Rob Mendoza went to rehab close to a decade ago to tackle his addiction to Xanax, and moved from Virginia to the Bay Area for a fresh start in 2018.
But a hospitality job promised to him by a family member fell through, and then the pandemic hit. Mendoza, 48, burned through his modest savings, relapsed, started living in his car, and then cycled through shelters before getting kicked out for his drug use.
“I was angry and couldn’t figure out a way forward,” he told me. “I got too deep on the opioid thing this time.”
Which is how he ended up on the street, smoking fentanyl. I met him earlier this week at the 16th and Mission transit plaza. He told me he uses fentanyl daily, but wants to quit. He nearly died from an overdose earlier this year, Mendoza told me.
Last week, Mayor Daniel Lurie announced a new plan to arrest drug users who are intoxicated in public and transport them to a “sobering center” where they would have to remain until they are no longer altered; they would also be offered treatment and services while detained. The plan comes amid Lurie’s broader push to tackle public drug use and the fentanyl crisis in the city, which has included mass arrests and tougher charges for possessing illicit substances.
Drug users “can get sober, and get into treatment. And if they don’t take that option, then they go to jail,” he said last Wednesday at a news conference.
I asked Mendoza whether having to sober up in a facility operated by the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office would make him consider long-term treatment more seriously. He started to laugh, and then shrugged.
“It would probably piss me off, you know. But it depends,” Mendoza said. “If I can feel comfortable, and I get offered real options, maybe.”
“If the vibe is bad, though? Hell no.”
The sobering center will be located in a city-owned property at 444 Sixth St., with about 16 to 25 seats. People arrested and transported there will be forced to stay until they are sober and able to care for themselves, based on the judgment of clinicians and sheriff’s deputies. Those who attempt to leave before that point will be taken to jail. Anyone who wants to stay to talk with addiction specialists and city case managers can stay for up to 23 hours.
This plan is a departure from previous responses to public drug intoxication, which slapped people with an arrest, booking, and short stay at the county jail’s “drunk tank” holding room. Those taken to the sobering center, meanwhile, will not be booked or charged with a crime.
I spoke with a dozen people actively using drugs in a variety of neighborhoods, curious about how they saw the mayor’s new plan. Nearly all of the people I chatted with were ambivalent about it.
“Nobody is going to sober up [at the center] and want anything but to get away from the cops and back to where their people and shit are,” said Chuckie, a 59-year-old I met near Mid-Market.
“I don’t really get how it’s any different from what we had,” added their friend Rilee, 46. “It’s not like they really arrest that many people to begin with. And the city workers come through offering services already.”
To Kimberly Richman, a professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco whose expertise is in criminology, the mayor’s new plan is a blend of many things that have been tried before. She noted a similarity to the use of jail “drunk tanks” and “flash incarcerations,” or short-term jailings of people who violate their probation as a way to check in and assess their behavior. Richman also observed that the state’s Proposition 36, passed in 2000, already allows non-violent drug offenders to be given treatment instead of incarceration.
While the new city program may help people sober up, “nobody expects anyone to get long-term sober in 23 hours,” she said, especially not in a random room in SoMa.
“There are people who are more skilled already working on this, like street outreach staff who have much better relationships within a community, or are otherwise [more] credible messengers,” Richman said.
Although the Sheriff’s Office is leading the new operation, it will work with other law enforcement agencies to find, detain, and transport drug users to the center, Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Tara Moriarty told Gazetteer in an email.
In addition, two deputies will be assigned to the sobering center. The detainments are legally justified by two sections in the California penal code and the state health and safety code pertaining to intoxication by controlled substances, according to Moriarty, who added that the plan will help circumvent “congestion in our county jail and ERs.”
For a broader perspective on this strategy, I spoke with Mike Scott, a former Lauderhill, Florida police chief and current director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing at Arizona State University. It’s been clear for decades that arresting public drug users and letting them languish in jail is an “ineffective, borderline inhumane strategy.” Scott recalled that, as a young cop in Madison, Wisconsin in the 1970s, he was instructed to take intoxicated people to a detox facility, where medical professionals could offer treatment or counseling, rather than arresting and booking them. Jail time and fines do little to convince an addict to change their habits, Scott said.
In that sense, Lurie’s new plan is nothing really new, Scott said. But if the mayor is hoping these arrests will disrupt the city’s public drug markets in a meaningful way, Scott suggested it will fall well short of the goal.
Curtailing open-air markets and drug use requires attention to detail and community-specific responses by law enforcement, much of it focused on deterrence rather than detainments, Scott added. Involuntary treatment for drug users, meanwhile, does not have a history of being effective, he said.
“You cannot just scare or shame a person with addiction into stopping. They’re going to have to come to a decision on their own. So as a society and a government, we need to have resources available for those people when they do decide they need to quit.”
Despite Lurie taking a tough-on-crime tone about coercing addicts into treatment, the new plan doesn’t actually have a mechanism to force long-term care. But USF’s Richman noted that the sobering center could be a positive stop for some drug users who are extremely vulnerable to and unwell, something that was brought up by Sonny Wu, a 38-year-old unhoused person and fentanyl user I met downtown.
“I’m not sure if I would be the right person; I think I’d just want to leave as soon as possible,” Wu said about the sobering center.
“But I know some people who look damn near dead when they smoke and just get worse and worse. Maybe if they can force them in front of a medical professional, maybe that can help.”
Wu then waved goodbye and turned his focus back to a piece of charred foil in his hand.
