San Francisco is getting hammered for spending millions of dollars on a program that gives free booze to homeless alcoholics, but researchers are insisting the multimillion-dollar strategy has merit.
Keanan Joyner, a professor and researcher in the Clinical Research on Externalizing and Addiction Mechanisms Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, called San Francisco’s Managed Alcohol Program, or MAP, “a very positive thing.”
“The science is very clear at this point that harm reduction as a general strategy for treating alcohol and other drug use disorders is very effective,” he said on Monday.
MAP was started four years ago as a way to care for unhoused people who drank excessively and ended up in emergency rooms, jails, or, in some cases, the morgue.
It made headlines recently after Adam Nathan, the founder of AI marketing company Blaze and chairman of the Salvation Army San Francisco Metro Advisory Board, slammed the program for giving out free beer.
“It’s set up so people in the program just walk in and grab a beer, and then another one. All day,” he posted on X.
His comments were followed by tech executive Garry Tan, who called MAP “harm acceleration.”
The program, which is run out of an old hotel in the city’s Tenderloin district, provides housing, three meals a day, and a nurse who administers alcohol, usually vodka or beer, to keep users at a “safe level of intoxication.” The goal isn’t to stop alcohol use but to keep it at a level that increases users’ safety and overall quality of life.
The San Francisco Department of Public Health said the program resulted in a fourfold reduction in the usage of emergency department services. It also said people called emergency medical services half as often and clocked a 50% reduction in the number of hospital visits.
Nathan wasn’t impressed.
“Providing free drugs to drug addicts doesn’t solve their problems,” he wrote on X. “It just stretches them out. Where’s the recovery in all of this?”
Nathan claimed the program cost taxpayers $2 million a year, a figure that is well below the actual cost of $5 million a year, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Critics like Nathan have excoriated San Francisco’s attempts at harm reduction, calling it a futile exercise that only makes things worse in the long run.
Groups like the Salvation Army, which promotes abstinence, have slammed the city for spending public funds on programs that provide drug users with overdose-reversing drugs such as Narcan or providing addicts with clean needles and foil for meth and fentanyl.
Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, has even spoken out against it, and her own public health department, by saying that harm reduction programs are “making things far worse.”
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Tom Wolf, a heroin addict now in recovery, also has problems with the program.
“Are we just going to manage people’s addictions with our taxpayer dollars in perpetuity forever?” he said. “It seems like that’s basically what we’re saying. I think we should be spending that money on detox and recovery.”
