On Tuesday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) tweeted her excitement over former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams being selected by the Democratic Party to give the response to President Trump’s State of the Union address, writing, “Congratulations to my friend @staceyabrams! There’s no better person to showcase our country’s strengths and speak the truth after the State of the Union.” The tweet showed Harris and Abrams laughing together with a street in Atlanta in the background, but it was the background that triggered laughter from James Woods, who followed Harris’ tweet with one of his own.
Harris tweeted:
Woods grinned, “Dear God, this campaign is going to be so much fun,” then pointed out what had made him laugh:
It is unclear whether the person in the background is actually an opioid addict or a transient. In any case, the picture isn’t going to help Harris’ or Abrams’ case that they’re deeply concerned with the plight of the homeless.
The homeless problem in both San Francisco (the area Harris hails from) and Atlanta (the area Abrams hails from) has become enormous. At the end of 2018, CNN reported, “Public drug usage and homelessness are not new problems for the city of San Francisco. But residents say the situation has gotten worse in recent years. As of October, 7,500 complaints about discarded needles have been made this year, compared with 6,363 last year. In 2015, the number was less than 3,000 … The city’s Department of Public Health recently partnered with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, essentially hiring contract workers to fan the streets and collect used needles.”
In May 2018, Buzzfeed News reported, “Open drug use has exploded in San Francisco in recent years, enraging residents who complain of having to step over people injecting heroin in train stations and to traverse a seemingly unending series of tent villages on sidewalks and bike paths. The problem has ballooned into a public health crisis, officials say, leaving elected leaders scrambling for solutions as discarded needles pile up in the streets.”
Vis-à-vis Atlanta, according to Atlanta Mission, “Statistics on the homeless in America are sobering. More than half a million people currently meet the definition of homeless in our country, and of those — 7,000 live in Atlanta.”
The Atlanta Journal Constitution noted in May 2018, “A new analysis released by the Atlanta Regional Commission last week showed how the opioid epidemic is killing people in parts of metro Atlanta that have previously had low rates of premature death. The driver has been prescriptions for pain-relief opioids such as oxycodone or hydrocodone, in which the patient can get hooked or in which other people steal the patient’s pills … Now added to that, are deaths from synthetic opioids and street drugs. Those can be more powerful and more deadly than the prescription ones, but also less expensive.”
Harris wrote on Facebook in 2017, “Drug addiction touches every community and every family in our country. It is, unfortunately, a near universal experience. We have opportunities in front of us to advocate for a better approach to drug addiction but it’s going to require working together to solve this crisis.”
Asked in March 2018 whether Georgia should sue drug manufacturers regarding the opioid crisis, Abrams answered:
I believe that we should pursue every legal remedy to limit access to drugs that should not be coming in simply because it’s for profit motive. But I will say this: we have to have a broader conversation about substance abuse in the state of Georgia, because substance abuse is a challenge that is decimating our communities, and we all should be a part of that conversation.