Drug Testing For Welfare Recipients? San Francisco’s Dysfunction Is Paved With Good Intentions

In October, Mayor London Breed decided to throw some red meat to a San Francisco electorate hungry for progress on The City’s fentanyl-fueled drug crisis.

Breed’s proposed ballot measure was a no-brainer for an incumbent mayor facing a tough reelection:  Screen city welfare recipients for possible drug addiction and require addicts to participate in treatment programs to continue receiving up to $687 per month in cash or housing assistance.

After all, said the chorus of “tough love” city officials and activists, who wants to give their hard-earned taxpayer dollars to those who will waste it on drugs anyway?

But upon closer inspection, the proposal is worrisome — with many of the same fundamental flaws as some of San Francisco’s biggest legislative flameouts.

In 2016, San Francisco city leaders prohibited business dealings and city-sponsored travel to states deemed hostile to LGBTQ communities — part of the response to North Carolina’s law banning transgender people from using public bathrooms aligned with their gender identity.  

The boycott eventually expanded to 30 states but had no tangible social impact — costing The City an estimated 10 to 20 percent more in contracting fees due to decreased vendor competition.

In 2016 and 2017, current Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin led aggressive expansions of “inclusionary housing requirements,” more than doubling the percentage of affordable housing units required of city developers.

The legislation dramatically slowed the creation of both affordable and market-rate units, prevented many new projects from even being proposed, and stalled thousands of already approved homes due to escalating costs — leading directly to the housing shortage and amplified homelessness crisis we’re experiencing now.

In 2020, in the aftermath of the Muhammad Nuru bribery scandal, numerous members of the Board of Supervisors put forth a charter amendment that split off a new Department of Sanitation and Streets as distinct from the Department of Public Works.

When estimates showed that the additional administrative costs of running a new agency could cost $6 million annually and make coordination even harder — without actually making streets any cleaner — the law was reversed in 2022.

So, what’s the common link between all of this bad policy?

Good intentions with unintended consequences.

In fairness, San Francisco City Hall is hardly the only governing body in the region with a taste for laws that can have negative side effects. Consider the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which made any public project in the state subject to an environmental study about possible negative externalities related to air quality, noise, and protected natural areas.

Once California courts interpreted a “public project” to include any private development that required governmental approvals — that’s everything in San Francisco — every apartment building or office tower could be held hostage by an individual or organization with the few hundred dollars necessary to drag developers to court and force projects to undergo years of delays and six-figure legal fees.

Which brings us back to Mayor Breed’s charter amendment.

Existing data on coerced drug treatment is limited, outdated, and conflicting. Some research suggests that involuntary treatment is less effective in the long term and more dangerous for overdose risk — specifically because the type of treatment employed may change when an individual doesn’t want it.

In Massachusetts, for instance, studies found that people who were involuntarily committed were more than twice as likely to experience a fatal overdose as those who completed voluntary treatment.

By forcing people to undergo treatment to receive benefits, we risk losing the opportunity to continually engage with them and encourage more effective voluntary treatment.

For that matter, should we be lumping all drugs into the same bucket  — including opioids like fentanyl that can kill you in a single dose and other psychoactive, psychedelic, or dissociative drugs that have possible mental health treatment potential?

If those who we could help turn down assistance because of the drug treatment requirement — and end up on the streets as a result — wouldn’t we be worsening San Francisco’s current drug, homelessness, and crime predicament?

All of these unanswered questions sound like a law ripe for unintended consequences.

A common sense approach says we should make getting help easier — not harder.

That’s why Breed’s drug screening ballot measure seems like a knee-jerk proposal that’s just more of the same — a policy that proves we haven’t learned from the mistakes that got us here in the first place.

Simply put, the road to San Francisco’s current dysfunction is paved with good intentions.

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