Drug overdoses killed more than 700 people in San Francisco in 2020, while the coronavirus pandemic — which shut down the city and accelerated an exodus — killed fewer than 300, and the overdose death rate is even worse in 2021.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday:

San Francisco suffered an epidemic in 2020 that was more deadly than COVID-19. Drug overdoses resulted in more than 700 deaths last year, while the communicable disease declared a global pandemic killed fewer than 300 — and 2021 looks to be even worse.

This year’s preliminary tally of 252 accidental overdose deaths from January to April, which is the latest available through the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, suggests San Francisco is on track to surpass 2020 in overdose deaths, which was a record-breaking year itself — 181 people fatally overdosed over the same time period in 2021.

Accidental overdose deaths in San Francisco have risen sharply in recent years. The number of deaths in just the first four months of 2021 exceeds 2017’s annual total of 222. The chief medical examiner’s data shows that overdose fatalities in San Francisco began to skyrocket in 2019, when fentanyl entered the city’s drug supply.

Fentanyl, often manufactured in China, often enters the U.S. illegally through the southern border, where the Biden administration has relaxed law enforcement.

Nonetheless, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said earlier this month that the amount of fentanyl caught at the border had risen 800% in the past year.

In January, President Joe Biden rescinded an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to allow almost all doctors to prescribe buprenorphine, a treatment for opioid addiction.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new e-book, We Told You So!: The First 100 Days of Joe Biden’s Radical Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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