The San Francisco drug crisis

OAN Brooke Mallory
UPDATED 6:40 PM – Tuesday, March 21, 2023

An ex-addict warns of San Francisco, CA, being at the center of the national drug crisis, with a lack of resources to fight the increase in drug overdoses, with many calling it a “cartel-fueled” crisis.

San Francisco activist Tom Wolf, founder of the Pacific Coalition for Prevention and Recovery, said organized crime has made the city’s opioid problem worse as the number of drug-related overdoses continues to rise.

“Unfortunately for San Francisco, we’ve become the epicenter of the overdose crisis in the United States,” Wolf said. “We have the highest overdose death rate per capita of any county in the United States right now, and if we don’t step in and intervene – and what I mean by intervene is, we need to actually come in and take these organized drug dealers down because they are cartel-fueled, organized drug dealers that are operating on our streets… And we have about 500 of them right now operating in San Francisco in broad daylight, right on the street for everyone to see, and we just don’t have enough resources to stop them,” he continued.

Wolf’s comments came in response to a video of paramedics taking a corpse away in a van, the third overdose call that morning alone. According to the San Francisco office of the chief medical examiner, there were 131 unintentional drug overdose deaths in San Francisco between January and February of that year.

Authorities have captured more than 800 pounds of fentanyl between ports of entry this year alone, with some blaming the border problem for the increasing drug deaths. This included 232 pounds found in San Clemente, California, enough to take the lives of fifty million Americans.

Wolf pointed out there were 647 overdose deaths in San Francisco the previous year and the trend was only going up.

Fentanyl is a drug frequently mixed with other medications, and it is at least 50-100 times stronger than morphine. The user is often unaware of the presence of fentanyl because of its small quantities. It only takes 2.2 pounds, according to the DEA, to kill 500,000 people.

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