San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins is once again making headlines—this time not for prosecutorial misconduct or political maneuvering, but for doubling down on a law enforcement response to the city’s fentanyl crisis. In a recent post on X (formerly Twitter), Jenkins declared that her job is to “make it harder for people to access drugs” and to “use the criminal justice system to shepherd people who are dealing with substance abuse to make a different choice for their lives.”
The image that accompanied the post shows a community march demanding action, with signs warning of fentanyl’s dangers. The scene is painful and familiar: families torn apart, communities in anguish, and children marching with signs as if screaming into the wind.
However, from our view, what San Francisco needs is not more rhetoric about “getting tough” or “holding people accountable” through jail cells. What it needs is a wholesale shift in how we understand and respond to addiction. The war-on-drugs model has not only failed—it has fueled mass incarceration, exacerbated racial disparities, and made the overdose crisis worse.
Arresting people with substance use disorders doesn’t treat them. It destabilizes them further.
Jenkins’ statement is steeped in a paternalistic contradiction: she wants to “shepherd” people into better choices through the very same criminal system that has historically brutalized poor and marginalized communities. She proposes punishment as treatment and control as compassion.
However, addiction is not a moral failure. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a complex public health issue—rooted in trauma, isolation, mental illness, poverty, and, often, a failed healthcare system. Arresting people with substance use disorders doesn’t treat them. It destabilizes them further. It severs access to support systems, housing, and employment. And it often increases their risk of overdose upon release from jail.
The data is clear on this point, studies have repeatedly shown that incarceration does not deter drug use. In fact, people are at a significantly increased risk of overdose in the weeks immediately following release. Jailing people for addiction is not just ineffective—it’s dangerous.
Jenkins tries to soften her stance by acknowledging that law enforcement can’t do it alone: “I have to lean on public health and other partners to really do that front-end work,” she says. But her division of labor—let public health handle prevention while her office cracks down on “drug dealers”—reveals a deeper failure to grasp the roots of the crisis.
Many so-called “dealers” are themselves users. They sell small amounts to support their own addictions. Others are trapped in low-level distribution networks by economic desperation, coercion, or both. Treating them as kingpins might score political points, but it does nothing to stem the flow of synthetic opioids or address the social conditions that drive people into the underground economy.
More importantly, no matter how many people Jenkins arrests, someone else will fill the vacuum. The market for fentanyl isn’t shrinking—it’s evolving. As long as the demand remains high, cracking down on supply simply leads to more dangerous substitutes and more deadly contamination.
If Jenkins were serious about saving lives, she would be advocating for comprehensive harm reduction infrastructure: supervised consumption sites, widespread access to naloxone, safe supply programs, peer-led outreach, and on-demand treatment. These are the evidence-based tools that reduce overdose deaths and stabilize communities.
Instead, we get more posturing. More police. More jails. More “accountability” that targets the most vulnerable while leaving the system itself untouched.
Public health must lead—not trail behind the cuffs and sirens. District attorneys should be stepping aside so health experts can respond to this crisis with dignity and science, not ideology and force.
What’s most tragic about Jenkins’ posture is not just that it’s wrong—it’s that it’s uninspired. San Francisco has the potential to lead the nation in crafting a compassionate, effective response to the overdose crisis. It has the public will. It has the research. It has the resources.
But it lacks the political courage to abandon a failed paradigm.
The fentanyl crisis is real. The pain in the streets is real. But law enforcement won’t solve it. It never has. What we need is bold leadership that prioritizes care over punishment, health over optics, and people over politics.
Anything less is just another cycle of failure dressed up as public safety.
