In October, San Francisco police arrested 24-year-old Miguel Ramos in the Tenderloin for possession of illicit substances. Officers found two ounces of methamphetamine as well as individual ounces of crack-cocaine and heroin. Then they made a startling discovery. Also in Ramos’ backpack were 7.8 pounds of fentanyl. Interim District Attorney

“As society degrades, a broader segment of it will choose drugs, moving images, dormancy. Yet this subset will cling, surprisingly, to a single public duty: that of electing a ruling class.” —Author Miles Klee, June 2012 A grim new statistic has emerged in the wake of 2022’s messy midterm elections.

I’ve got some awesome news! We received a grant from the Civic Joy Fund to put out a literary magazine celebrating SF and acting to counter the stupid “Doom Loop” narrative. It’s a gift to the people of San Francisco. And after months of working on this project it’s now available

Liz was the kind of girl who always needed a bailout. She’d been this way from the moment I met her in high school. There was always “something” she needed to be saved from. Sometimes, it wasn’t her fault but also she was the impulsive type who never learned. And why

TRIGGER WARNING It seemed like everything was crumbling around me. I was losing control of myself and there was nothing I could do to keep myself from spiraling. I felt like I was losing my mind. I had been beaten down to my breaking point. I couldn’t recognize the girl

by Charles Irwell During the trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor, I happened to be at my mother’s house. We watched a news report that detailed the extent of Jackson’s pharmaceutical drug addiction. My mother, a proud NHS nurse of 40 years, shook her head in incredulity at the drugs Jackson’s physician

By Kate Harveston When tens of thousands of your fellow citizens die in one year from the same preventable cause, you rightly call it a ‘crisis’.  The National Safety Council found in 2017 that for the first time ever, Americans were more likely to die from opioid overdose than from a car accident. You

Posters reading ‘Deadly Street Drugs Alert!!’ have been hung in parks and along muni lines in San Francisco by the Haight Ashbury Legal Organization (H.A.L.O.).  The posters read: “Fentynal-lased heroin and meth are causing deaths and overdoses at this time in San Francisco (FEB 2018)  it has also been found in

This originally appeared in my Broke-Ass City column for the SF Examiner.  I live at the corner of Needles and Diarrhea. OK, those aren’t the real names of the streets in my SoMa/Mission neighborhood, but if our thoroughfares were christened after the things most prevalent on them, there’d be a