(DailyVantage.com) – The City of San Francisco has once again come under fire for providing “managed” amounts of alcohol to the city’s homeless population.
The issue first came under the spotlight after Adam Nathan, who founded Blaze, an AI marketing firm, posted on Twitter/X that San Francisco was spending $2 million a year to provide free alcohol to homeless people in the city.
The program is implemented through San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, which sees participants given three square meals a day, as well as their “managed” alcohol intake, which is even “administered” by a nurse.
The initiative is ostensibly part of the city’s “harm reduction” approach for individuals – often belonging to the homeless population – who are struggling with substance addiction. Keanan Joyner, who works at UC Berkeley as a professor and researcher in the university’s Clinical Research on Externalizing and Addiction Mechanisms Lab, said that while on the surface such programs seem counterintuitive, initiatives such as SF’ s “Managed Alcohol Program” have been shown to be helpful, especially in preventing major relapses caused by periods of long abstinence and withdrawal.
Keeping program beneficiaries in a “safe level of intoxication” as well as giving them enrichment activities keep them safe and provide them with a better quality of life, Joyner said. The program also ostensibly helps the city’s emergency services, as “managed” individuals are less likely to come to harm and seek hospital treatment.
But since those are the goals of the program, and not removing to treating individuals’ unhealthy dependence and addiction, others say that such initiatives are more “harm acceleration” rather than “harm reduction.” Ironically, SF Mayor London Breed is reportedly one of the critics of the program, pointing out that in the long run, it keeps addicts addicted and could even worsen the problems addicts and alcoholics often face.
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