Gary McCoy, a HealthRIGHT360 VP, filed a defamation lawsuit against Erica Sandberg after she accused him, a harm reduction and supervised consumption advocate, of being responsible for the “murder of 1,500 plus drug addicts at the failed Linkage Center.”
People outside the Tenderloin Linkage Center in January. Gary McCoy, a vice president at health nonprofit HealthRIGHT 360, filed a defamation lawsuit against writer Erica Sandberg after she falsely accused McCoy, an advocate for harm reduction and supervised drug consumption, of being responsible for the “murder of 1,500 plus drug addicts at the failed Linkage Center.”
According to the lawsuit, the image was first posted online on April 9, 2022 by an account with the name Karl Brandt — the same name as Adolf Hitler’s physician. It included the wanted poster with McCoy’s face and name on it, alleging he was responsible for mass death at the Tenderloin Center, a multi-resource hub created during Mayor London Breed’s 90-day emergency declaration in the Tenderloin neighborhood.
“Rather than break up the open drug markets and provide treatment to addicts, San Francisco officials have adopted the opposite approach: let the sellers sell and the users use. Ignore. Make a feeble attempt to fix it, then let it slide out of control, again and again. Such policies and attitudes have resulted in immeasurable pain and an unprecedented number of overdoses,” she wrote in an email response to the Examiner about the lawsuit.
“In addition to obtaining relief for the serious damage to Mr. McCoy’s reputation and psyche from this series of Twitter posts, this lawsuit is intended to firmly and publicly renounce this severe and outrageous form of cyber-bullying that is prevalent on social media,” the press release reads. “Both Mr. McCoy and Mx. Lemberg are proud members of the LGBTQ+ community and unequivocally stand against bullying in any form.
McCoy, who has been sober since 2011, formerly used heroin and methamphetamine and credits harm reduction for his own recovery process. He has long advocated for increased attention and services around substance use disorder in San Francisco. In August 2021, McCoy led a hunger strike at San Francisco City Hall that helped lead to The City’s emergency order around the overdose crisis and paved the way for safe consumption services.
Harm reduction for drug use can include safe needle exchanges, providing clean smoking supplies and using drugs in a supervised setting stocked with naloxone, a fast-acting drug that can reverse opioid overdoses. The philosophy extends much broader than substance use, too. Wearing masks and social distancing is a form of harm reduction for airborne viruses, for example.
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