In San Francisco in 2017, there were an estimated 22,500 people who inject drugs (PWID). Many PWID do not have access to safe and private environments in which to inject, which leads them to public drug use and makes them more vulnerable to overdose and other injection-related complications. In 2019, high and increasing rates of fatal overdoses prompted the San Francisco Mayor’s Office to ask a group of interested community organizations to develop a white paper on options for overdose prevention services (also known as supervised consumption services) that could guide the city’s overdose response.
As a lead organization in the community coalition, San Francisco AIDS Foundation hired Facente Consulting to facilitate the process of developing the white paper, and, ultimately, creating the document, with community input. The process included several meetings with stakeholders, review of the literature, research on various existing overdose prevention models, and identification of several potential options for San Francisco. The comprehensive white paper was submitted to the Mayor’s Office in 2019, and served as the impetus for the subsequent Tenderloin Linkage Center, which operated for approximately 11 months in 2022, served hundreds of PWID per day, and saved 333 lives.
Photo Credit: David Mamaril Horowitz