The Story You’ve Heard About Cities and the Drug Crisis Is Wrong

Unstylishness is the worst thing that can happen when journalists on the fashion beat don't pay much attention to whether the trends they describe are real. When reporters covering addiction, homelessness, and mental illness do the same thing, it can lead to policies that do enormous harm when mainstream media ignores the abundant research that shows otherwise.

To promote policy that actually works, reporters and editors need to act more like science journalists and less like stenographers who useIgnorance to drive Fear.

It would be hard to find a better example of this problem than the recent essay by Nellie Bowles in The Atlantic, which argues that San Francisco is a failed city because of liberal policies. She suggests that local politicians refuse to confront the delusions of the hippie's who just want to let it be. She claims that the recall of the progressive district attorney shows that the city is finally waking up.

It is not the only thing that fails to look at evidence of effectiveness of policies when discussing politics. In one 24 hour period in June, a columnist for The Washington Post argued that Democrats have lost the public's trust on crime because ofBoudin's recall. The New York Times' news analysis didn't mention any data. The question of whose preferred approaches are supported by evidence was ignored in the New York magazine essay.

Her hometown became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics had to be accepted or ignored. She describes the city's supervised injection site as a place that looks like young people are going to die on the sidewalk.

Her argument doesn't fit with the data. There are hundreds of studies that support the use of supervised injection sites and clean needle programs.

Research evidence was used to adopt harm reduction. Studies show that using cops and coercion first is counter productive. Red states with old-school tough prosecutors have worse crime rates than liberals.

Since she assumes harm reduction tactics were adopted because they looked groovy, she ignores this research base. She criticizes San Francisco policymakers for using a mindless approach. She and others frame the failure of harm reduction as the failure of criminalization.