Open-air drug markets a reminder: much work still to do in San Franciscos Tenderloin

It’s 3 a.m.in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, and an all-night, drug-fueled party has been raging for hours.

The sidewalks are littered with trash and human feces.Addicts huddle in the alleys, inhaling fentanyl fumes through plastic straws; others are slumped over, barely conscious.

Makeshift homeless encampments line block after block.Dealers are everywhere.On the street corners, groups of men dressed in dark hoodies and face masks sell drugs.

These are the “Hondos,” migrants from Honduras who have taken over the San Francisco drug trade.Night after night, they turn the Tenderloin into a lucrative, open-air drug market.We spent three days and nights in the Tenderloin, talking to addicts, journalists, cops and the dealers themselves.We discovered that the city’s progressive policies have allowed foreign drug gangs to take over an entire neighborhood in downtown San Francisco, poisoning the down-and-out and bringing Third World conditions to one of America’s wealthiest cities.In the Tenderloin, the Hondos rule.In 2022, former San Francisco mayor London Breed seemed to admit as much in a radio interview, saying that “a lot” of the city’s drug dealers were Honduran.

Her comments sparked a wave of backlash from Latino activists, with one local group denouncing the remarks as “xenophobic and racist.” Soon after, Breed was pressured into issuing a public apology.But Breed was right.Gangs of migrants, primarily from Honduras and supplied by Mexican cartels, run the fentanyl trade in San Francisco.

In 2023, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Hondurans had “taken over the sale of [fentanyl]” in the city’s “[open-air markets].” Last year, an article in the Harvard Law Review stated that “nearly all” low-level fentanyl and meth dealers prosecuted as part of a federal sentencing program were “Honduran men without legal status in the United States.”Why is this happening? For years, the city has prioritized its “sa...