Citizen Moritz

By Julie Pitta

The billboard looms large over the mid-Richmond. For those who might have missed it, the brightly colored sign takes a swipe at the City’s response to the fentanyl crisis. Its banner teases, “That’s Fentalife!” 

The billboard is part of a $300,000 advertising campaign funded by Michael Moritz, a technology venture capitalist who is only the latest in a long line of business leaders willing to spend lavishly to influence San Francisco politics. Moritz has poured millions into Together SF Action, a political action committee. Like William Randolph Hearst before him, Moritz has even started a news website, The San Francisco Standard, to get his point across. The money spent will hardly make a dent in what’s said to be the tech mogul’s $5 billion bank account.

Moritz believes the City’s liberal values, as old as the Gold Rush that brought the first large wave of settlers to town, are responsible for the troubling conditions on city streets. Those very values made San Francisco a perfect laboratory for the business experiments that made Moritz, a British émigré who, like others before him, came here to make his fortunate, a very wealthy man. 

Today, he’s using all the influence money can buy to demand an end to what he believes is the City’s soft approach to the drug crisis. His frustration — and that of many San Franciscans — is understandable: During the first five months of 2023, 346 died from drug overdoses, a more than 40% increase from the same time last year. Of those, 80% succumbed to the deadly effects of fentanyl.

“It’s a strange city that bans plastic straws but permits plastic needles,” Moritz complained in an opinion piece that ran in the Financial Times. “Yet that’s San Francisco today.” In an interview with SF Gate, Moritz’s right-hand, Kanishka Cheng, doubled down on her boss’s belief that the City must take a more muscular approach. “We’ve been supporting … the idea that law enforcement has to play a role because we’re seeing fewer and fewer instances of people opting into treatment,” Cheng said. “There needs to be a tool to compel people into treatment.”

Moritz has a found a willing ear in Mayor London Breed — no surprise given the mayor faces reelection next year and a billionaire’s deep pockets can swing elections. Breed and her hand-picked district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, are reviving the War on Drugs, an effort that’s seen the United States spend at least a trillion dollars to little avail. 

The plan is doomed. Forced treatment, as addiction experts point out, has a long history of failure. 

“The literature does not support mandatory treatment on any level to help the public health situation,” said Daniel Ciccarone, a physician and professor of family community medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, who studies drug addiction. A 2015 meta-analysis that studied involuntary treatment around the world found that “evidence does not … suggest improved outcomes related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies suggesting potential harms.” 

Last December, Breed launched a trial run of her aggressive new approach, declaring a state of emergency in the troubled Tenderloin. She flooded the neighborhood with police officers, arresting drug dealers and users, alike. The result was this: Drug sales and use moved into other neighborhoods, especially South of Market. For her part, Jenkins has failed to secure prosecutions for drug-related offenses.

The difficult truth is that San Francisco’s drug crisis will not be solved overnight. It will require an unwavering commitment to evidence-based solutions like harm-reduction sites that keep people alive while healthcare professionals gain the kind of trust that leads to successful treatment. It will involve the creation of supportive housing (with no strings attached) for drug-users living on the streets.

It’s been proven that when people have a stable home, they can address other problems in their lives. That policy, known as Housing First, has been embraced on the federal level by presidents as different as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Today, like other evidence-based solutions, it’s under attack by the far right.

San Francisco’s Department of Public Health and the Mayor’s office have engineered seven plans to address the City’s drug crisis. They incorporate evidence-based solutions. To date, none have been fully implemented. Moritz has fundamentally misunderstood the problem: It’s not one of policy failure. 

The first iteration of Moritz’s “That’s Fentalife!” ad disparaged Narcan, a vital medicine for treating opioid overdoses. It was blasted for its insensitivity. Not to be dissuaded, he replaced them with versions that omitted any mention of Narcan. 

The first ad was a blunder; the second, not much better. Moritz, a billionaire, can afford costly mistakes. San Francisco, still in the throes of an economic crisis, cannot.

Julie Pitta is a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and senior editor at Forbes Magazine. She is a neighborhood activist and an officer of the San Francisco Berniecrats. Email her at julie.pitta@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter: @juliepitta.