As the fentanyl crisis continues to wreak havoc on the US west coast, drug-related deaths increased by 41% in San Francisco in the first quarter of this year, with one person dying of an accidental overdose every 10 hours. According to data from the city's medical examiner, 200 persons died from overdoses in San Francisco in the last three months as opposed to 142 in the same months a year ago.
The homeless were particularly heavily hit; between January and March, overdose deaths among the unhoused were up by two times over the same period last year. Most of the deaths had fentanyl found in them. Minority groups in the city were particularly damaged.
“It’s a crying shame that a city as wealthy as San Francisco can’t get its act together to deal with overdose deaths,” said Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, a professor of addiction medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who claimed that drug users' risk of overdosing has increased as a result of the city's increasingly harsh attitude to dealing with them.
“We’re a politically divided city between the people who have a lot of money and want the streets swept and those who think a compassionate, science-based, health approach is appropriate,” he added.
Despite making up only 5% of the city's population, Black people made up a third of the overdose victims. Overdose fatalities in the city reached an all-time high in January with 82 deaths, continuing a trend that started in December. This happened soon after the local government tightened security in San Francisco's drug-ridden Tenderloin section and shut down a major outreach facility where drug addicts were using under medical care.
(Image: Representational image.Reuters, AFP)
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