Aaron started coming to San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighbourhood three years ago to buy heroin.
“I didn’t know where else to go to get drugs. San Francisco is the place where people historically do drugs. So I came here and I just started shoulder-tapping random people.”
He arrived at the height of San Francisco’s so-called doom-loop, as homelessness, addiction and shoplifting rocketed in the wake of the pandemic. Thousands of businesses abandoned the city, turning parts of downtown into lawless, open-air drug markets in one of the richest cities in the world.
