STAT May 16, 2024
SAN FRANCISCO — Amid what feels like an ever-worsening drug crisis here, locals and politicians alike are fed up. Overdose death rates remain near all-time highs. The Tenderloin, a historic downtown neighborhood, remains rife with open-air substance use and drug dealing. Public health officials are increasingly at a loss.
In recent years, much of the backlash has come to focus on harm reduction, the philosophy and practice of reducing the most acute drug-related harms without expecting abstinence from drug users.
But the solution is not a return to the “war on drugs,” a panel of addiction experts warned on Thursday, even as they acknowledged that the public has come to view hands-off drug policies, tolerance for open-air drug markets, and...
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