A shining light in San Francisco

Alex Byrd was shooting meth in his wife’s bathroom while looking up a rehab center to check into. Before his most recent stint in prison, he’d been a major player in the drug trade, controlling distribution at every strip club on San Francisco’s Broadway Street and dealing all over the Bay Area from Oakland to San Jose. But while he was locked up, a leader in Nuestra Familia, his prison gang, offered Alex the chance to retire. When he got out, Alex promised his wife he’d never go back to prison again.

But he was still an addict — and now it was a lot harder than it had been before, since he no longer had a constant supply of drugs. Now he had to work for his drug money, which is to say to engage in petty crimes like robbing Amazon stores. “It was a burden,” Alex says. “It was a headache just to get high.”

When he was dealing, he had two houses in the Bay Area and a condominium in Hawaii. Now, his wife wouldn’t let him sleep at home. He was spending nights in his car, in cheap hotel rooms, in RVs and occasionally on the pavement at the subway station. He knew that if he kept this up, he’d be living in a tent encampment. So one day last February, he promised his wife that if she let him stay at home just one night, he’d go to rehab the next day and wouldn’t come back until he was clean.

The next day he checked himself into Walden House, a residential treatment center in San Francisco. It was not what he expected. “Everyone in there was high as fuck,” Alex recalls. “The food was horrible — worse than jail, really. The rooms were like tombs. My roommate was smoking meth the whole time I’m kicking fentanyl.”

Like most rehab centers in California, Walden House is committed to the twin philosophies of “Housing First” and “harm reduction.” The idea behind “Housing First” is that you can’t treat someone for drug addiction or mental illness until you get them into stable housing. Harm reduction holds that it’s counterproductive to pressure drug users into quitting; instead, you should keep them safe while they use until they decide independently to give up the habit.

In California, these philosophies are all but mandated by law. If you operate a shelter or a residential drug rehab, you can’t get state funding if you require residents to be sober or in a program before they’re given a bed. Such preconditions are deemed “barriers to housing,” which cuts against the Housing First doctrine. Consequently, most facilities in the state are filled with active drug users, which is a problem for someone like Alex who is trying to quit. “I can’t go back to living around drug addicts,” he told me. “It’s a matter of time before I use dope too.”

“They’re being placed in drug dens,” says San Francisco supervisor Matt Dorsey, who is a recovering addict himself. He described a homeless mother of three he knows who was overjoyed to be offered housing but appalled that her kids routinely see drug overdoses on the floor of their single room occupancy hotel.

“We’ll house you and pamper you,” is how Alex describes the message to clients at these facilities. “You can do a little bit of dope, we’ll be here with Narcan to help you.” He believes this has become a business model. “It encourages people to come,” he told me. “The more people that come the more beds they have, the more beds they have the more funding they get. They don’t want to put restrictions on things because that will stop a lot of people from coming.”

Alex is among dozens of recovering addicts trying to change that policy. He’s now eight months sober, having left Walden House and joined Harbor Light, one of the few abstinence-based drug treatment centers left in San Francisco. Operated by the Salvation Army, Harbor Light is a privately funded charity that takes no state funding; it runs according to its own rules.

Supervisor Dorsey would like to see the city and the state support facilities like Harbor Light. He has been fighting for a bill that would ensure that a quarter of the “permanent supportive housing” the city offers is drug-free. Another bill is moving at the state level to allow public funding of drug-free recovery housing.

Clients at Harbor Light are prohibited from drinking or using drugs while they’re in the program, but that’s not the most important rule; staff count on it being broken. Relapse is part of recovery — it happens. At Harbor Light, if you use you get kicked back down to detox, which is the first rung of the ladder. But you’re still welcome to continue in the program.

What is unacceptable, and what can get you kicked out altogether, is sleepwalking your way through the program and failing to engage in the process of changing yourself.

“This is a guy who is not yet at Step 1 of acceptance,” Adrian Maldonado, the center’s director, told his colleagues at a recent staff meeting, referring to a client who was failing to make progress. “And we can’t make him accept that he’s a drug addict.”

Maldonado is simultaneously funny, irreverent and deadly serious. His conversations with his clients tend to betray a lack of patience rooted in an understanding that these are people with a finite amount of time to find their way out of a deadly disease. “I hate to say it out loud,” Maldonado said of another client, “but I will. She’s gonna get through this with her half-assed approach, and end up back on the street, taking fucking OxyContin and all fucked up again.”

The goal at Harbor Light isn’t merely to keep addicts alive, as it is at many harm reduction-oriented rehab centers in California. It isn’t even just to keep them off drugs. It’s to make clients into the kind of people who don’t need substances in their lives anymore — people with non-transactional social habits, robust senses of themselves and more to live for.

Often, the biggest challenges in the program aren’t drug-related at all. In a recent group session, Alex offered advice to another client who was getting ready to graduate out of the program and into secondary housing. He didn’t think drug use was going to be an issue for him. “You’re addicted to criminal activity,” Alex said. “I don’t see you having any problems at all when it comes to craving a substance or anything like that, but I do see that criminal in you from time to time, you know?” He reflected on his own experience. “My addiction wasn’t just drugs,” he said. “The drugs — that’s the easy part. This safe haven here at Harbor Light took care of that. Now I gotta deal with my urge for criminal activity, my urge for violence and gang activity.” These are behavioral patterns and modes of thinking and feeling that frequently underlie addiction, but are rarely acknowledged, let alone addressed, at a typical SRO or other non-recovery-based housing facility.

Permanent housing that allows active drug use is failing San Francisco. Not only does it do nothing to get people off drugs — it doesn’t even keep them off the streets. More than a third of the “homeless” in San Francisco are not homeless at all; they’ve already been provided with housing or shelter. Matt Dorsey told me that city workers estimate that half the people who participate in the open-air drug market along the Sixth Street corridor already have access to Permanent Supportive Housing. San Francisco street addicts, in other words, are being provided with places to live indoors, but choose to stay in tents because their problem is not “homelessness” but addiction. “You put a homeless addict into a house, he’s still an addict,” says Alex. “He ain’t going to be able to maintain that apartment. It’s just like a tent with a door.” What people need, he adds, is not just housing, but recovery housing.

Alex now lives in secondary housing himself, in a facility called the Joseph McFee Center, in San Francisco’s Mission District. His family attended his graduation ceremony from Harbor Light. A few months ago, he participated in a rally in San Francisco to promote Dorsey’s bill and traveled to Sacramento to join a press conference in support of the state-level bill. In the future, he hopes to work as a drug counselor himself.

It wasn’t tolerance and non-judgmentalism toward his drug use that fixed him. It was meetings, rules, consequences and abstinence.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2025 World edition.