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Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:04] Today, we’re gonna talk about the San Francisco standards reporting on why this disparity is so bad. But first, we wanted to talk with someone from this generation who has personal experience with addiction and recovery. So we went to the Tenderloin to meet up with Richard Beal, who now leads the recovery program at the Tendloin Housing Clinic. But 30 years ago, he was in the throes of drug addiction. in the streets of San Francisco.
Richard Beal [00:01:49] My name is Richard Beal. I am known throughout the Tenderloin and the recovery community as the Ambassador for Recovery. I’ve been an ambassador for recovery for the last almost 30 years here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m currently the Director of Recovery Services for Tenderloin Housing Clinic.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:09] You live in Antioch now, but where did you grow up?
Richard Beal [00:02:12] I grew up in Richmond, California. I got three older brothers, I got two younger brothers, and I got four sisters. So I was born in the 60s. My heroes was Huey Newton. You got, you know, H. Rap Brown and Bobby Seale and Angela Davis and you know, this is the Black Power movement.
Bobby Seale [00:02:38] It’s good to be here to see so many people trying to move and understand the revolutionary struggle that’s going on within the confines of racist decadent America.
Richard Beal [00:02:50] Felix Mitchell, you know, Mickey Moore, they was ghetto legends.
Newsreeel [00:02:55] 32-year-old convicted drug racketeer Felix Mitchell was convicted in San Francisco federal court earlier this year after allegations that he was the kingpin in an East Oakland heroin dealership that featured fancy cars…
Richard Beal [00:03:07] Back then, it was hard for a person of color, a Black person, to get a job that can pay enough. And so my father, because he made more money in the streets, you know, that’s what he gravitated to. People can only give you what they got. And so he gave us what he had, which was knowledge about how to survive in the street. You know, he sold weed. He did a lot of things. When I was six months old, my father went to prison for 19 counts of armed robbery. I was the youngest at that time. My three older brothers were born and my mother, she was 20 years old with four kids. She sent my father one of those Dear John letters in prison. Said she was going back to her mother in Mississippi. And my father said, yeah, I understand you’re going back to Mississippi, but leave my kids.
Richard Beal [00:04:06] I had a resentment against my mother. How could you leave your six-month-old baby? You know, it took me a long time coming into recovery, because my father never forgave her. He said, I’m never going back in Mississippi, and he never forgave my mother. Anyway, they let him out after the five years, and my father never went back to the penitentiary after. He didn’t do no more robberies or anything like that, but he started selling weed and gambling and he ran a gambling house and all that type of stuff.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:04:34] That sounds like a pretty, I mean, intense childhood and you mention your addiction and your recovery. How did you, I guess, get caught up?
Richard Beal [00:04:45] My father got out and I started stealing doobies out of my father’s ashtray. And so nine years old, I started smoking weed. My father found out we were smoking weed, me and my older brothers, they was already into it. At 12 years old he started giving it to us, to sell. And so at 12 years I was selling 50 cent joints, five dollar matchboxes and three finger lids. That’s what they called it back in the 70s. Joint is a joint, you know. Five dollar matchboxes, they would literally be a box of matches filled with weed, three fingers of marijuana.
Richard Beal [00:05:16] And so I smoked weed, just weed, for a long time. And I got kicked out of school, every high school I went to. And then, you know, I was caught up with crack. And when I got caught up crack, it was like, I smoked crack for like 10 years. That’s what led me to San Francisco. And so in the early 80s, I came out to San Fransisco. I went from Richmond to Berkeley. You know, and I went from, didn’t have enough dope, didn’t have enough money there. I went from Berkeley to Oakland, didn’t have enough money, didn’ have enough dope there. Then I went the San Francisco. And it was like, free drugs, drug heaven, you can use, you know, it was, like, you know. San Francisco, people up all night long getting high. You know sometimes the police would mess with you, sometimes they wouldn’t. But it was just a lot different.
Richard Beal [00:06:10] I wanted to go back to the point where I could just smoke weed and not use those harder drugs. And every time I always ended up back with crack. It took me 12 years to get 30 days. I’m talking about from 83 to 95. The last day I used, I could remember laying down that night, just sleeping out in the alley right there by the entrance of the detox and a woman named Deborah Williams, she let me in and she tried, I was too tore up really still to be, you know, fully conscious and do an assessment. So she just told me to lay down on the mat and at that time I was tired. I said, I’m ready. I said I’m tired of this. I don’t want to do crack no more. I tried everything else and nothing has worked. And so that was the day I really surrendered. On July 20th, I went into a St. Anthony’s program right there at 55 Jones Street. I did the intake and everything, and I went to Seton Hall. You know, I graduated the program.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:13] How old were you then?
Richard Beal [00:07:15] I was 29 years old when I came into recall. So I’ve been out through my 30s and 40s and now 50s and been clean. So I’ll be celebrating 30 years clean on July 18th.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:28] When you were going through your own recovery, was it common to see other folks in the community going through what you were doing through, especially, and in particular, black men?
Richard Beal [00:07:39] Two of my brothers ended up dying from the disease of addiction. My brother Anthony, you know, he passed away. You know, I found him dead 2017. You know I tried to get him to come out and get clean and I let him come live with me. I found him in a room right next to me. I had a two, three bedroom in Hayward. And then my other brother, William, he went into a program and he tried to detox and off a crack. It wasn’t, he wasn’t an IV drug user. I tried it all, but he loved crack though and he loved, he used to smoke meth every now and then. He had a heart attack in the program, in treatment. And then he left the program at the hospital, didn’t go back and ended up dying. Two days before his 46th birthday.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:08:32] What have you learned over the last 30 years about what black men in particular need?
Richard Beal [00:08:36] They need people like me to talk to him and let him know that you can recover. The disease of addiction is addressed through applying treatment and talking about trauma and talking why did you use the exact nature of where all of that came from? What are you suffering from that let you, if drugs is the answer, what is the question? Why do you think that you need a drug to get through life, to deal with your emotions and your feelings? That’s the question! And a good counselor is not a person that has all the answers. A good counselor, a good case manager is the ability to ask the right question.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:21] Twice a week, Richard leads a relapse prevention meeting. We followed him there. In a packed room on a Thursday morning with donuts and coffee, participants shared their stories and why having a group like this was important to their recovery journey.
Richard Beal [00:09:41] How’s everybody doing this morning? Good. All right, all right, y’all. And so I just want to say, you know, I really, really appreciate you. Each and every one of y’all. When y’all made the decision to come to New Horizons Transitional Housing, when you came here for being in custody, when you came here from going through residential treatment, everybody made a decision that they want to improve the quality of their life.
Meeting participant [00:10:05] One thing I noticed that this program did build for everybody and. I know it may not seem important to everybody, but it really is. It’s bringing structure back into our life. Because we really didn’t have no structure. The 25th of this month, I’ve made three years clean.
Meeting participant [00:10:29] The drugs basically took away my youth, like I didn’t have an education before until I went to prison and got my high school diploma. But then ever since I’ve been to this program it gave me that safe haven to actually study and I go to San Francisco City College and my major is environmental science.
Meeting participant [00:10:49] I can just tell you that, like, I grew up in most underprivileged areas around here, like around, you know, 3rd Street and Cortland, and I’ve been using since I was 12 years old. I’m 59 years old, but thanks to the program and thanks to being able to come to Horizons, like I got a job now as an SUD counselor at a methadone clinic, and I got a second job at Horizons in San Mateo in detox. And I go to school, I’m pursuing my B.A. and my certification for SUD Counseling. And I couldn’t do it without being here. You know what I’m saying? And I’m so grateful.
Richard Beal [00:11:35] Recovery has done so much for me. I’m not a 9 to 5 recovery guy. Some people are just 9 to 5 people. I’m a one o’clock in the morning, two o’ clock in the mornin’ — if you call me, I’m a respond type of person.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:11:49] Why is that? Why do you work it sounds like so hard beyond the 9 to 5, like what keeps you going, I guess.
Richard Beal [00:12:00] Because what God in this program has done for me and recovery has done to me, the gift of recovery is just priceless. Some of the places that I go to now, they used to put me out the crack house because I tweaked so hard. Now when I walk into places, they embrace me. And so I embrace the same suffering addict. The whole thing about the newcomer is the most important person at any meeting. I understand that, but then it says the old timer is invaluable to the group because it shows the newcomer that the program works. So we need each other.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:35] Thank you so much, Richard, for your time. Appreciate it.
Richard Beal [00:12:38] Hey, thank you. I really appreciate y’all coming out.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:22] In the first part of this episode, we paid a visit to the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and heard from Richard Beal, who himself suffered from addiction for decades. Beal is part of a whole generation of Black men in San Francisco whose lives have been disrupted by drug addiction. And according to reporting by the San Francisco Standard, it’s worse here than anywhere. David Sjostedt is a staff writer for the San Francisco Standard. He reported this story with the Standard’s Noah Baustin and George Kelly.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:58] What exactly do the numbers show in terms of the impact of overdose deaths on this specific group of folks?
David Sjostedt [00:14:08] The Black men born from 1951 to 1970 have died of overdoses at a higher rate than any other demographic group in dozens of U.S. counties. In San Francisco, that disparity was worse than anywhere else. So just between January 2020 and October 2024, there was at least 410 black men from this age group who died of overdoses in San Francisco. A lot of them are dying from fentanyl, but what we do know that is different between Black men in this age group and other races is that Black men are far more likely to have died with cocaine in their systems. And so there is some speculation based on that data that a lot of these deaths and a lot of this disparity is being caused by a laced cocaine supply in the city.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:15:08] What did your reporting find about why it’s so bad for this cohort of men, and specifically this age group in particular?
David Sjostedt [00:15:17] So we spoke with dozens of members of this community, including family members of people who were lost, people who have survived, people who are working in the city, around the city, advocates, researchers, and it’s a combination of factors. But one of the most striking is that this generation, many of them grew up during redevelopment in San Francisco that saw many black families torn apart, displaced. The community in the Fillmore, Western Addition, you know, there was this mass exodus of Black families from that neighborhood.
David Sjostedt [00:15:54] In the late 90s to the early 2000s, San Francisco saw this influx of tech jobs, but the city’s Black community did not see a corresponding increase in their employment in these sectors. In 2023, the median income for Black households in San Francisco was about $47,000. That’s less than a third of white household median and less than Black communities nationwide, which is wild considering how expensive it is to live in this city compared to other places in the country. Dr. Philip Coffin, the director of substance use research at the Department of Public Health said that when he went through the overdose death data and filtered out people who were recently homeless or still homeless, the disparity went away. From their eyes, this disparity is as much caused by economic factors as much as the health disparities that have happened for generations back to slavery.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:17:06] Richard talked with us about how he had a really rocky childhood. I mean, his dad was incarcerated. His mother left their family when he was really young. He started selling drugs, I think at like somewhere between 9 and 12 years old. Was in and out of schools. I mean was that also similar to the other people that you talked with in this story?
David Sjostedt [00:17:31] Yeah, I did a roundtable with, I think, about seven people in this cohort while I was reporting on this story. And when I was asking them, why do you think this disparity exists? That was the first answer I got from everybody was, well, we grew up around it. This is what our dad did. This is what our brother did. This is what everybody did. Then, of course, we had to ask the question, why was that happening? And yeah, I mean, there was just so much trauma. Back to the main family that we profiled, they watched their neighbors’ homes taken away on trucks. They stood in front of bulldozers to keep their community from being torn down. We ended up speaking with the family of Mary Helen Rogers, who was a storied activist in the Fillmore fighting against redevelopment and found that two of her sons had died of overdoses in this time period. They were both in this cohort.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:18:29] There’s a lot of disagreement right now about the best way to tackle the overdose crisis. For years, San Francisco has promoted harm reduction, this idea of providing people tools to use drugs safely. But others want to see the city promote abstinence. Mayor Daniel Lurie recently ordered the city to cut back on harm reduction programs that offered safe smoking supplies such as pipes, foils, and straws. Some medical experts have spoken out saying that these programs save lives and that getting rid of them will make the crisis worse. And you could see this disagreement within the black community, too.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:19:18] What did you hear from Black folks in San Francisco, especially the surviving family members of those who’ve died of overdoses, and people like Richard even, about what they think is needed to address this problem?
David Sjostedt [00:19:33] The thorough line that I heard from many people, there’s a lot of disagreement on nuanced policy choices and how the city should move forward, but one point of agreement is that there needs to be acknowledgement and inclusion of these Black community leaders. There are some Black service providers in the city who still feel as if the Department of Public Health doesn’t listen to them, and that even when decisions come down to work with. members of this group that is most affected by the overdose crisis, it comes from white leadership rather than coming from the community itself. And that leads to a huge distrust in public health but also in some of these strategies that many people say are effective at reducing overdoses such as fentanyl test strips and naloxone which is an overdose antidote. those strategies fall under this label of harm reduction, which many people in the Black community have no trust in and it’s seen as a white thought coming into their communities. What’s funny is even with all the political disagreement going on in the city, when you really get down to the brass tacks with a lot of these people who are outspoken against one approach or another, a lot them really are in agreement that there needs to be some of both. The city needs to continue investing in these communities in ways that give people purpose. Addiction, it doesn’t live and die by drug use. It’s a whole confluence of factors that are happening when somebody is suffering from addiction.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:21:23] Well, David, thanks so much for joining us on the show. I appreciate it.
