Posted January 4, 2025 12:18am PST

Over the last few months, San Francisco has been cracking down on open-air drug markets that have taken root on several street corners in the city’s South of Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods.

Some progress has been made, but Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who represents South of Market, is fed up with what’s happening on one particular street in his district: Sixth Street.

On Sixth Street on any given day, one can see some of the city’s issues with drug use, drug dealing and mental health all out in the open.

Dorsey is pressing city departments to take swift action.

“Just on the Sixth Street corridor, if we were to affect 100 arrests per night with an eye toward making those life-saving, medically-appropriate interventions, getting people into detox and drug treatment,” he said.

Dorsey has sent a formal letter of inquiry to all city departments that are responsible for law enforcement, public safety and public health to ask what they would need to make his 100-arrests-per-night proposal a reality.

He acknowledges there has been improvement on drug use and sales on several street corners in SoMa and the neighboring Tenderloin, but not on Sixth Street.

He said the issues on Sixth Street have not just remained the same. He said they’ve gotten worse

“This is not COVID-19 or something that we can expect to get better once we get over the hump,” he said. “The reality is that we are now in the era of synthetic drugs.”

For that reason, he believes mandated treatment after an arrest is needed.

But not everyone agrees, in part, because right now there is a lack of treatment available in the city.

“We have very little treatment for women, for example,” Coalition on Homelessness Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach said. “We have very little for the Spanish-speaking population. We have literally no free trauma therapy that’s extensive. These are the places that have been identified as what we really need to do to address the crisis. Criminalization isn’t even on the list.”

Freidenbach said the city also needs some kind of detox facility.

She and Dorsey seldom agree on many issues, but they both said they have high hopes for Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie. Dorsey said he’s on the same page as a lot of Lurie’s public safety proposals, and Friedenbach said Lurie has a long history of funding projects aimed as solving the root causes of problems in the city.