4/24/2023 0 Comments Dying light the following missionsOfficials also said it didn’t connect as many people to services as hoped.Īdvocates predicted that the December closure of the center would lead to more overdoses and argued that an official supervised consumption site should replace it. When Breed’s office closed the site, officials said it was always meant to be temporary. Critics said allowing drug use there enabled addiction.īut many supported the move and came to regard it as a de facto safe consumption site, a model that exists in cities around the world and in New York, where people can use drugs in a supervised setting. When the center opened, officials didn’t share publicly that the facility would have a sanctioned outdoor area to use drugs under staff supervision. While a relatively small portion of those who visited the center were connected to treatment, staff reversed more than 300 overdoses in the 11 months the site was operating. The site logged more than 100,000 visits, but critics pointed out that only 1,000 of those visits resulted in linkages to mental health or drug treatment despite the city spending millions on the center. The center offered showers and food as well as connections to shelter, housing and addiction and mental health treatment. Breed said the initiative would address overdose deaths and street conditions in the neighborhood, and also crack down on open-air drug use and dealing. Plaza opened in January 2022 as the cornerstone of Breed’s Tenderloin emergency initiative announced in December 2021. The Tenderloin Center, which closed in December, provided services for drug users and homeless people. Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Breed, said the city is also working on “disrupting the fentanyl dealers that are preying on people through arrests and prosecutions.” He noted that the mayor and Board of Supervisors are working with nonprofit partners to open an overdose prevention site, “though we don’t have a proposal to do so yet.” The city has also increased access to buprenorphine, a medication for opioid use disorder treatment. To address the rise, the health department is continuing to work on its Overdose Prevention Plan, which includes expanding access to the overdose reversal medication naloxone, and opening more residential care and treatment beds. Fentanyl, which became more common in the city in the late 2010s, has driven overdose mortality to unprecedented levels. The new total makes January 2023 the deadliest month so far for accidental drug overdose deaths in San Francisco since January 2020, the first month for which this data is available. January’s preliminary count was 62, compared with the updated count of 78. But this tally will probably increase as medical examiners complete more death investigations in the coming months. That’s about the same as the average monthly deaths last year. The new data released Friday shows at least 53 people died of overdoses in February, bringing the early running total for 2023 to 131 so far. “To see this very profound data hits home the importance of the site and how the mayor’s policy for closing the Linkage Center appears to result in an increase in deaths due to drug overdose.” “The best treatment for fentanyl overdoses is a place where people can be observed using, such as what was being done informally with the Linkage Center,” he said, referring to the original name of the Tenderloin Center. Noah Berger/Special to The Chronicleīut Joshua Bamberger, a clinical professor of family and community medicine at UCSF, said there is nothing else he can attribute the deaths to other than the closing of the Tenderloin Center. The Tenderloin Center, which provided services for drug users and homeless people, closed on Dec. A spokesperson for Mayor London Breed said he could not comment on “what happened specifically and would rely on DPH experts.” The health department did not respond to multiple emailed questions about whether the closure of the Tenderloin Center may have contributed to the rise. In a statement, the Department of Public Health said it is analyzing the latest overdose numbers to understand more about the deaths and “what trends may be present in the evolving overdose crisis.” It’s too early to know whether the closure is a factor in the increase. New numbers released for January show it was the highest monthly total in three years.
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