Friday 17 June 2022 01:19 AM San Francisco's notorious open-air drugs market will CLOSE at end of year as ... trends now
San Francisco's notorious taxpayer-funded open-air drugs market will close at the end of the year - after the facility that's said to have cost $19m in taxpayer's cash treated just one in 1,000 users and failed to cut fatal overdose numbers.,
The Linkage Center in the Tenderloin, at the heart of San Francisco's civic center, opened in January and was intended to help the city's large population of homeless people and drug addicts to find help.
But critics say the site, rented at a cost of $75,000 a month, has failed to curtail the problem in the crime-ridden city, which recently recalled its woke DA Chesa Boudin amid a spike in crimes blamed for a sharp decline in locals' quality of life.
They note that only 0.1 percent of those using the site were directed to treatment in the first five months, despite the estimated $19 million spent in running costs.
Furthermore, the rate of fatal overdoses has not declined in a meaningful way: in January the office of the chief medical examiner reported 49 deaths, and last month there were 45.
Gary McCoy, the scandal-hit vice president of public affairs and policy at non-profit HealthRIGHT 360, which runs the site, insisted the mayor's decision would increase overdose deaths.
On Thursday, he tweeted: 'Despite success in connecting with the hardest to reach folks we've failed for decades, this will certainly send folks back into the streets, parks, and isolation w/ increased risk of OD.
'If we won't continue to fund this model, I hope we've increased $$ for the Medical Examiner.'
McCoy, a former congressional aide to Nancy Pelosi was previously accused of being clueless or just downright misleading about what was going on at the facility.
City health chiefs accused McCoy - who says he lived in the streets while battling addiction in his 20s - of making up numbers to keep taxpayer cash flowing into the squalid money pit.
San Francisco has become a drug-abusing Wild West with syringes littering pavements and drug dealers, selling heroin or the deadly opioid fentanyl, easily recognizable dressed in black with matching backpacks. Above: a person in a wheelchair shoots up, just outside the Linkage Center on January 22
Gary McCoy, of San Francisco nonprofit HealthRIGHT 360, has been accused of making up the number of people seeking help at the city's open air drug market by city officials
Part of the linkage center is pictured behind screens in January. It was never intended as an area for drug users to get high - but thousands of them are now doing exactly that
Drone footage shot in January shows San Francisco's homeless and drug addicted population inside the center, which is estimated to have consumed much of the $10 million set aside to tackle crime in the city's Tenderloin neighborhood
Residents claim that DA Boudin's policies have made the liberal California enclave - which has seen vagrancy and crime rates soar in recent months - an increasingly unsafe place to live
San Francisco is now blighted by rampant open-air drug abuse, car break-ins, aggressive shoplifting, homeless encampments and fouling of pavements with human excrement
McCoy was accused by San Francisco public health bosses in February of fiddling the figures for people treated by the site.
Gina McDonald, a co-founder of Mothers Against Drug Deaths (MADD), told DailyMail.com they welcomed the closure of the site, saying that many contractors had made huge profits from its operations.
'We were all in favor of this Linkage Center, as we were told it was going to link people to services,' she said.
'But it turned into this drug den, with people who were trying to get clean and sober besides those openly using.
'We're thrilled they are shutting it down.
'It was supposed to be a place that people could get help and treatment.
'And it basically turned into an opium den.'
McDonald said that the San Francisco department of health was misguided in failing to push people to seek treatment. She said a more robust policy was needed to encourage vulnerable people to seek help, and tolerance was not the answer.
'The department of health has taken on this radical harm reduction model,' she explained.
'They say they are "meeting people where they are at". But they're leaving them there.'
Figures compiled by Gina McDonald show that fewer than one in 1,000 visitors to the center have actually received treatment or a referral to rehab
This email sent by special project coordinator Rob Hoffman, of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said he'd observed HealthRIGHT 360 staff and found no evidence to back up the numbers of people the nonprofit claimed it was helping
McDonald, who was herself homeless with meth-induced psychosis, and whose daughter became addicted to fentanyl, added: 'I think it's the fault of the San Francisco department of public health that has hired these contractors who make a lot of money when people stay sick.'
She added: 'I believe that if you're laying on the street shooting up, smoking fentanyl, and stealing - you can't live there on the street.'
McDonald said the main problem was the drug dealers, noting 'there are 30 people out there any time of day.'
'The police do arrest dealers when they can,' she said.
'The street-level dealer keeps on his person the amount that is only a misdemeanor. The homeless person sitting nearby has the rest of the stash.
'And the police do not arrest the homeless, because people in San Francisco people won't support that - they see it as harming them.
'My daughter's dealer was arrested three times and released, for selling fentanyl. Then they'd send him off to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
'I had to go and pay him off for her safety.'
McDonald said her organization backed the approach taken by the San Francisco department of adult probation, which has opened two drug-free sites for people to
