The city is operating an illegal drug-consumption site.
Locals sometimes call San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood “Hamsterdam.” The name comes from the third season of HBO’s The Wire, in which a Baltimore police commander unilaterally designates an area of his district where his officers would turn a blind eye to the selling and using of drugs. The fictional depiction of Hamsterdam is horrifying—“a village of pain,” one character calls it. For Tenderloin residents, that portrayal is a reality. And now it’s not just happening on the streets: San Francisco is operating a rogue and unlawful drug-consumption site. In January 2021, the Third Circuit ruled that such supervised consumption rooms are illegal under federal law, as per the Controlled Substances Act.
