San Francisco was supposed to be a liberal nirvana. But now the city’s drug addicts outnumber their high school students. It was recently revealed that the city handed out a record 5.8 million free syringes last year. That is approximately 500,000 more than in 2017.
Despite spending an extra $1.8 million dollars last year in an effort to retrieve used needles, the government handed out about 2 million more syringes than it got back.
The addict population in the city with the Golden Gate Bridge now stands at 24,500, which is an increase of 2,000 drug users since 2012. The number of people living on the streets, using the sidewalks as outdoor toilets is 8,500 more people than the city’s 16,000 high school students.
Mayor London Breed promised to clean up the city, but there have been 9,659 calls complaining about needles littering the streets received in 2018. That is an increase of a third on 2017.
The number of complaints about feces on the streets has also tripled since 2011.
There seems to be a disconnect between San Francisco’s tech elite and the homeless junkies who camp on the streets. It was emphasized in a tweet by Erik Finn showing starving, jobless homeless people huddled outside a “robotic coffeebar”.
Investor Bill Blain also expressed outrage at what he witnessed during a recent trip to San Francisco, writing, “The squalor we saw in The City was frightful.”
“San Francisco has always been one of my favourite US cities, but the degree of homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse we saw on this trip was truly shocking,” writes Blaine. He added that his liberal friends shrugged it off as always having been that way, ignorant of the fact that it is clearly getting worse.
“I found it quite shocking the number of folk sleeping rough on the sidewalks, the smell of weed and drug impedimenta everywhere, the filth, mental illness and degradation on view just a few meters from the financial centre driving Silicon Valley,” said Blaine.
“It’s a city where the destitute seem to have become invisible to the Uber hailing elites. We found ourselves hopping on one of the beautiful F-Route Trolley Buses to find nearly every seat occupied by someone lugging around their worldly possessions around in a plastic bag. It was desperately sad,” he said with sadness.
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