(NewsNation) — Overdoses from fentanyl and other drugs are the most serious “calamity” in San Francisco since the AIDS crisis, a city supervisor said during NewsNation’s “Crime in America” town hall.
Matt Dorsey, San Francisco’s District 6 Supervisor, sounded the alarm Monday night.
“We are seeing a loss of life here that is twice as deadly as COVID-19 from drug overdose deaths. It is the most serious public health calamity we have faced in this city since the AIDS crisis, and it’s getting worse,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey told the town hall’s audience that San Francisco is on track for the deadliest year of drug overdose in San Francisco’s history. But it doesn’t stop there. Dorsey believes the fentanyl crisis is manifested in the city’s issues with street conditions, homelessness, and retail theft.
“That is what is driving a lot of the highly visible kinds of street-level crime, retail theft, and I believe we have to do more to involve law enforcement,” Dorsey said.
Col. Paul Humphrey, a deputy police chief in Louisville, Kentucky, agreed with Dorsey but said the problem has been prevalent in poor and Black communities for years.
“Fentanyl has been a crisis for years now. It’s a scary, scary deal. The heroin and fentanyl crisis … woke up America to problems that Black and brown communities have been facing for a very long time,” Humphrey said.
“We shouldn’t have to wait for something to become a pandemic or an epidemic for us to solve that problem. We should treat people like people and human beings and get to them before we reach a crisis level,” he told NewsNation host Chris Cuomo.
Dorsey, who is a recovering addict, thinks giving people access to resources rather than punishing them could be the right approach.
“As somebody who has been in recovery, I think if we can make an intervention in somebody’s addiction and do it in a way that we’re making sure that they have access to medically assisted treatment and health services, we don’t have to make this punitive. We can make it a lifesaving intervention,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey’s comments come as the California Highway Patrol recently seized enough fentanyl to kill more than two million people.
In May, CHP officers deployed to the San Francisco neighborhood of Tenderloin and surrounding areas. Investigators reported seizing 4.2 kilos of fentanyl, enough to kill 2.1 million people, almost three times the population of San Francisco.
On a national scale, more than 932,000 people have died from a drug overdose since 1999, according to the CDC. The health agency says deaths involving synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, continue to rise, with 70,601 overdose deaths reported in 2021 alone.
People or families of individuals facing mental and/or substance use disorders are encouraged to call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline at 800-662-HELP (4357). The hotline is free, confidential, and provides treatment referral and information service 24/7, 365 days a year. The administration also welcomes people to visit their online treatment location or send their zip code via text message to 435748 to find help.