San Francisco Officials Unveil ‘Soft Touch’ Plan to End Open-Air Drug Crisis: ‘Nobody’s Going to Jail’

San Francisco city supervisors unveiled a vague set of suggestions to tackle the city’s open-air drug crisis, emphasizing a “soft touch.” One suggestion includes the implementation of a pilot program for a supervised drug consumption facility.

The plan does not present tangible solutions to fix the drug crisis but rather offers suggestions for the city’s 21 departments and six city commissioners to implement, the San Francisco Standard reported. It also asks them to present their “ideas” within 90 days on how to address the crisis.

San Francisco supervisors Matt Dorsey, Rafael Mandelman, and Catherine Stefani released the “San Francisco Recovers” strategy at a Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday. Dorsey also released the plan on social media:

While the plan calls to end the open-air drug scenes, it simultaneously encourages drug use by suggesting the city implement a pilot program for “supervised consumption facilities.”

The supervisor claims their suggestions would emphasize “recovery,” calling it a “soft touch,” but would impose no consequences for those contributing to the city’s open-air drug use on the streets.

“This is a way that nobody’s going to jail but we’re doing an effective job of interrupting the drug market and drug scenes,” Dorsey said via the Standard.

The supervisor’s suggestion book also calls for the city to emphasize job placements and training over imprisonment for individuals who agree to stop drug dealing.

The vague suggestion booklet comes as the Democrat-controlled city’s open-air drug crisis has become so dire that the San Francisco Chronicle was prompted to declare in June that the city is “worse than it looks.”

Other observers have called San Francisco’s drug use on the streets “pure filth.”

In December 2021, Democrat Mayor London Breed declared “a state of emergency” in the city’s Tenderloin district, a neighborhood notorious for crime and open-air drug use.

In 2021, 645 people died in the Golden Gate city due to drug overdoses, while 711 perished from drug overdoses in 2020, the Chronicle reported. Fentanyl was the primary driver of overdose deaths, along with Methamphetamine.

San Francisco lost 6.1 percent of its population between July 2020 to July 2021 during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the most of any U.S. city, Breitbart News noted.

You can follow Ethan Letkeman on Twitter at @EthanLetkeman.