Economic Punishment: Prop F Will Threaten Bare Minimum Financial Support For The Most Vulnerable

By Zack Segall
March 3, 2024

Toward the end of 2023, Mayor London Breed signed Proposition F to be on the March 5th ballot, that would allow the City to drug test all public assistance recipients if they feel “reasonably suspect the person to be dependent on illegal drugs. These monthly disbursements, currently provided to around 5,000 SF residents and used to provide housing, support their employment assistance, utilities, food, and other basic needs. To threaten this basic assistance for San Francisco’s poorest, displaced, negatively impacted community members is not only inhumane and disgusting, it will clearly add to the misery on our streets that this Proposal’s supporters love complaining about. 

Proposition F does not address the fact that someone can use a drug and not be “dependent” on a substance. How will the City address this fact? We are supposed to entrust a City with blindly and arbitrarily determining who they “reasonably suspect” of being “dependent” on substances and who is not? The City that just formally apologized for its “systemic and structural discrimination?” In addition, forcing people into treatment does not work. 

Do Drug Tests Work? 

Then there is the utility of the actual drug test itself. Drug tests routinely produce false positive results. Relatedly, many common medications cause false positive results. Drug tests ruin trust and rapport with current and potential providers . Drug tests are far from an accurate representation of someone’s relationship to a substance, to dependence and addiction, nor are they representative of an individual’s mental health and substance use needs. Testing is not an accurate or helpful representation of an individual’s needs or progress in treatment. Furthermore, drug tests can be rather easily beat; a quick google search turns up endless products and information about this. We don’t have to look far to view other examples in which drug testing is deeply discriminatory and has devastating impacts to individuals, families, and communities.

If punishment and criminalization worked to address public health crises, we would be the soberest, healthiest, happiest population on earth. We are far from that. 

Prop F is part of a broader policy push by drug war advocates around the country, centered around punishment and coercion into “services” with little-to-no concern about the quality, availability, and accessibility of these services. In addition, Prop F would continue to stigmatize and marginalize people receiving public assistance. We must remember that people are not without housing because they use drugs. People are not without housing because they are without mental health and substance use services. This is a false narrative and we need to call it out every time it is employed. 

Experts in public health, drug policy, and substance use continue to offer proven, evidence-based policies that would continue to work toward reducing harm to communities and people who use drugs, saving tax dollars and reducing our overdose rate (twice as high as any other country). We could decide to offer robust, desirable, low barrier, voluntary mental health and substance use services tomorrow. We could pour the already available money and resources into rapidly and safely housing our neighbors.  We could open safe consumption sites, save lives, and reduce harm to community members and entire neighborhoods. We could continue to ramp up safe supply programs (Suboxone, Methadone, etc.). These are expert-supported interventions that are tried and true in public health and medicine.

But please, don’t worry. London Breed, supervisors Matt Dorsey and Rafael Mandelman, GROW SF, TogetherSF, The Briones Society, Chris Larsen and some other billionaires, and SFPD have a fresh, nuanced, innovative idea to address this ever-increasing public health crisis: Punitive drug tests!

Without this financial assistance, a disabled and systematically marginalized community will lose their supportive housing. People that are currently on waitlists for housing opportunities will have their eligibility impacted. Folks will increasingly be unable to purchase food and will struggle to meet their basic needs. Problematic, public substance use and medical issues will increase on our streets. This comes as California and specifically San Francisco have recently moved to make it easier to involuntarily hospitalize and conserve folks for these very reasons.

Prop F would serve to continue historical failed drug war policy initiatives that have increased public suffering, poverty, and homelessness that we now cannot escape. San Francisco medical professionals agree. Instead of focusing on providing increased support for this struggling population, this Proposition will further punish our City by targeting poor and low-income Black and Brown citizens and increasing homelessness. This increase in suffering and homelessness will inevitably be accompanied by an increased use of emergency services throughout the city, in addition to an increase in quality of life crime. Our already exorbitant overdose rate will climb.