See how they run: Mayor Breed drops in on drug recovery summit

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Mission Local is publishing a daily campaign dispatch for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: London Breed. Read the rest of the series here.

Let no one say Mayor London Breed governs without the requisite personal experience: She lost a younger sister to drug overdose in 2006, when Breed was 32 and her sister just shy of 26.

Conversations with drug addicts, she’s said, partly drove her to put Proposition F on the March 5 ballot, the measure that mandates drug screening for single adult welfare recipients — and threatened to take away services like housing if those found using did not enter treatment. 

She spoke about her sister in 2022 when announcing a crackdown on drug dealing in the Tenderloin, one of several that have dramatically increased arrests, and last year during the outdoors Board of Supervisors meeting on fentanyl, in which she said of San Francisco’s approach: “Compassion is killing people.”

That same sentiment was subtext on Wednesday, when Breed visited the half-day San Francisco Recovery Summit held at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Breed, speaking to several hundred audience members, again mentioned past losses: “There are so many people that I grew up with, so many of my family and friends, that did not make it,” she said.

Breed reminded the audience that she came up in poverty — “I grew up in OC, I grew up in Plaza East,” she said, referencing the Fillmore public housing project once known as “Outta Control” — during a time “when the crack epidemic exploded, when heroin started to take away so many people’s ability to make decisions.” 

“But the difference between then and now is, recovery seemed more possible. And now what we’re finding, instead of recovery, is death,” she continued. “That’s why this community … coming together in faith and hope and love to uplift and celebrate one another is so critical.”

The summit was the third annual gathering of an ascendant movement: Public health professionals, politicos, and former drug users who believe San Francisco’s drug policy is doing too little to emphasize recovery, and has swung too far in a permissive, “harm-reduction” direction.

“Everything needs to be focused through the lens of recovery,” said Steve Adami, the executive director of the Salvation Army’s “Way Out” recovery program and former re-entry director at the city’s probation department. 

But the recovery movement can appear to many in the harm reduction community as myopic and moralistic — too focused on ensuring total abstinence, and punitive. 

One of the summit’s keynote speakers, for instance, was Kevin Sabet, a Yale University professor and three-time drug policy advisor in the White House under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He runs an organization opposed to marijuana legalization that promotes a “middle road” between it and incarceration. 

The mayor has taken shots at harm-reduction strategies, saying in February that they were “making things worse.” Mission Local spoke to half a dozen public health experts after her comments, and all said approaches like safe-injection sites and “housing-first” are based on solid public health evidence. 

Still, recovery has growing support in City Hall and in the mayoral race: Two of Breed’s opponents boosted the recovery summit today — Supervisor Ahsha Safaí filmed himself praising the summit at their rally Wednesday morning, and Tipping Point CEO and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie stopped by and said he would invest in recovery programs as mayor. Lurie has also emphasized a police response in his platform: “Get immediate treatment or face arrest.”

And Mark Farrell, the former District 2 supervisor, is calling for more police officers, more National Guard troops, and a “shift from an over-reliance on harm reduction that has enabled more drug use, to providing more recovery-first and abstinence-based options.”

Breed, who once embraced the supervised consumption sites called for in her Overdose Prevention Plan, is now abandoning the idea. Her campaign platform emphasizes both “a law enforcement AND public health perspective” to the drug crisis, and notes that the mayor is “sending a message that drug users should NOT come to San Francisco any more … They will get arrested.”

Adami, for his part, said that would continue to be part of the overall approach.

“Where change typically happens is where opportunity meets accountability,” he said, adding that the “light bulb will come on” for some people if they are arrested for their behavior while using or trying to score. “The justice system saved many of us, and I’m not saying it’s the best way to get clean but, until we have a better alternative, we need to figure out something.”