On Wednesday, newly inaugurated Mayor Daniel Lurie made an emergency declaration intended to combat the fentanyl scourge that has killed thousands of people in the city over the past five years and has turned some neighborhoods into sidewalk drug markets, The New York Times reports. Lurie’s declaration of a fentanyl emergency consists of a package of ordinances that will speed its way to the Board of Supervisors, akin to a City Council, on Tuesday for what is expected to be swift approval. The declaration would streamline the hiring of new city workers and the building of homeless and drug treatment facilities. A new ordinance will also allow the city to accept private donations to help fund Mr. Lurie’s promised 1,500 new shelter beds within six months.
The city’s drug crisis has claimed more lives in the city since 2020 than have Covid-19, car crashes and homicides combined. To combat the issue immediately, Lurie instructed the city’s police and sheriff’s departments to redirect their personnel — moving from a temporary, sporadic effort to break up drug markets to a permanent, 24/7 operation. He vowed that by this spring, police officers would have somewhere new to take people picked up for using drugs or for acting erratically in public — not just a jail or a hospital emergency room. A crisis center in the Tenderloin neighborhood will be staffed with health workers who can guide those who need treatment. “Widespread drug dealing, public drug use and constantly seeing people in crisis has robbed us of our sense of decency and security,” Lurie said. “I refuse to believe that this is who we are.”
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