Good morning.
While reporting a recent article on the drug overdose crisis in San Francisco, I called Thomas Wolf, one of the loudest critics of the city’s policies, to run past him what I was hearing from professors and other experts who have spent their lives studying drug use.
“Forgive me for saying this,” Mr. Wolf politely told me, “but those people who you said you talked to — the experts — they have never shot dope, man. They never stuck a needle in their neck. They never spent a night on the street.”
Mr. Wolf has done all of those things, which makes him one of the most poignant voices in the debate over what San Francisco should do to address an epidemic that claimed 713 lives last year, more than twice as many as died from the coronavirus in the city in 2020.
I took in Mr. Wolf’s main message: that the rampant availability of drugs in San Francisco, especially the fast-acting and very often deadly opioid fentanyl, makes it very difficult for users to successfully seek treatment and recover.
neither one will happen immediately, disappointing environmental groups.
Caitlyn Jenner, the Republican former Olympian and transgender activist, said she would challenge Governor Newsom in this year’s likely recall election. She called herself a “compassionate disrupter.”
The vaccinated, partially vaccinated and unvaccinated are navigating a tricky new social landscape in California, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.
California National Guard members feared that commanders were considering using a fighter jet to frighten protesters last year, The Los Angeles Times reports.
In its zeal to prevent building collapses during earthquakes, San Francisco may have set the stage for building fires in the aftermath of a quake, Mission Local reports.
San Jose State faces a reckoning after an athletic trainer accused in 2009 of sexual abuse by more than a dozen women was allowed to continue treating female athletes. Current and former employees suggest university leaders may have been more interested in protecting the university than in protecting athletes, The Mercury News reports.
The City of Fresno has reached a $4.9 million tentative settlement with the family of an unarmed teenager killed by the police. It came weeks after the city agreed to settle a separate case and pay $4.4 million to the family of another man killed by the police, The Fresno Bee reports.
A councilwoman in Temecula compared the fight against coronavirus mask rules to Rosa Parks’s struggle for civil rights in Alabama in the 1950s. Local civil-rights leaders were outraged by the comparison, The Riverside Press-Enterprise reports.
The newly opened migrant shelter at the Long Beach Convention Center could help boost the local economy by contributing up to $40 million in direct and indirect spending, The Press-Telegram reports.
The mass vaccination site at Disneyland is set to close on Friday, which, as KTLA reports, is the same day Disneyland and Disney California Adventure are reopening to the public.
And finally …
wrote in February, “Chloé Zhao currently lives in Ojai, in the Topatopa Mountains outside Los Angeles, with her partner and cinematographer, Joshua James Richards, their two dogs and some chickens in a house overlooking orange groves.”
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