It’s 9am in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district and sleeping bodies line the sidewalks as Felanie Castro sets out on her route in Glide Memorial church’s harm reduction van.
Along Ellis Street, hungry people queue up for the church’s daily breakfast of buns, hard-boiled eggs and plastic-wrapped muffins. Down the block, a fire department truck, part of a city response team, awaits the day’s first drug overdose call.
This neighborhood and the adjoining South of Market (SoMa) district have become ground zero in an opioid overdose crisis that is killing thousands of California residents, including many experiencing homelessness. In the past two years, more than 1,300 people have died of overdoses in San Francisco, a rise driven by the emergence of fentanyl, a super-potent synthetic opioid that’s 50 times stronger than heroin. Nearly half of those deaths have occurred in these two hard-hit neighborhoods alone.
