Aerial footage shows a powerful landslide crashing down onto a popular campsite near Mount Maunganui after days of heavy rain. Rescue crews are searching for missing people, including children, as damage mounts across northern New Zealand.
A COVID-era program that guzzled $5 million of taxpayer money annually to serve booze to homeless alcoholics will finally shutter this year, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie exclusively told The California Post.
“For years, San Francisco was spending $5 million a year to provide alcohol to people who were struggling with homelessness and addiction — it doesn’t make sense, and we’re ending it,” Lurie said.The MAP news highlights the uphill struggle that Lurie faces in returning San Francisco to its once grand self after being brought down by homelessness, addiction and retail flight in the downtown area., was created by the San Francisco Department of Public Health in April 2020, when the city began housing homeless people in hotels during lockdown.Ex-Vikings captain says Minn. Dems hate ICE because 'we're deporting their voters' Trump 'reviewing everything' about fatal shooting of armed Minneapolis protester, says fed agents will leave city 'at some point' To prevent chronic alcoholics from dangerous withdrawal while stores and bars were closed, clinicians brought metered doses of beer and liquor to clients.Now, “We have ended every city contract for that program,” Lurie added. A representative for Community Forward, the San Francisco-based nonprofit contracted by the health department to run the plan since 2023A health department official boasted in a 2024 video presentation about one of the success stories, who went from 36 ER visits annually to fewer than 10.San Francisco’s Mayor Daniel Lurie insisted the city’s Managed Alcohol Program “didn’t make sense” and vowed to end it. show the nonprofit received $17.8 million in government contracts and grants in 2025, with $10.8 million going to salaries and compensation. In 2024, it was revealed that CEO Kara Zordel, who stepped down that year, earned a $225,794 salary., like free needle exchanges, have been sold as public health initiatives to fight the spread of bloodborne diseases, San Francisco’s MAP took the unprecedented leap of administering the actual substance of choice to addicts.“Under my administration, we made San Francisco a recovery-first city and ended the practice of handing out fentanyl smoking supplies so people couldn’t kill themselves on our streets,” Lurie told The Post.Lurie, who was sworn in last year, has put an end to this, along with handing out free drug supplies such as crack pipes — a practice that had turned the city’s downtown, especially its Tenderloin district, into a “Under my administration, we made San Francisco a recovery-first city and ended the practice of handing out fentanyl smoking supplies so people couldn’t kill themselves on our streets,” Lurie told The Post. “We have work to do, but we have transformed the city’s response, and we are breaking the cycles of addiction, homelessness and government failure that have let down San Franciscans for too long.” Lurie put the city’s notorious open-air drug markets on notice in a statement last year, saying: “If you do drugs on our streets, you will be arrested. And instead of sending you back out in crisis, we will give you a chance to stabilize and enter recovery.”“We are breaking the cycles of addiction, homelessness and government failure that have let down San Franciscans for too long,” Mayor Lurie said.This shift away from a multi-decade, permissive approach to addiction puts San Francisco outside the norm for a major West Coast city, as the city governments of Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle continue to insist that a“They wasting our money just paying people to keep using the drug that they’re hopelessly addicted to,” Tom Wolf, a former homeless heroin addict in San Francisco who now works as a recovery advocate, told The Post. “Harm reduction itself is part of the overall social justice framework … If you ascribe to social justice ideology, you must ascribe to harm reduction, which has been redefined from the original meaning, from keeping people alive, and keeping them from getting bloodborne diseases like HIV, to now supporting drug users,” Wolf added.“They wasting our money just paying people to keep using the drug that they’re hopelessly addicted to,” recovery advocate Tom Wolf told The California Post of San Francisco’s MAP.Recovery advocate Tom Wolf in a 2018 mugshot, when he was homeless and addicted to heroin on the streets of San Francisco.“Over the past two decades the city had really doubled down on housing first and harm reduction,” said Steve Adami, a once-incarcerated recovering addict who is now the executive director of“Under Mayor Lurie, they have reassessed the outcomes of those models and have pivoted and have a very clear strategy: That we are a recovery-first city. He’s made a significant investment into abstinence-based and recovery-focused services.”, which provided a “north star” to reorient all city programs toward recovery and abstinence over pure harm reduction in addressing the addiction and homelessness crisis. Among Lurie’s challenges: The city reportedly only has 68 detox beds available for the 19,000 people who cycle in and out of homelessness annually. On any given night, 8,000 people sleep on the streets of San Francisco. Those who seek help with addiction often wait days or weeks for detox services to be available.Steve Adami, executive director of The Way Out, said the city is learning valuable lessons from two decades of harm reduction and “housing first” strategies.The MAP news highlights the uphill struggle that Lurie faces in returning San Francisco to its once grand self after being brought down by homelessness, addiction and retail flight in the downtown area.The MAP news highlights the uphill struggle that Lurie faces in returning San Francisco to its once grand self after being brought down by homelessness, addiction and retail flight in the downtown area."Under my administration, we made San Francisco a recovery-first city and ended the practice of handing out fentanyl smoking supplies so people couldn’t kill themselves on our streets," Lurie told The Post."We are breaking the cycles of addiction, homelessness and government failure that have let down San Franciscans for too long," Mayor Lurie said.“They wasting our money just paying people to keep using the drug that they're hopelessly addicted to,” recovery advocate Tom Wolf told The California Post of San Francisco's MAP.Recovery advocate Tom Wolf in a 2018 mugshot, when he was homeless and addicted to heroin on the streets of San Francisco.Steve Adami, executive director of The Way Out, said the city is learning valuable lessons from two decades of harm reduction and"housing first" strategies.
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