Leftists tell us that anti-drug laws are punitive. That’s why those leftist prosecutors George Soros gets into office refuse to bring charges against drug users or dealers. Instead, they create programs to get drugs to users, saying that the users then don’t need to engage in crime to feed their addiction. This year, though, San Francisco discovered that anti-drug laws save lives – drug users’ lives.

When San Franciscans elected Chesa Boudin as their district attorney last year, they might not have known that George Soros funded Boudin’s campaign. Boudin, however, was open about his left-wing activism. After his Weather Underground parents were both sent to prison, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn raised him. Boudin rounded out his hard-left upbringing by attending Yale both for his undergraduate and law degrees.

Boudin took over the DA’s office in January 2020 and immediately made it clear that he would ignore the laws on the books in favor of leftist-style social justice. That meant refraining from prosecuting people in the “underclass” who committed “lifestyle” crimes (drugs, public defecation and urination, etc.) because he believed they committed those crimes only because of systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other identity politics issues. Within months, San Francisco’s already high crime rate skyrocketed.

The most damaging thing the city did was something called “harm reduction,” which meant making it easier for drug users to use drugs:

Organizations such as the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the Harm Reduction Coalition, the Drug Users Union, and even the Department of Public Health, in partnership with The DOPE Project, focus almost exclusively on “safe drug use.” In fact, the Drug Users Union’s goal is “to create a safe environment where people can use & enjoy drugs as well as receive services.” This attitude led to today’s humanitarian crisis: thousands of people living on San Francisco’s streets, languishing in an endless cycle of homelessness and addiction.

Every day of the week, nonprofits and churches such as Glide Memorial partner with the city to distribute drug use supplies to addicts at designated pick-up points.

With the lockdown, the San Francisco government decided to double-down on its “harm reduction” policy:

San Francisco was spending $200 a night to house the homeless, or as the current politically correct euphemism insisted that they be called, the ‘unhoused’, in hotel rooms at a cost of over $100 million.

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The whole reason that San Francisco taxpayers were going to be out $200 a night for months was to save each crazed homeless junkie from spreading the coronavirus. But how do you do that when they won’t stop punching each other from less than 6 feet away, and won’t wash their hands before shooting up?

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The San Francisco Health Department claims that handing out drugs and booze to junkies with coronavirus is actually a “harm reduction practice” that has “significant individual and public health benefits”.

How – ahem – humane.

The program probably damaged many San Francisco hotels beyond repair. It also sucked money from taxpayers in a city that’s seen its sales tax revenue drop by 40% as non-criminal, non-drug abusing people have fled the city. That’s tragic, but the greatest tragedy is that the program didn’t save lives; it cost them:

New numbers provided to the Chronicle show 1,070 bodies were examined by the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office from Jan. 1-Aug. 31. And 468 of them died of an overdose.

At this rate, San Francisco will experience almost double the number of drug deaths it saw in 2019, and more than double the number of deaths in 2018.

All of this is a reminder that our anti-drug laws are not there merely to protect those who do not use illegal drugs. They are also intended to be a disincentive to those who do use illegal drugs.

There will always be people who abuse drugs, and there will always be people whose drug use kills them. Society can never save everybody. But just as an indulgent parent doesn’t raise sweet, loving children but, instead, raises monsters, an indulgent criminal justice system doesn’t help people stay on the straight and narrow; it kills them.

We already know that a criminal-friendly system is dangerous for innocent people who get in the way of killers released without bail or illegal aliens allowed to drive or walk freely in America. When it comes to those deaths, as Dennis Prager likes to say, being kind to the cruel means being cruel to the kind.

The San Francisco experiment, though, shows that it’s not just innocent people who die when leftists ignore the law. The leftists are also killing the very same people they claim to be helping. Whatever leftism touches, it destroys.

Image: Junkies in San Francisco’s BART station. YouTube screengrab.