Fed-up San Franciscans are suing the city over drug policies they claim “herd” junkies into their neighborhood and destroy the community – just as California Gov. Gavin Newsom claimed Democratic cities were safer than Republican towns.
Three businesses and five anonymous individuals recently filed a lawsuit alleging San Francisco officials had turned the Tenderloin neighborhood into a “drug containment zone,” where drug dealers brazenly sell narcotics on the streets.”
San Francisco “effectively herds fentanyl users into the Tenderloin,” a lawsuit obtained by the Times read, adding that they’ve seen “some organizations going so far as to deliver drug kits to their sidewalk encampments.”
News of the lawsuit broke just a day after Newsom held a fiery press conference railing against Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to address crime in US cities like Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and possibly Chicago next.
Newsom accused Trump of only targeting Democratically-led cities, and said crime in Republican-led cities was far worse.
“Look at the murder rate that’s nearly four times higher than California’s — in Louisiana,” he said Thursday, according to The Washington Post. “I want to present some facts to the president of the United States, and I imagine this is alarming to the president to learn these facts.”
“The carnage in Louisiana is well defined,” he added, also naming Missouri in his diatribe.
While murder rates are worse in both states than in California, the Center for Disease Control’s most recent figures on drug overdose mortalities suggest drug crime is a problem Newsom may be overlooking in his partisan comparisons.
California’s mortality rate by drug overdose was 27.9 deaths per 100,000 in 2023 — worse than Mississippi 25.3 per 100,000.
And while Louisiana’s drug mortality rate was worse than California’s at 50.6, numerous blue states across the country – including most of New England – had overdose death rates sometimes more than 10-points higher than swaths of the Republican-dominated Midwest.
Texas, Montana, and the Dakotas had rates in the teens; Idaho and Utah had rates in the 20s – and Nebraska’s rate was just 9 deaths per 100,000, the CDC showed. All are Republican-led states.
Meanwhile, California’s left-led neighbors Oregon and Washington had mortality rates in the 40s.
And in San Francisco, residents recounted a drug-addled hellscape on their front stoops in the harrowing lawsuit.
The Phoenix Hotel described “crowds of hostile people selling and using narcotics block passage of the sidewalks abutting the hotel” in the lawsuit, along with “people who appear to be gang members now openly sell fentanyl and other potent drugs.”
And one of the unnamed residents, a mother of two, said “she encounters drug dealers, users openly injecting or smoking narcotics and people lying on the street who appear unconscious or dead.”
She added that her family was routinely forced to step over drug paraphernalia, human filth, avoid “unleashed dogs” that growl and bark at them as they pass – and that users have even “threatened her with knives and hammers.”
In one such incident, the mother asked a group not to make a bonfire on the street as it affected her daughter’s asthma, but the group refused and “threatened to cut her throat.”
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