Embattled San Francisco Mayor London Breed is proposing new legislation requiring low-income residents to undergo substance abuse screening and treatment in order to receive welfare.
She said the move was necessary to combat the city’s drug and homeless crisis.
“We need to make a significant change,” Breed said at a news conference Tuesday.
“No more ‘anything goes’ without accountability, no more handouts without accountability,” she added.
Under Breed’s proposal, individuals with a suspected drug problem would be required to participate in substance abuse screenings or treatment programs funded by the San Francisco Human Services Agency, according to FOX News.
Treatments would include a range of interventions, including residential treatment, medically-assisted treatment, outpatient options and abstinence-based treatments to be decided based on the needs of the individual.
Those who refuse such treatments, or do not successfully engage in them, would not be eligible to receive funds through the County Adult Assistance Program, and their application for the welfare program would either be denied or they would be discontinued from receiving cash assistance.
The program provides housed residents with benefits of up to $697 a month.
For homeless residents, the benefit was changed in 2002 with the passage of Proposition N — known as the Care not Cash proposition — which guarantees homeless residents $105 a month and a shelter bed.
The city’s homeless population is estimated to be around 8,000, with half refusing to accept services and shelter when it is offered to them, according to TV station Kron4.
CAAP now serves about 5,200 San Francisco residents, and doled out a total of $30.3 million in fiscal year 2022, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Breed, who is running a campaign for re-election in November 2024, is expected to unveil the text of the legislation in the coming weeks, Politico reports, as drug use runs rampant at San Francisco’s homeless encampments.
A recent city survey found that 52% of the city’s homeless population said their substance abuse was a disabling condition, and data from the county medical examiner’s office found that about a quarter of the residents who died from overdoses last year were homeless.
The city is now on track to record about 850 overdose deaths, or about 70 per month, in 2023, the Chronicle reports.
But Breed faces an uphill battle to get the legislation passed through the Democrat-run Board of Supervisors.
Board President Aaron Peskin, who some believe may run against Breed, said the mayor was “grasping for a political lifeline” and predicted the policy would fail.
“These are serious times in San Francisco — and we need serious ideas,” he said in a statement.
“Mayor Breed does not have the ability or the will to organize our many public safety resources … If she can’t find the way to prevent several hundred brazen criminals from selling deadly drugs, how does she think she will find the resources to drug test thousands of welfare recipients?
“The answer is she can’t and she won’t — and this would simply be silly politics if the issues we face as a city were not so serious.”
Supervisor Hillary Ronen also claimed the proposal is doomed to failure.
“The War on Drugs, punishing people for being poor, punishing sick people for being sick, are the methods we’ve used for decades in this country,” she said. “If they worked, they would have worked by now.”
Supervisor Dean Preston added; “I am appalled to see this type of proposal — usually pushed by Republicans in states like Florida or Texas — in San Francisco,” he said.
The plan is being supported, however, by Supervisors Matt Dorsey and Rafael Mandelman.
Dorsey — who has spoken about his own struggles with substance abuse in the past — argued the proposal would encourage treatment and recovery for a vulnerable population.
“We’re facing an unprecedented loss of life in San Francisco right now and we know that coercive interventions can work,” he said.
Mandelman, meanwhile, added: “San Francisco has earned a reputation as a destination for people who use the most toxic drugs to come and eventually die.”
He said he hopes the effort would instead make the city one where people can “get sober and build a better life.”
When asked about the opposition, Breed told the Chronicle: “Everyone’s going to have an excuse for why we shouldn’t do this. And at the end of the day, at this point, as far as I’m concerned, we’re going to do everything we can to move forward and to get people into treatment, controversial or not.
“What’s their solution, other than ‘We should not?’” she added.
If the board does not approve the proposal, Breed could take it to voters through a ballot initiative.