The new 'main spot' for drug dealing in SF: Outside the Main Library

As a nightly crowd of over 100 drug users and dealers gathered outside San Francisco’s Main Public Library on Wednesday, Ted Disbennett, a 36-year-old homeless man, thumbed to a page of his sci-fi novel, bookmarked with a strip of foil he uses to smoke fentanyl.

“There’s dragons that control the spaceships,” he said, explaining the book, Starshield by Weis Hickman. “And the wizards work for a news agency trying to find the ultimate truth.” 

Disbennett said he had spent the past few weeks outside the library near City Hall at night, often falling asleep by the front steps in his wheelchair. That night, by 10 p.m., music was blasting, fights were breaking out and drug dealers operated from the shadows as people sprawled across the sidewalks all around him.

Several smartly dressed pedestrians navigated the crowd with their heads down on their way toward Market Street. Some stopped to survey the crowd and say a few choice words. “Fucking ridiculous,” muttered one man.

Disbennett said he and others in the crowd around him had been forced from block to block and were in and out of jail since a multi-agency drug crackdown began last May.