It is killing people and it is absolutely making no sense to put Law Enforcement and public works in the place of other members that know what they are doing, that know the signs and know what to do when there is an overdose happening. I think, as the board of supervisors, you have the capability of supporting narratives that humanize these people that are on the street, regardless of how they ended up there and regardless of what choices they are making with the options that they have. You need to rebuild the narrative around these people that is built around compassion rather than condemnation. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. My name is lydia. I work with saint anthonys. I have worked there for the past 14 years. In my time there, through my education, most of which i received through our guests, not through training, has been it is time and attention. It is like taking the time and paying attention that garners the biggest ability to support people. With safe injection sites, with the ability to spend that time and attention with people, you can make real changes to help people to make choices for their lives. When you are approaching someone who is on the street and who is in crisis, it is difficult to have a conversation with that person that isnt directive. We want to move away from that model and move into a model where you can take the time to listen to people and be able to understand. Which is they need to understand the help in their lives. We lost two people this year at st. Anthonys from our staff from overdose. We had someone overdose in our staff bathroom and we were able to reverse them. We do overdoses overdose reversals every week, two, three , four, five, 10. Our staff, our onboarding, they are onboarding enormous amounts of trauma around these issues. Mostly because they dont know how to help other than to keep forcing overdoses. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello. My name is giant jane and i have spoken to you many times. First of all, i want to echo every single thing that has been said before me because everyone is saying the right thing, but what i am here to say is to let you know what it is like to live at seventh and mission and let you know that this is beyond a crisis. If this was an earthquake, we would have an Immediate Response every single City Department would pull out everything they have. This is as bad as an earthquake and we are not doing that. So i have talked all of my good friends of that department of Public Health of all the right ideas and we are all working on it. I read it will take two years to open the 24 7 a clinic clinic that we need. I watch reversals every single day out of my window. My brother died from a Drug Overdose. I know what this is all about. I know how hard it is and how long it takes to treat. But just reversing a Drug Overdose without offering followup treatment is sending that person right back down that hole. So we need to absolutely escalate everything you have heard here. We need to put every single city resource behind it. We cant wait two years. I watch it every single night. I watched people revived, i watch people die right outside my window. It is not safe for us who are housed and live in the neighborhood. One of my friends testified yesterday. He is disabled and walks with a walker. He cant walk out our door and he cant pass down the sidewalk. All i am saying is this is urgent and this is a crisis. Please act as quickly as you can thank you for bringing this forward. Thank you. Next speaker, please. I want to thank the supervisors were getting this hearing on today and thank matt haney for calling it what it is, it is an emergency and a crisis. I work at late Harm Reduction programs. The Harm Reduction theres a Harm Reduction tshirt that says support, not punished. It is a simple message but it is one that has not been inherent in the manner it needs to be. People who have Substance Use disorders should never be punished or having a disorder. They should be supported and programs should be saving people with dignity and respect and any time that the choice is, should i support or punish and you are choosing punished, then there is a problem with the paragraph that you are using and it will be ineffective. Everything everywhere where we have had successful interventions have always had a nonjudgmental and a compassionate way of engaging those folks. Normally people who use drugs are heavily abusing drugs in our front and center of those organizations. So we have to rethink how we are doing this and we have to expand on Program Models that are successful. The expertise in this room, in this community, we know how to do this. The department of Public Health knows how to keep overdose numbers down. Those projects have done incredible work with minimum resources and thats when one of the reasons why we have such low numbers here and we have benefited from not been contaminated in the drug supply. It is only going to get worse until we take more action and we have more resources. Please direct your resources at the agencies that know what they are doing, that can engage the population and we can take this number down dramatically and any time you think a war on drug solution, Law Enforcement will never work when it comes to preventing overdose deaths. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello. Thanks for having me today. My name is william on the Outreach Coordinator for hep pepsi prevention services. Thank you for pulling bringing this up. At the end of the day, it has been said in so many different ways where it is needed, but i will say a little bit from my perspective as someone who is out there in the trenches on a daily basis. And who has been doing this work for almost 20 years in the city. I care deeply about the people that we serve. And as someone who, by necessity subscribes to the philosophy of Harm Reduction, because i do i believe in evidencebased and Public Behavioral Health interventions, and that is what we do in Harm Reduction. We dont do opinion based treatment. Unfortunately Substance Use treatment was for so long in this country. Things are changing. [please stand by] water and bathrooms. Many people experience homeless use drugs to survive on the street. And when they lack access of basic needs, they can use unsafe ways that increase the risk and preventable overdose. We must ensure we respect the community of San Francisco by guaranteeing access to basic human needs and universal Mental Health access to everyone. Safe injection sites are a great way to reduce disease like hepatitis c and hiv. We need to act right now. We need Overdose Prevention sites now. Lets end the epidemic now. Thank you so much. Thank you. Are there next speaker. A lot of the drug people are alluding to are highly toxic substances, these individuals are making bad choices and their vices are killing them, half of all iv users in the city have acquired hepatitis, it would probably require another quarter of a billion dollars a year to credit them with medication. Drug use is sensationseeking behavior. People may look like terrible wrecks laying on the street or staring at a crack on the sidewalk but rest assuring they are enjoying their high if they are not having a psychotic reaction in public. I drove across mexico years ago, a drug gang dumped 35 bodies on to the highway. A couple months before i arrived and the drug gang disappeared, 40 University Students a couple months after i left. We have been reading about communities in mexico being turned into war zones as gangs fight to feet american demand. I would like to know if there is an estimation of the amount of money being spent on elicit substances, how that money is obtained and if local police are working close with the f. B. I. Over the remainder of the bureaus enhanced efforts. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public who would like to speak on this item before i close Public Comment . Seeing none, Public Comment is now closed. Supervisor haney. Well, first of all, thank you to everybody who came out and spoke. Im glad we did Public Comment first because i think you all really added so much to the conversation and so many of the folks doing this work every day and have really been a part of where most of the ideas that are in this legislation have come from. And also i want to thank the dope project and the union, we did a lot of trainings in the community and here at city hall, and i think that was a powerful statement of the collective responsibility that we all have in the course of this epidemic. I have a few things. But i figure maybe you all might want to go first. I see supervisor stefani. Supervisor stefani. Thank you. Thank you, supervisor haney for calling this very important hearing. And thank you for everybody who came out out to come and for the presentation. And a few things i picked up in Public Comment that i wanted to just touch on. I liked what someone said about compassion rather than condemnation for those that are, of course, suffering from the disease of addiction on our streets. Also what david said, i think it was our first speaker in terms of having people out on the streets with our peace officers and sometimes public works employees that have experience with addiction and who are Homeless Outreach team are people that are if we are making contact with people, we have to have people on the frontlines to know exactly what addiction is all about. And i think that thats something we need to get better at in terms of coordinating with responses to what we see on our streets. And i wanted to Say Something too that im very, very, very familiar with addiction and have a lot of experience personally in my family and have been through the ringer on several aspects of this problem. Im sure you look at me and you probably dont think that. And i when you said something about compassion rather than condemnation, i thought, of course, that applies not just to those who are using drugs but those, i think that are affected by people who use drugs, daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, public. And there are so many people that are affected by those using drugs. And i think we often judge those people as well. And i think we need to suspend judgment for all aspects of this problem. And drug use is not always peaceful. And when we have to respond to it, its not always pretty, right . And i think a lot of times we dont want to criminalize addiction, of course, but behavior that results in people being harmed because someones addiction which ive seen in my own family that is very difficult. And the consequence of peoples drug use, at times. And that has to be taken care of in a way that i think causes a lot of conflict. And i think we need to understand that aspect of it. I have so much compassion for people who are suffering from addiction. I think more than you will ever know. And i want to thank you, again, supervisor haney for calling for this. I also just want to make sure that we are all on the same page in terms of understanding that not only is the crisis for those that are experiencing addiction, and we have to find a way to help them, whether or not its increaseed use of narcan, making sure we have people going out with our Police Officers who do go out to get called to events that could harm the individual using drugs or somebody on the other side of that. And we need, i think, to have compassion for all those involved. And i want to continue to participate in the conversation and want to make sure that we suspend judgment and try to hold space for not just those that are suffering from addiction but also those that are affected by somebody elses addiction. And like i said, those, the passer by, thats someones daughter, thats someones son. Its someone its the Police Officer sometimes who doesnt probably even want to respond to that call. And i know that the sweeps are an issue, definitely. And you want everyone responding to someone that is suffering on the streets with compassion and not with aggressive force or anything like that, of course. But i just want us to try to hold space for the entire the entire problem of ones addiction. And like in 12step programs, all the jum too, its a Harm Reduction people judge Harm Reduction, people just abstinence. Its whatever works for people trying to recover. Its one of the reasons in the program, people make a list of those they harm and become willing to make amend to those they have harmed. So i want to hold space for all of it and have compassion for every person that is touched by the problem of addiction. So thank you, again, supervisor haney for calling this very important hearing. Supervisor walton. Thank you. I just want to reiterate the understanding that, one, we know we have a crisis that exists in our city right now, and it is a Health Crisis. And it needs to be addressed as such. One of the reasons why im very positive and excited about Mental Health sf is because we will be sending out mobile crisis teams with medical and Mental Health professionals versus Law Enforcement. And that is an important piece of the work, because we cannot continue to send folks out to work with our population that has addiction and Substance Abuse issues and try to address it with Law Enforcement and punitive means and strategies. And so we are committed as members of the board of supervisors to address this Health Crisis with strategies that are and responses that are under the lens of addressing this as such, as a Health Crisis. And we are going to be focused on doing that together, whether it is safe injection sites, sending out folks to work with our population that have the expertise, experience and working in our communities and with our communities that suffer from addiction. I did want to just a quick question as we talk about the streetbased engagement strategies that you are utilizing on our team. Are you also working with the Vehicle Triage Center . Is that your team thats going to be out . We are not currently working with the Vehicle Triage Center. But we are constantly looking at other partners that we collaborate with but at this point, no. Thank you. I will echo the thanks of my colleagues to you, supervisor haney, for authoring this resolution and for your commitment on this issue, which is heart breaking and tragic. And i am struck, whenever we have a hearing that touches on these issues how we talk about the siloization of City Services but how siloed our conversations about these issues are and the conversations of folks who are impacted by encampments are just completely the head space of folks who are experiencing an encampment is in such a different place. And if there was some way to have these different conversations somehow like kind of engaging with each other as someone who is participating in both sets of conversations. I dont see a universe in which encampments are going to be allowed to remain in terms of the health of the people who are living in the encampments, i fully accept the healthiest thing might be to allow the encampments to remain where they are and i cant imagine in a democraticallygoverned cities that we are going to move to a place where the sweeps end entirely. I think the burden on the city is to find better, healthier ways of creating other spaces for people to be. And i think over the next year we need to take a hard look at whether our shelter policies are expanding the places for people to sleep in a way that gives folks an alternative. Are we giving People Places to put their stuff so that their stuff does not become an impact to the community . Are we giving people the places where they can use drugs safely . Are we managing the ongoing addictions of people who have been to treatment over and over and over again . You can increase your funding for residential treatment beds and its not going to work for everybody, and those people arent terrible people, they just need a way to live. So i want to thank you, supervisor haney, and im eager to work with you on this. Thank you. And thank you for your work and your leadership on the Meth Task Force and the many hearings youve been in with this, and particularly looking at meth and how we can respond more effectively there. Im going to because i promised this wouldnt be a super long hearing, im going to sort of say a few things and that i would love to have followup on, and i know we are an ongoing conversation as well as with the partners in the room. So rather than having you come up and answer each of these things, ill sort of put a number of things out there, and i hope we can find a time to have followup on these things. The first is im very excited about the streetbased engagement. And one of the things that i would like to understand is how we have the level of streetbased engagement thats necessary to meet the need and how we understand that and how we measure that. Many of these things, whether its the mobile outreach medical teams, encampment health fairs, Harm Reduction therapies, how often they are out there, how many people they are reaching, goals around reaching more people. And obviously in partnership and coordination, because of