NEWSOM VOWS TO STEP UP FIGHT AGAINST DRUGS

Supervisor promises to use budget surplus for inpatient care

"I have no interest in being part of the way things have been done around
here. What we have been doing is absolutely, unequivocally wrong."

Gavin Newsom, youngest member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors,
concluded a rousing, youth-oriented town hall meeting on drugs Saturday
with those remarks - vowing to press for more residential drug treatment
programs for The City's substance-abusing youth.

Newsom also pledged to systematically canvass The City's neighborhoods
throughout the year in search of new community-based solutions to an old
problem.

He said similar town hall meetings would be held monthly and possibly
continue into 1999.

He also promised to initiate action within six months aimed at setting
aside a portion of The City's budget surplus for inpatient care for
drug-using youths.

Now, Newsom said, only Walden House, a nonprofit drug treatment center, is
able to care for this population.

"The thing that was overwhelming at this meeting was the lack of
residential treatment programs," Newsom said afterward. "There's $38
million left in the surplus. We can do it through an ordinance or a
resolution.

"I expect to be doing something."

Gathered at Potrero Hill Neighborhood House with about 50 community
activists, drug experts and youth workers, Newsom heard dozens of speakers
blast government, the police and the school system for their purported
failure to address the needs of inner-city youths, women and small
children.

"City bureaucracies move very slowly and they need constant pressure from
community groups to keep going," said panelist Michael Siever of the
treatment on Demand Planning Council.

According to Siever, treatment on demand - a policy backed by Mayor Brown -
requires $20 million to be implemented without waiting lists. But "nowhere
near that amount of money" is in sight, Siever said.

Newsom agreed - but made it clear he wanted to distinguish himself from the
legislative pack.

Noting recent board committee action on his plan to increase the
availability of methadone to heroin addicts, he said, "Bureaucracy does
move slowly, but dammit, it's not going to move as slowly as it has!"

Reuben Goodman, describing himself as a former crack cocaine user, told the
supervisor:

"Your methadone legislation is literally going to save lives. I want to
thank you for your heroism on that."

Most speakers, however, pointed to what they perceived as glaring faults in
the system.

*Goodman said drug users were discriminated against in the emergency room
of San Francisco General Hospital:

"There's a triage nurse and because she thinks people are under the
influence, she puts them out in the cold and calls security if they don't
go willingly."

But hospital official Chris Wachsmuth said the emergency room did not turn
away any patients, including evident alcoholics or drug users - and could
not under law.

She said, however, that patients necessarily are rank-ordered in terms of
need for care, with some forced to wait hours before they can be seen.

*The Rev. Timothy Dupre, chairman of the city Juvenile Justice Commission
and director of Morrisania West, a youth agency in San Francisco, said
treatment on demand wasn't enough.

Dupre called for a "holistic" approach to the "cancer of substance abuse"
reaching into every aspect of the at-risk population's lives.

*Substance abuse treatment workers Nika St. Claire and Elizabeth Sullivan
urged a concentration on women and children, saying both groups received
less than their fair share of drug prevention and treatment funding.

*Ramon Calubaquib, director of Asian Youth Prevention Services in San
Francisco, said attention had to be paid immediately to the problem of
crystallized methamphetamine use in the Filipino community.

"This is more potent than crack cocaine," Calubaquib said.

Saturday's meeting, Newsom said, was "the beginning of a process."

If the young supervisor follows through on all he promised, it could be a
process that elevates him to a leadership position legislators twice his
agehave failed to achieve on this exceptionally difficult issue.

)1998 San Francisco Examiner Page D 1