San Fransicko Quotes

“The more you play the victim, the more of a victim you’ll become.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“It is a formula that binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his status as a victim,”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“pathological altruism,” defined as “behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Contingency management harnesses well-established psychological principles, which is likely why it works for such a wide number of people and such a large spectrum of drugs, including both opioids and stimulants. Contingency management is based on the psychological theory of operant conditioning.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“You know, people are using for a reason. They’re trying to mitigate something, and that’s the thing that we should be focusing on first. What is underneath that to try to take somebody’s coping mechanism away as the first intervention?”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“No matter how many times you’ve heard the statistics, they never lose their power to shock: the United States is home to less than 5 percent of the world’s population but has 25 percent of its prisoners.1 Today, the United States incarcerates five times more people than it did in 1970. The total number of people incarcerated in state or federal prison rose from 200,000 to 1.6 million between 1972 and 2014.2 California’s incarceration rate quintupled, from about 100 for every 100,000 residents to nearly 500. Between 1984 and 2005, the state opened twenty-one prisons.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“just one-fifth of San Francisco’s homeless said they were born in the city and only half had lived in the city for over ten years. In a different survey, nearly one-third of San Francisco’s homeless said they were homeless before coming to San Francisco.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“We are responsible for our behavior, not that of our group, nor that of our ancestors. The arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice, as King claimed, and we thus dishonor the sacrifices of our forebears when we suggest things are as bad or worse today than before the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Between 2008 and 2019, eighteen thousand companies, including Toyota, Charles Schwab, and Hewlett-Packard, fled California due to a constellation of problems sometimes summarized as “poor business climate.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“The American people are capable of distinguishing between stigmatizing fentanyl use without stigmatizing the sick person who is using fentanyl. The person requires our compassion, but the behavior requires our condemnation.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“problem with Housing First stems from the fact that it doesn’t require that people address their mental illness and substance abuse, which are often the underlying causes of homelessness.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“management is based on the psychological theory of operant conditioning. It emphasizes the need for concrete and immediate reinforcements, such as housing or a gift card, in exchange for good behavior, including abstinence, work, and compliance with psychiatric medicines. Contingency management swaps one set of rewards, such as meth and heroin, for another set of rewards, such as gift cards and apartment units.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Psychiatrists have long warned against giving money to the mentally ill homeless addicted to drugs, and yet that is what San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other progressive cities do. “It is not only clinically incorrect,” said the director of psychiatric services at San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, “but almost sadistic to give money on a regular basis to people who have a demonstrated inability to handle cash funds.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“In a randomized controlled trial, homeless people were given furnished apartments and allowed to keep them unless they failed a drug test, at which point they were sent to stay in a shelter. Sixty-five percent of participants completed the program.48 Three similar randomized controlled trials also found moderate to high rates of completion. And participants in abstinence-contingent housing had better housing and employment outcomes than participants assigned housing for whom abstinence was not required.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Housing First may even increase addiction and overdose deaths and make quitting drugs more difficult. Warned a multiauthor review in 2009, “One potential risk [of Housing First’s harm reduction approach] would be worsening the addiction itself, as the federal collaborative initiative preliminary evaluation seemed to suggest.” The authors pointed to an experiment that had to be stopped and reorganized after the homeless individuals in the abstinence group complained of being housed with people in the control group, who didn’t stop their drug and alcohol use.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Many of the people who enjoy some of the highest levels of prosperity and freedom in human history are also the least grateful, and least loyal, to the civilization that made it possible.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Most voters in 2021 still felt homelessness was the number one problem that required addressing. In January 2021, most respondents agreed that violent crime was increasing (52 percent) and that we need more housing, not less, to reduce rents and eviction (83 percent). Forty-three percent said mental illness and drug addiction were the main causes of homelessness, and 49 percent agreed with the statement, “We need to break up the open-air drug markets and offer mandatory drug treatment as an alternative to jail.” Eighty-eight percent of Democrats and 29 percent of Republicans agreed.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“While we should hold our elected officials responsible, we must also ask hard questions of the intellectual architects of their policies, and of the citizens, donors, and voters who empower them. What kind of a civilization leaves its most vulnerable people to use deadly substances and die on the streets? What kind of city regulates ice cream stores more strictly than drug dealers who kill 713 of its citizens in a single year?6 What kind of people moralize about their superior treatment of the poor, people of color, and addicts while enabling and subsidizing the conditions of their death?”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“I believe safety is the first thing you need to guarantee as mayor,” she said.47”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“No matter how many times you’ve heard the statistics, they never lose their power to shock: the United States is home to less than 5 percent of the world’s population but has 25 percent of its prisoners.1 Today, the United States incarcerates five times more people than it did in 1970. The total number of people incarcerated in state or federal prison rose from 200,000 to 1.6 million between 1972 and 2014.2 California’s incarceration rate quintupled, from about 100 for every 100,000 residents to nearly 500. Between 1984 and 2005, the state opened twenty-one prisons.3”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“In his memoir, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown writes, “I discovered factors—some bureaucratic, some political—working in a kind of evil synthesis with each other that really prevented the long-term homeless from entering the system. Backing this up was a collection of so-called activists with heavy political clout who absolutely believed (and still believe) that homeless people should have a right to live on the street. They believed that homeless people had an absolute right to do everything they were doing, no matter how harmful to themselves or to the rest of the citizenry.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Despite skyrocketing overdose death rates, none of the country’s leading advocates of harm reduction are rethinking their advocacy of decriminalization and harm reduction. Instead they focus on things like promoting Narcan. “It’s really about getting emergency responders to carry [naloxone/Narcan],” said Ethan. “The guy who was a real pioneer in all of this was a guy named Dan Bigg out of Chicago. He really took this issue by the horns in the early 2000s.” What happened to him? “He himself died of an overdose a few years ago,” said Ethan. Bigg’s death in 2018 attracted national media attention. “The substances found in his body included heroin, two benzodiazepines . . . methadone, fentanyl, and acetyl fentanyl,” wrote a journalist for Vice. “The cause of Bigg’s death, however, in no way repudiates the cause to which he devoted his life.”24 Leaders of the Harm Reduction Coalition agreed. “We can’t end overdoses until we end poverty,” said Kristen Marshall, “until we end racism, and until we end homelessness.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“No state in America has taken more aggressive action to reduce the public’s exposure to chemicals, and to secondhand smoke, than California. California banned the sale of flavored tobacco, because it appeals to children, and the use of smokeless tobacco in the state’s five professional baseball stadiums. It prohibited the use of e-cigarettes in government and private workplaces, restaurants, bars, and casinos. San Francisco in late 2020 banned cigarette smoking in apartments.8 In the fall of 2020, California outlawed companies from using in cosmetics, shampoos, and other personal care products twenty-four chemicals it had deemed dangerous.9 And yet breathing secondhand smoke and being exposed to trace chemicals in your shampoo are hardly sufficient to kill. By contrast, hard drug use is both a necessary and sufficient cause to kill, as the 93,000 overdose and drug poisoning deaths of 2020 show. And yet, where the governments of San Francisco, California, and other progressive cities and states stress the remote dangers of cosmetics, pesticides, and secondhand smoke, they downplay the immediate dangers of hard drugs including fentanyl. In 2020, San Francisco even paid for two billboards promoting the safe use of heroin and fentanyl, which had been created by the Harm Reduction Coalition. The first had a picture of an older African American man smiling. The headline read, “Change it up. Injecting drugs has the highest risk of overdose, so consider snorting or smoking instead.” The second billboard’s photograph was of a racially diverse group of people at a party smiling and laughing. The headline read, “Try not to use alone. Do it with friends. Use with people and take turns.”10 When I asked Kristen Marshall of the Harm Reduction Coalition, which oversees San Francisco’s overdose prevention strategy, about the threat posed by fentanyl, she said, “People use it safely all the time. This narrative that gets it labeled as an insane poison where you touch it and die—that’s not how drugs work. It’s not cyanide. It’s not uranium. It’s just a synthetic opioid, but one that’s on an unregulated market.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“San Francisco has a long tradition of tolerance toward drug use. During the Gold Rush of the 1840s, Chinese immigrants opened rooms for smoking opium. Authorities sometimes broke them up starting in the mid-1860s, but San Francisco’s leaders did not ban opium dens until 1875. Opium smoking in San Francisco continued well into the twentieth century but was gradually supplanted by heroin. “San Francisco had twice as many alcohol outlets per capita compared to the national average going back at least until the late nineteenth century,” said Stanford’s Keith Humphreys.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Those who recover from their addictions no longer see homelessness the same way. “Once I started to heal myself,” said a formerly homeless man, “I knew I had to work with this so-called homelessness problem, to get some of those people suffering out there into treatment and help them turn their heads around.” “So-called?” asked Gowan. “Ain’t no homelessness problem in my opinion,” the man replied. “The problem is addiction, period. Even those people that have schizophrenia or something else like that, generally you find they have a big problem with addiction as well.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Heavy drug and alcohol use degrades the health of homeless people. Drug overdose is the leading cause of death among the homeless.44 Skin infections and disease are more common due to injecting drugs like heroin and meth. Respiratory diseases are common due to smoking tobacco, crack, heroin, fentanyl, and meth.45 And about two-thirds of the time of hospital emergency departments in San Francisco is spent serving the homeless.46 Social”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Drug overdoses are today the number one cause of accidental death in the United States as a result of America’s historic addiction and overdose epidemic.* Overdose deaths rose from 17,415 in 2000 to 93,330 in 2020, a 536 percent increase.30 Significantly more people die of drug overdoses today than of homicide (13,927 in 2019) or car accidents (36,096 in 2019).31 The overdose crisis is worse in San Francisco than in other cities.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Violence, not stricter drug sentences, drove mass incarceration. New York is proof. For ten years after Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the state legislature increased penalties for drug use beginning in 1973, the number of people in prison for drugs hardly changed. Then, in 1984, the number of people incarcerated for drug crimes started to rise sharply due to violence associated with the crack epidemic. More than a decade later, in 1997, total inmates in New York prisons for drug offenses peaked and began their long decline, mostly because of a reduction in violence. It was only in 2004 and again in 2009 that the state legislature reduced penalties, and the declining rate of incarceration for drug crimes didn’t change after those two years.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“But a closer look at the data reveals that just 3.7 percent of state prisoners are there for nonviolent drug possession, and that 14.1 percent of state prisoners are locked up for any nonviolent drug offense. Forty-seven percent of inmates in federal prisons are in for nonviolent drug convictions, but there are just 172,000 people in federal prisons and 1.3 million in state prisons.7 Over half of all prisoners in state prisons are there for violent offenses like murder, rape, and robbery.8”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“No matter how many times you’ve heard the statistics, they never lose their power to shock: the United States is home to less than 5 percent of the world’s population but has 25 percent of its prisoners.1 Today, the United States incarcerates five times more people than it did in 1970. The total number of people incarcerated in state or federal prison rose from 200,000 to 1.6 million between 1972 and 2014.2 California’s incarceration rate quintupled, from about 100 for every 100,000 residents to nearly 500. Between 1984 and 2005, the state opened twenty-one prisons.3 The reason, according to Michelle Alexander in her bestselling 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, was drugs. “In less than thirty years, the US penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.”4”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities