The crisis in San Francisco: drug addicts massively inject and defecate on the street

Near the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in downtown San Francisco, a woman fills a small need on the sidewalk and smokes crack. In her purse about a dozen used needles for heroin. According to her, she chops herself with heroin up to 10 once a day.

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Approximately in 50 meters from her, a man inserts a needle into another woman’s neck, writes CNN.

The Uber, Twitter and Salesforce headquarters are located in this San Francisco area. However, walking here, you can also find used syringes and needles, garbage, human excrement, as well as people who are in different states of intoxication on the sidewalks.

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Drug use and high levels of homelessness are not new challenges for San Francisco. But residents say that in recent years the situation has worsened. For the first 10 months of this year, 7500 complaints about discarded needles were filed in the city compared to 6363 last year. In 2015, there were less than 3000.

Some locals started documenting the mess they see on the streets in an attempt to get the attention of the city authorities.

Adam Mesnik, a restaurateur who lives and works in San Francisco, began publishing daily photos and videos of people who use drugs in public, urinating near his restaurant or lying unconscious on the sidewalk.

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Mesnick isn't trying to shame homeless people with his Twitter posts—he says he's "really trying to find help for these people." For the past ten years, he says, he has been donating leftover food from his restaurant to the homeless. Visible homelessness and drug use on the streets of San Francisco have increased markedly over the past five or six years, Mesnick said.

Some residents of the city fear that the situation will affect tourism and the brand of the city.

In July of this year, the London Brid became the mayor of San Francisco. She made the fight against homelessness and drug addiction a key element of her election platform. Last week, the mayor announced a detailed plan to send 181 million dollars to improve the situation with homelessness, affordable housing and related problems. The offer includes about 20 millions of dollars to be spent on beds for patients with mental health problems. An extra 4 million dollars will go to cleaning the streets. According to the mayor, significant progress in this direction has already been made, although residents say that this is still imperceptible.

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