The District 2 supervisor race is forcing a question that San Francisco has been awkwardly dancing around for years: should the city actually arrest more drug users?

It's a sign of how far the pendulum has swung that this is even a serious question. A few years ago, the prevailing consensus at City Hall was that enforcement was essentially counterproductive — that arresting people for drug use was cruel, expensive, and accomplished nothing. The results of that philosophy are, well, visible on most major corridors in the city.

Now District 2 candidates are being pressed to articulate where exactly they fall on the enforcement spectrum, and the answers reveal a lot about the shifting political landscape in what's supposed to be one of the city's more moderate districts.

The honest reality is that "more arrests" versus "more treatment" is a false binary, and any candidate framing it that way is either being lazy or deliberately evasive. The question isn't whether to arrest people — it's whether there's a functioning system on the other end. You can arrest someone for open-air fentanyl use tomorrow. Then what? If there's no court capacity, no treatment beds, and no accountability mechanism, you've just created expensive paperwork.

What voters should be demanding from every District 2 candidate is specifics: How do you fund treatment infrastructure? How do you hold the city's existing behavioral health bureaucracy accountable for the billions it already receives? And how do you ensure enforcement isn't just performative tough-talk that evaporates after election day?

Meanwhile, the political machinery behind these races is drawing its own scrutiny. As one local on Reddit put it, advocacy groups across the spectrum operate by "opining to candidates on their chances and offering to help make connections. And it isn't inherently evil." Fair point — but voters deserve transparency about who's pulling strings and why. Another SF resident was blunter: "Anyone with two brain cells knows that all these groups are just vehicles for billionaires to buy votes."

Cynical? Maybe. But in a city where political nonprofits proliferate faster than dispensaries, a healthy dose of skepticism about everyone's motives — left, right, and center — is just good civic hygiene.

District 2 deserves candidates who can talk about drug policy like adults. Less posturing, more plumbing.