Journalist Erica Sandberg said Wednesday that San Francisco has shut down its “harm reduction” program that offered free alcohol, drugs and hotel rooms to the city’s homeless after a meth lab was discovered in one room.
“It was basically a disaster,” Sandberg told Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” “It’s such a shame because it could have worked out.”
The San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) confirmed in May that it was offering free alcohol and drugs to homeless people staying in hotels at taxpayer expense. (RELATED: ‘It Could Be A Disaster’: Coronavirus Is Spreading In Homeless Populations, Exposing The Failures Of Progressive Policies)
“The thing is, people were given rooms. Unfortunately they were also given a tremendous amount of drug paraphernalia, so you’re talking everything from needles to meth pipes, crack pipes, foil to smoke Fentanyl with and because of that it turned into just a chaotic, horrible mess, and it didn’t have to be that way,” the City Journal writer explained.
She said the city could have used the hotel rooms “as sober places. They could have been place for recovery … but instead, it was the opposite and so it turned out to be a complete disaster.”
Host Tucker Carlson suggested the municipal government should have guessed where this experiment was headed. “I mean, who could have seen that coming? If you had a kid with a drug problem and you gave them a credit card in a hotel room, do you think it would end any differently? Why would they do this?”
Sandberg concurred.
“I mean, the answer is so obvious; it’s shocking that nobody kind of put those two things together. Of course the rest of the community did. We knew, the city of San Francisco knew.” (RELATED: San Francisco To Deploy ‘Poop Patrol’ In Effort To Remove Homeless Excrement From The Streets)
A homeless man sleeps in front of his tent along Van Ness Avenue in downtown San Francisco, California on June, 27, 2016. Homelessness is on the rise in the city irking residents and bringing the problem under a spotlight. (JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)
She blamed “the city leaders, the officials … the supervisors who … said ‘We know better. We are going to do this and it’s going to work out great.’ Guess what? It didn’t.”
Sandberg said the program has been “suspended: no new hotel rooms, no new hotels and the city has kind of drawn back on its contract.”
Homelessness is a chronic and growing problem in San Francisco. In 2019, according to city statistics, there were 8,011 homeless people in the city, 18% more than the number in 2015.