The city of San Francisco approved a plan to open a “sobering center” for methamphetamine-addicted residents to safely come down from their drug-induced psychosis.
Mayor London Breed announced on Thursday that the California city would be putting up tents with 15 beds to house addicted residents in one of San Francisco’s neediest neighborhoods, Tenderloin. The facility will be open 24 hours a day and will offer resources for those who use the center to continue receiving treatment.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the city has been plagued with meth addicts acting erratically while struggling through the psychosis that comes with the high. Addicts have stripped naked in public, threatened strangers, and otherwise made residents feel unsafe. Psychiatric hospitals in the city have been overwhelmed with patients seeking help. In 2017, nearly half of all psychiatric patients at San Francisco General Hospital were meth addicts.
Beyond the effect on the greater community, San Francisco also has to respond to increasing levels of overdose deaths.
“The reality is that drug use and overdoses are on the rise, and doing nothing is not an option,” Breed, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The public drug use we see every day hurts those who are suffering from addiction as well as the surrounding communities.”
Addicts will be brought to the center if they are found to be showing signs of psychosis. San Francisco’s center is the first in the nation to focus solely on addiction to methamphetamine. The center’s tents will be placed in an unused city parking lot, which is slated to turn into public housing in fall 2021. San Francisco currently faces one of the worst homelessness problems in the United States.
Despite the city’s optimism about the center, many people in the Tenderloin neighborhood were unaware of the plans. NBC Bay Area reported that many of the residents had “not heard about it at all.”
San Francisco has struggled to keep its streets clean of human feces and used needles as the homeless crisis continues. In 2018, the city deployed a “poop patrol” for residents to report areas that need to be cleaned.
