Health officials: 'Fentanyl continues to disrupt and destroy lives' in San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO -- The illegal use of fentanyl continues to be the leading driver of accidental drug overdose deaths within San Francisco.
The San Francisco Department of Public Health released its overdose death statistics for 2022 on Wednesday, noting a drop from 725 reported cases in 2020 to 620 last year.
The 2020 number represented an all-time high in San Francisco in large part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the growing street availability of fentanyl.
"Fentanyl continues to disrupt and destroy lives in our City and while the overdose numbers have gone down, they still remain far too high," Mayor London Breed said in a news release. "San Francisco remains committed to finding innovative solutions to the ongoing opioid crisis while also focusing on the accountability work with our public safety agencies to get drugs off our streets."
Fentanyl remains a health issue across the country, not just in San Francisco.
There were 107,622 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2021, an increase of nearly 15% from the 93,655 estimated in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control National Center for Health Statistics.
The 2022 estimates have not been made available, but national trends show few signs of the crisis abating.
"Fentanyl has had a devastating impact on communities across the country, including San Francisco," said Dr. Grant Colfax, Director of Health.
Since fentanyl first became prevalent in local drug supplies in 2018, SFDPH has been tackling the crisis from multiple angles.
Last year, Breed and the SFDPH created an Office of Overdose Prevention and implemented an Overdose Prevention Plan to coordinate efforts to reduce overdose deaths and mitigate the negative impacts of drug use on individuals and communities.
In 2021, SFDPH and its community partners distributed more than 33,000 kits of naloxone, the life-saving antidote for fentanyl and other opioid overdoses.
In 2022, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, which collaborates with SFDPH in its distribution of the medication, distributed more than 40,000 doses of naloxone alone and reported 5,127 reversals.
"The decline in deaths is encouraging and shows that we can save lives with the programs and policies we are implementing in San Francisco," said Dr. Jeffrey Hom, who oversees the Office of Overdose Prevention.
