For the last four years, San Francisco's "Managed Alcohol Program" has provided beer, wine, and vodka shots to the city's homeless population.
The program is financed with $5 million in taxpayer dollars annually and operated by the Department of Public Health.
The SF Chronicle reports:Since its creation, the program, which started out with 10 beds, has served 55 clients, according to officials from the Department of Public Health. The now 20-bed program, which costs about $5 million per year, operates out of a former hotel in the heart of the Tenderloin. Nurses dispense regimented doses of vodka and beer to participants at certain times of day based on care plans.
Such programs don’t focus on sobriety, experts say, but rather on improving participants’ overall health while decreasing hospital stays and calls to police.
The report noted that the city also spends public funds on initiatives that "provide drug users with overdose-reversing drugs, clean needles and foil for methamphetamine and fentanyl consumption."
Shannon Smith-Bernardin, a professor at the UCSF School of Nursing who helped create the managed alcohol program, told the paper that the program helps stabilize the homeless people’s alcohol use “so they’re not binge drinking or stopping drinking and having seizures and then … start figuring out what’s next.”
Opponents of the program have argued that there is no recovery effort in enabling the addictions.
"It's not a good idea, not when you consider the fact that, over the last four years, San Francisco spent $20 million to basically service a total of a couple of hundred people… by giving them free vodka and beer. For that amount of money, we could have funded 60 drug treatment beds instead," Tom Wolf, founder of the Pacific Alliance for Prevention and Recovery, told Fox News.
Wolf asserted that he does not see the benefit of the program.
"You really have to ask, where's the recovery in all of this? What is the desired outcome of this program? They say it'll save money, but we just spent $20 million bucks over the last four years. You have to really ask, ‘is it saving money, and is it making a difference?’"
