Great. Fine. We're cautiously optimistic that the city is finally acknowledging that sometimes people in the grip of fentanyl addiction need more than a clean needle and a kind word.

But here's where things go full San Francisco: even as the city pivots toward mandatory treatment, the Department of Public Health is quietly cutting funding for substance abuse counselor training programs at City College of San Francisco. You know, the pipeline that actually produces the trained professionals who would do the treating.

Let that marinate for a second. The city is simultaneously demanding more treatment capacity while defunding the workforce development that makes treatment possible. It's like announcing a massive infrastructure project and then laying off all the engineers.

This is the kind of bureaucratic incoherence that makes taxpayers want to scream into the void. One hand of city government doesn't know — or doesn't care — what the other is doing. DPH is trimming its budget in ways that directly undermine the policy goals City Hall is trumpeting to voters.

And let's be clear about the stakes: mandatory treatment without adequate staffing isn't treatment. It's warehousing. It's a legal mandate with no operational backbone. It's a press release masquerading as policy.

As one SF resident put it, "This city loves to announce solutions and then quietly sabotage them."

If San Francisco is serious about mandatory treatment — and we think the concept has merit when done right — then the workforce question isn't a footnote. It's the whole story. You can't treat addiction with good intentions and empty counseling chairs.

City College counselor training is relatively cheap compared to the billions we've poured into the homelessness-industrial complex. Fund it. Staff it. Or stop pretending mandatory treatment is anything more than a talking point.