DYING TO GET HIGH –
Feb. 5, 2026 – The coroner’s office struggled to keep up.
During a 24-hour-span on Aug. 8, 2023, nine people in San Francisco died from drug overdoses, eight of them from fentanyl. Eight were collected from apartments across the city. One was found on the street across from City Hall. That month, drugs killed 88 people. By the end of 2023, the annual overdose death toll was 810, the highest ever recorded.
Downtown was dotted with sick and dying people, in wheelchairs or wrenched in the familiar fold or splayed out on the cold concrete. Local heroes, artists, neighbors, friends, and relatives lost their lives. In the face of so much death, public health experts were befuddled, and political careers crumbled.
August 2023 would mark peak destruction of a fentanyl epidemic that has gripped not just San Francisco but the U.S. Since then, the trend has turned as the city has made progress in preventing the worst of the drug’s impacts.
Yet fentanyl’s death grip on the city has not fully loosened.
