A video circulating on social media this week offered a raw, unfiltered look at the human toll of fentanyl and methamphetamine use on the streets of San Francisco, and reignited a familiar debate about whether the city's leaders have done enough to confront a crisis that has defined it for years.
The clip, posted on X by San Francisco street videographer JJ Smith, was shot at 7th and Market Street in the city's Tenderloin neighborhood. It shows multiple people slumped, swaying, or barely conscious on the sidewalk, a scene Smith, described as a longtime resident of the area, has documented before. One person in the video told Smith they were using fentanyl and crystal methamphetamine. Another said they had come from Sacramento because, in their words, the dope is cheaper and better in San Francisco.
That single admission, a drug user traveling to San Francisco specifically because the city offers a more attractive market, tells you more about the incentive structure at work than any policy white paper could.
The San Francisco Police Department moved quickly to frame the footage as outdated. Evan Sernoffsky, SFPD's Director of Strategic Communications, told The California Post that police believe the video dates back "a number of years." The exact recording date remains unknown; Smith's X post was dated April 30, 2026, but the footage itself carries no visible timestamp, and Smith did not specify when it was filmed.
Sernoffsky offered context meant to reassure:
"For context, since we increased our drug enforcement efforts in June 2023, SFPD has made over 14,392 arrests and we've seized over 1,259 lbs. of narcotics."
He added a broader claim about the city's trajectory:
"The city looks vastly different than when this video was taken."
Those are substantial numbers. More than fourteen thousand arrests and over half a ton of seized narcotics since mid-2023 suggest a genuine enforcement push. But enforcement statistics, by themselves, do not tell you whether the streets are actually safer or cleaner for the people who live and work in the Tenderloin. Arrest totals measure police activity. They do not measure outcomes.
Whatever progress SFPD claims, the broader data complicates the picture. The latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention place San Francisco second in the nation on its overdose list, behind only Baltimore. That is not a ranking any city wants to hold, and it is not one that squares easily with reassurances that the crisis is in retreat.
There is one genuinely encouraging data point. In 2025, overdose fatalities in San Francisco reportedly fell to their lowest level in five years. That decline matters, and it deserves acknowledgment. But "lowest in five years" is a relative measure. It tells you the bleeding slowed. It does not tell you the wound is closed.
San Francisco's political leadership has long faced criticism for policies that critics say enable open-air drug markets, from permissive enforcement postures to harm-reduction programs that, whatever their medical rationale, can signal to users and dealers alike that the city will tolerate what other jurisdictions will not. The broader dysfunction of California's Democratic establishment has drawn scrutiny on multiple fronts, including Nancy Pelosi's recent claims of ignorance about misconduct allegations involving a sitting congressman, a pattern of see-no-evil leadership that extends well beyond drug policy.
Matt Dorsey, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors member representing the downtown area, offered a notably candid assessment. Speaking to ABC7, Dorsey acknowledged that the city's improvement has lagged behind comparable jurisdictions:
"What we are seeing right now is other counties are improving faster than San Francisco is."
That admission alone is worth pausing over. A sitting city official, from the party that has governed San Francisco without interruption for decades, conceding that his city is falling behind, not in absolute terms, but relative to peers who started in similarly bad positions.
Dorsey went further, using language that would have been considered politically radioactive in San Francisco not long ago. He told ABC7:
"What I'm hoping is that we have to do everything we can to turn off the magnet and stop being a destination city for drug related lawlessness."
"Turn off the magnet." "Destination city for drug related lawlessness." Those are not the words of a progressive celebrating harm reduction. They are the words of an official who understands, at least rhetorically, that his city's policies have created a draw, a market signal, that attracts drug users from surrounding areas. The person in Smith's video who traveled from Sacramento to score cheaper fentanyl is living proof of exactly the dynamic Dorsey described.
Whether Dorsey's rhetoric translates into policy changes is another question entirely. San Francisco's political culture has a long history of producing sharp diagnoses followed by weak prescriptions. The city's leadership class has faced mounting pressure on multiple fronts, from internal party turmoil over scandal and endorsement collapses to broader questions about accountability at every level of California governance.
The footage itself is difficult to watch. Smith's camera captures people in various states of incapacitation on a public sidewalk in broad daylight. Drug use is visible. At one point, Smith tells a person in the video to pull their pants up, a small, human detail that underscores the indignity of what has become routine in parts of San Francisco.
SFPD's contention that the video predates recent enforcement efforts may well be accurate. But the department has not provided a specific date for when the footage was recorded, and Smith has not clarified the timeline. The uncertainty cuts both ways: if the video is years old, it documents what the city allowed to fester before acting. If it is more recent, it documents what persists despite the action.
Either way, the scenes captured are not fabricated. They happened on a public street in a major American city. The people in the video are real. Their condition is real. And the policy environment that produced those conditions, years of one-party governance, ideological resistance to enforcement, and a harm-reduction framework that too often substituted compassion rhetoric for actual results, is real too.
The political winds in California have shifted in recent cycles, with even some Democratic figures acknowledging the limits of progressive criminal justice and drug policy. But the state's power structure remains firmly in the hands of the same leadership class that presided over the crisis. Challenges to that establishment, whether from insurgent candidates seeking to unseat entrenched figures or from voters demanding accountability at the ballot box, have so far produced more noise than structural change.
San Francisco's drug crisis did not arrive overnight, and it will not be solved overnight. The SFPD's enforcement surge since June 2023, more than 14,000 arrests, more than 1,200 pounds of narcotics seized, represents a real shift in posture. The decline in overdose fatalities in 2025 is a welcome trend.
But the city still ranks second in the nation for overdoses. Other counties are improving faster. And people are still traveling to San Francisco from other cities because the drug market there remains attractive. Those are not the hallmarks of a crisis under control. They are the hallmarks of a crisis being managed, barely, while the underlying incentives remain intact.
The national conversation around accountability in California's political class continues to intensify, touching everything from drug policy to congressional ethics and insider trading. Voters watching videos like Smith's are drawing their own conclusions about whether the people in charge have earned their trust.
A city doesn't become a "destination for drug related lawlessness" by accident. It becomes one through years of choices, and through the refusal to make harder ones.
