San Francisco is giving free drugs and alcohol to some homeless addict isolating inside city-rented hotels during the coronavirus pandemic, the city’s department of public health confirmed Wednesday,
Fox News reports, San Francisco’s controversial practice was recently brought up last Friday when a man who describes himself on Twitter as “Formerly homeless addict in #recovery advocating for the #truth about homelessness and drug addiction. Faith, Hope and Love. SF Native. Tweets are my own.” tweeted to the city.
He wrote: “I just found out that homeless placed in hotels in SF are being delivered Alcohol, Weed and Methadone because they identified as an addict/alcoholic for FREE. You’re supposed to be offering treatment. This is enabling and is wrong on many levels. @SF_DPH @sfbos @LondonBreed”
These harm reduction based practices, which are not unique to San Francisco, and are not paid for with taxpayer money, help guests successfully complete isolation and quarantine and have significant individual and public health benefits in the COVID-19 pandemic.
— SFDPH (@SF_DPH) May 5, 2020
The city’s department of public health confirmed the report on Twitter this week.
“These harm reduction based practices, which are not unique to San Francisco, and are not paid for with taxpayer money, help guests successfully complete isolation and quarantine and have significant individual and public health benefits in the COVID-19 pandemic.”
San Francisco failed in their objective to secure more than 8,000 hotel rooms that city supervisors aimed to lease in order to house homeless, other at-risks populations, frontline workers needing to quarantine or socially distance themselves, and those living in densely populated apartment buildings. during the coronavirus pandemic.
But as of Monday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that only 2,741 rooms had been leased, with 1,130 of those remaining empty due to lack of staff at hotels or other failures in preparation.
Before the outbreak of COVID-19, the city was struggling to handle a growing crisis in homelessness.
Fox News reported, California acquired more than 15,000 hotel rooms to shelter homeless people during the coronavirus pandemic last month.
Newsom touted his “Project Roomkey” initiative in San Jose and announced a new agreement with the Motel 6 hotel chain which would provide an additional 5,025 hotel rooms at 47 locations in 19 counties.
“Today marks an important milestone for our efforts to protect very vulnerable homeless individuals from COVID-19, and to protect our hospitals more broadly from surges that challenge our capacity and stress our system,” the governor said outside a Motel 6.
According to Fox News, the federal government has agreed to pay 75 percent of costs associated with housing the homelesss, including people who test positive or may have been exposed to COVID-19, older homeless people and those with underlying health conditions.