San Fransisco is Losing a Generation of Black Men

SLAVES TO ADDICTION –

Dec. 20, 2024 – Black men in this group have represented 12% of all overdose deaths in the past four years, despite making up less than 1% of the population. They are nearly 32 times more likely to die of an overdose than the average American. Mario Rogers was 6 when his family moved to San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood in the early 1960s. Before long, his mother, storied activist Mary Helen Rogers, was blocking bulldozers, trying to save the city’s Black enclave from destruction. She didn’t succeed: Thousands of the young family’s neighbors were displaced by one of the largest redevelopment projects on the West Coast.

In the ’70s, as a teenager living in a neighborhood that was a shadow of its former self, Mario began experimenting with cocaine and pills. Despite growing up to be a talented speaker and writer, he was dogged by drug use for the rest of his life. He fell in and out of homelessness, bounced between jobs, and eventually moved into a pandemic-era shelter hotel in SoMa.