From junkie zombies to pavement camps filled with needles, how America’s wokest city got destroyed by a drugs epidemic
WAFTING a pair of hypodermic needles towards my face, addict Chris mumbles: “One is speed, the other heroin.”
Glassy-eyed and dishevelled, he wasn’t shooting up in a drug den but in the afternoon sunshine on a San Francisco pavement.
With young families strolling past, thousands of other homeless and often mentally ill people also openly snort, smoke and inject what one campaigner calls hard drugs 2.0.
For San Francisco — which gave the world the hippy dream of peace and love — is now gripped with a crime-plagued narcotics epidemic.
Described as the “crucible of woke”, this bastion of liberalism where the police were defunded has been labelled a “failed city”.
In makeshift pavement campsites in the centre of the city, the drug of choice is now synthetic opiate fentanyl — 50 times stronger than heroin.
Many users are in wheelchairs having lost gangrenous limbs to needles.
Others suck on glass pipes loaded with methamphetamine then rant and rave at their demons.
On street corners, black-clad Honduran street dealers openly sell packets, or “baggies”, of the drugs for $4.
There is a deep stench of urine and human excrement.
Rampant shoplifting
This being the US tech capital, a whizzkid developed an app a few years ago called Snapcrap to identify where people had relieved themselves.
All around, drug users nod in and out of consciousness on the pavements as shoppers walk past.
On average, two people die of overdoses each night.
Earlier this month a homeless woman gave birth on a city sidewalk as passers-by tried to help her.
All this in an area home to Twitter, Uber, Airbnb and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, and a city which has more billionaires per head than anywhere else on Earth.
Activist JJ Smith, who escorts me through the open-air drugs market of his native Tenderloin district, explains: “Fentanyl turns people into zombie-like states.
“They bend over and become stuck in that position for 30 or 40 minutes.
“Meth gives people a psychotic state of mind and they talk to themselves.”
He says of the children living in this drug-blighted neighbourhood: “They think it’s normal because they see it every single day.”
For retired chef JJ, 53, his crusade to stem his neighbourhood’s drug epidemic is personal.
He lost his brother Rodney, 55, to a fentanyl overdose last year.
The dad of five adds: “I see ODs day in, day out and about five deaths a week. It’s very sad.”
JJ explains that the drug epidemic is financed by rampant shoplifting.
He explains: “People steal from shops to buy drugs.
“It only takes $4 to get enough fentanyl to get high for around 30 minutes but then they start the cycle all over again.
“They go back to the stores to steal.”
A few blocks from where Chris is nodding out, grocery store owner Gilles Desaulniers, 71, confronts a wired-looking man staggering towards the frozen goods section.
The boss of the SoMa district’s Harvest Urban market — who has twice been bitten by deranged shoplifters — warns the man not to snatch anything.
While confronting thieves, he has been “knocked out, held up at gunpoint, pepper sprayed, bitten twice and clawed in the face”
Gesturing towards the neatly stacked rows of fresh fruit, Gilles says: “I had a guy in this aisle who was so high he was chewing his skin.
“He was bleeding so I called the police.
“It took two officers and two ambulance guys to subdue him and put a net mask on his face so he stopped biting himself.”
The store owner, who lives nearby, added: “On my street last year five people ODed, a girl was raped and homeless people’s tents were set on fire.
“A guy was high, fell asleep in his car with his foot on the gas pedal.
“I thought the car was going to explode.”
Gilles blames rampant shoplifting on a 2014 law that downgraded stealing goods valued at less than $950 — just over £760 — as a misdemeanour rather than a more serious felony.
No repercussions
The Canada-born shopkeeper revealed: “The idea was to save money and keep people out of jail, but it gives criminals the idea they can take what they want and there’s no repercussions.
“We’ve been broken into five times in the last eight months.
“A $4,000 (£3,200) window has been smashed five times.”
Rachel Michelin, president of the California Retailers’ Association, told me organised crime is now running shoplifting rings because “they see no consequences”.
She said some thieves even have receipts to prove the goods they’ve stolen are worth less than $950.
Beleaguered store owner Gilles added: “I blame liberal politics.
“The rule of law doesn’t apply here.”
Demoralised following Defund The Police protests, law enforcement faces a “catastrophic” staffing shortfall.
San Francisco’s mayor London Breed had pledged to slash £95million from police budgets in 2020 following George Floyd’s murder by a white officer.
Then in 2021 — as crime skyrocketed — the mayor was forced to reverse the policy, promising to be “less tolerant with all the bulls**t that has destroyed our city”.
In March the San Francisco Police Department had a shortfall of 541 officers, which was described as “catastrophic” by one local politician.
The city is a Democrat one-party fiefdom.
It hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1964.
With the local authority projected to run a £580million deficit over the next two years, its leaders have backed plans to give every black San Franciscan £4million in reparations.
California was never a slave-owning state yet campaigners say the city closed black businesses and displaced thousands in the Fillmore district in the 1970s.
‘San Fransicko’
The proposals would also give those eligible guaranteed incomes of £77,000 per year for 250 years and homes for just $1, while also eliminating personal debt and tax burdens.
One estimate has calculated that it would cost each non-black family in the city at least £478,000.
Local Republican leader John Dennis called the reparation plans “ridiculous”, adding: “This is the one city where it could possibly pass.”
Now the hard drugs and a mental health crisis convulsing the streets is reaching a deathly climax.
In the first three months of this year there were 200 accidental overdose deaths in San Francisco — a 40 per cent jump.
Former Democrat Michael Shellenberger who, running as an independent, came third in the last year’s race for state governor, blames “the radical Left” for the city’s woes.
The 51-year-old, who wrote a book called San Fransicko, told me: “Wokeism, which is a victimhood ideology, began here.
“If you give addicts everything they want they will just kill themselves.
“It’s a sick city which is a black mark on America.”
Last month California’s Democrat governor Gavin Newsom caved into pressure to take decisive action, announcing he was sending the state’s National Guard and Highway Patrol to boost the city’s overworked cops.
The proposed crackdown, he promised, would target dealers.
Yet local politician Dean Preston, a Democratic Socialist who represents the Tenderloin district, described it as a “publicity stunt” that is “declaring war on a diverse, low-income, urban neighbourhood”.
One of those who has campaigned most fervently for the National Guard to take to the streets is mum-of-five Jacqui Berlinn.
In 2019 she saw a photo of a comatose homeless addict on a Facebook group with people commenting on how gross the city had become.
In a heart-rending post, Jacqui wrote: “That’s my son.”
She then shared an image of boy Corey, 31, when he was well-groomed and sober.
The fentanyl addict still rides the trains around the city today as he attempts to get clean.
Jacqui, 57, a legal clerk, said: “Corey has deteriorated more in the 18 months since he’s been on fentanyl than the nine years he was on heroin.
“It’s caused him to have a permanent stoop and he’s lost a number of teeth.”
Jacqui, who co-founded Mothers Against Drug Addiction And Deaths, blames authorities in San Francisco for “enabling” drug taking.
The mum, who has asked cops to arrest her son but to no avail, added: “People are shooting up in front of children walking by on the streets.
“You can see police officers nearby not doing anything about it.
“I don’t blame the officers, they’ve pretty much been told not to do anything about it.”
Back on the streets of Tenderloin, activist JJ asks user Chris if he’s ready to take a rehab place.
The heroin addict politely declines, slumps on to his camping chair and prepares to shoot up once more on the streets of San Francisco.