[varyouga]

“enacted a needle exchange program that's still running, then they wonder why they end up with mentally ill drug users”

Needles are not the same as drugs. It's a cheap precaution to minimize a chance of extremely costly disease outbreaks from groups of people sharing needles in the streets. Eventually those diseases would pass to non drug users

[mass55th]

If needle exchange was supposed to prevent costly outbreak of diseases, how is it that San Francisco, and other cities in California are experiencing all these disease outbreaks?

You don't think exchanging needles only encourages people to do more drugs? And the opposite problem that probably occurs is that drug users are too lazy to go exchange needles, especially the homeless ones.

And then there's this...From April 23, 2019:

San Fransisco Streets Flooded with Dirty Used Needles

Yeah, that needle exchange program is working real good.