Proposition F ties welfare payment to drug screenings and was passed by voters on March 5 by a margin of 63-37. Now, single adults with no children who are part of the County Adult Assistance Programs (CAAP) may be required to undergo drug screening and agree to treatment in order to continue receiving benefits. As issues surrounding homelessness, crime, and drugs continue to batter San Francisco, yesterday’s vote signals a shift to the political right as local communities attempt to resolve longstanding problems. The ballot measure was backed by the San Francisco Republican Party, while opposed by the city’s Democratic Party and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. Mayor London Breed celebrated the bill’s passing with a thread posted to social media platform X. “Thank you to the voters for passing Prop F to bring more treatment and accountability to San Francisco. This is how we get more people the help they need and change what’s happening in our City,” she said. “We’ve added treatment beds, helped 5,000 people get medication assisted treatment & are implementing new conservatorship laws to get our most vulnerable into care. Prop F will build on this work to get more people help,” London added. “Addiction is complicated and there are no easy paths, but fentanyl is so deadly that we need more tools to get people into treatment. Prop F is part of that change. We can't just keep giving people money to overdose and die on our streets — we have to do more,” she continued. Opponents to the ballot measure warn that the new drug testing guidelines could backfire. “It is deeply disturbing that in the middle of an unprecedented overdose epidemic, voters got a misleading and performative ballot issue that demonizes welfare recipients rather than helps them,” Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said in a statement to The San Francisco Standard. “San Francisco deserves better. Those suffering from addiction deserve actual solutions and real opportunities for treatment, not false promises and election-year politics.” “This was an exceptionally low voter turnout election and we know that low turnout electorates skew conservative,” said Laura Guzman, executive director of the National Harm Reduction Coalition, according to the Standard. “It’s difficult to say that this electorate was representative of San Francisco. What’s unfortunate is that residents are likely to see an increase in the unhoused population in the city if Measure F is implemented as described by supporters of the measure.”San Francisco voters passed a ballot initiative that would require recipients of state welfare benefits to pass a drug test before receiving payments.
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