One day after the created a story in Golden Gate Park, pulling up stock photos of needles and unabashedly blaming youth and poor people for what is essentially a park maintenance issue, the Mayor ordered the displacement of campers in Golden Gate Park at 4:00 a.m. each morning. Many folks were cited, and in fact camping and sleeping citations given to houseless folks across the city has tripled since the summer. Many were arrested on warrants. An effort to ensure youth in the Haight had access to showers failed in the context of intense hatred magnified by our largest local daily paper. The Mayor also introduced legislation to expand the definition of camping and the hours during which sleeping would be illegal. These dual efforts continue today: Both the sweeps and the hatred spewing from the same columnist who “discovered” people were living in the Park.

Of course, this was not the first such effort ordered by a big-city mayor. It wasn’t even the first this year in San Francisco. (more…)

There are some strong opinions about Insite, Canada’s only supervised site for substance abuse victims to inject themselves with illegal narcotics.

The enforcement pillar of the drug industry, the police department, lobbies the governments to shut down the facility. The whole project has survived on six-month exemptions to Canada’s drug laws, leaving staff and clients not knowing how long the site will last. Vancouver’s Mayor Sam Sullivan makes statements on both sides of the fence and has stated that Insite might make the transition to distributing legal drugs.

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