Just when you think nothing more can shock you, San Francisco puts up billboards advocating for drug use.
San Francisco, a once beautiful city in Northern California, is on a mission to make its downtown area a safe place for avid drug users by posting signs promoting drug use and criticizing law enforcement.
A six-person group called the Drug User Liberation Collective put up posters in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood— which is infamous for its open-air drug use.
“Downtown is for drug users,” one of the signs reads., while another says: “Anti-drug user culture and laws = white supremacy.”
Another says: “Yea, we buy drugs and do drugs here. A lot of us don’t have housing, so we don’t have a choice in the matter.”
The signs appear to counter a recent initiative proposed by Mayor London Breed that would allow law enforcement to arrest people who use drugs in public.
“It’s very literally not hurting you, your business, or the economy,” the signs continue. “But it could seem like it because of all the stigma and misinformation out there.”
The posters accuse Breed of targeting communities “in order to build political power.”
The campaign’s creator, Nova Schultz—who uses the pronoun “they”— describes themselves as a “drug user in recovery” and defends the use of illegal substances.
“Our lives are inherently criminalized. It’s illegal to be us,” Schultz told the San Francisco Standard. “People who use drugs are not morally corrupt.”
Schultz argued that criminal activity associated with drug use is due to them being illegal.
At least 752 people died from drug overdoses in San Francisco between January and November— more deaths than in any other year, according to data from the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office.
In 2022, San Francisco opened a “safe injection site,” which only ran for about 11 months. The site was eventually shut down over complaints about how much it cost the city’s taxpayers.