San Francisco is facing its deadliest year on record for drug overdose deaths, with 692 people having died so far this year – more than in all of 2022.
The city is on pace for more than 800 deaths this year – which would surpass the highest year on record: 2020, when 726 people died.
The rise in drug deaths has gone hand in hand with a crime wave that has forced businesses to close and the city center to be empty.
August was the deadliest month, with an average of someone dying from an overdose every nine hours, while in October an average of two people died per day.
So far this year, 572 of the deaths – 80 percent – have been caused by fentanyl overdose – as the city tries a series of policies to put an end to the deaths as experts say 'the city clearly isn't doing it' has done well enough'.
San Francisco is on track for its deadliest year on record for drug overdoses, with 692 people dying before November and the total expected to top 800.
Drug addicts using openly in San Francisco's Tenderloin District – Fentanyl is the leading cause of drug overdose deaths in the United States, as well as in San Francisco
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid often trafficked from Mexico and can be fatal even in small doses. The drug is 50-100 times stronger than morphine.
It is cheap, small in package, relatively easy to smuggle into the US, and is mixed into pills that then claim the lives of users, who are often unaware they are taking something so powerful.
Fentanyl is the latest phase in the opioid crisis that began in America in the early 2000s when millions of people became addicted to prescription opioids marketed by pharmaceutical companies and easily dispensed by doctors.
When prescriptions became harder to get in the 2010s, addicts had to turn to heroin. Now they've turned to the cheaper option, fentanyl.
Joseph Friedman, an addiction researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Guardian: 'Fentanyl has taken over the illicit opioid market not because consumers love it, but because distributors love it. It's extremely profitable.'
He added: “California has now surpassed the national average and is becoming the leading place for overdose interventions in terms of numbers.”
Experts said the predicted nearly 25 percent increase in deaths from last year is “crazy and unfortunate.”
San Francisco has tried a range of different policies to stem the deaths
They tried to increase police presence and open a “safe injection site,” which they then closed
None of them have worked, while the number of drug deaths continues to rise
San Francisco has tried a slew of different measures to reduce deaths, from increasing police presence to opening a “safe injection site” that they then closed.
But none of them have worked.
Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, a professor at the University of California, told the Guardian: 'I predicted the epidemic would die out. But it is incredibly resilient and terribly durable.”
And he warned, “the city clearly hasn't done a good enough job… our policy options aren't working.”
And the drug deaths go hand in hand with a crime wave that has led to an exodus of businesses and put the city in a “doom run.”
A recent report found that 95 retailers in downtown San Francisco have closed their doors since the start of the COVID pandemic, a drop of more than 50 percent from 2019.
Office vacancy rates hit a record high of 34 percent in September as shops were pushed out of the city center by increased crime and economists warned the city was entering an “urban doom loop.”
Looting in particular became a major problem for the city while it was rampant Theft caused the demise of San Francisco's main shopping district, Union Square, and forced many major chains and local businesses to close their doors permanently.
A map shows the major companies that have left or are planning to leave San Francisco in recent months
Of the 620 deaths in 2022, 72 percent were attributed to fentanyl
Starbucks, Whole Foods, IKEA, Nordstrom and the Disney store have all closed some of their San Francisco locations due to the city's drastic crime problems.
In October LinkedIn put the top five floors of the 6,000-square-foot, 26-story building up for lease until December 2027 and laid off 668 employees.
A few months earlier, Meta announced it was prepared to vacate its 40,000-square-foot building in San Francisco once its lease expired in 2031.
Companies like Airbnb, Paypal, Slack, Lyft and Salesforce have also left tens of thousands of square feet of buildings in the city in the past year.
San Francisco plans to increase police presence this holiday season to crack down on shoplifters — despite defunding the police department just two years ago amid BLM protests.