‘We’ve Lost Our Way’: San Francisco Rethinks Drug Paraphernalia Handouts

Daniel Lurie, the city’s new mayor, is scaling back a program that gives away clean foil, pipes and plastic straws for fentanyl consumption. Nonprofits will have to direct people toward treatment.

Plastic straws are banned in San Francisco, at least if you want to drink a soda or lemonade. Those smoking fentanyl, however, have been able to get them for free, at taxpayers’ expense.

There was also the time five years ago, when the city helped pay for a billboard that showed smiling, glittery partygoers. “Do it with friends,” the public service message said, urging drug users to consume with others so they could treat a potential overdose.

For decades, San Francisco has been a liberal city where those using drugs found easy access to their substance of choice and a government generally willing to tolerate addiction. City leaders emphasized a harm reduction approach, believing that more lives would be saved by helping users to consume safely than by punishing them.

But Daniel Lurie, the moderate Democrat who became the city’s new mayor in January, said this week that things had gone too far. He told The New York Times that he would announce on Wednesday a new policy that walks back the free distribution of clean foil, pipes and plastic straws on the streets of San Francisco. The supplies were typically used to smoke fentanyl or methamphetamines, and the city spent hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on them.

Mr. Lurie’s rollback was the latest sign that San Francisco was moving away from the far-left ideology that had made it a target of late-night comedians and conservative politicians. In recent years, voters have signaled a political shift by ousting a progressive district attorney and electing more moderate city leaders, including the new mayor and Board of Supervisors.

“We’ve lost our way,” Mr. Lurie said on Tuesday as he walked around the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, where fentanyl use and open-air drug markets have proliferated. “We are no longer going to sit by and allow people to kill themselves on the streets.”