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When Tanya Tillman was a teenager, she moved to the Bay Area to live with her mother. She then married, had two sons, and built a home in San Francisco’s historic Italian North Beach neighborhood, up the hill from the tourist and financial hubs.
Even when her marriage fell apart, she never considered divorcing. This was her city and her people. Liberal like her, with varying income levels and a general sense of community. She wasn’t worried about her growing sons going out on the streets. There she always felt herself safe.
But those streets have changed, she says. The problem was exacerbated by the policies of city hall and homeless advocacy groups, she said, and she believes the community she once felt she belonged to has disappeared. And her son found himself in an almost unavoidable scene in the city: a drug case.
CNN
Tanya Tillman says prisons and rehab facilities may finally help her son.
Tillman said Roman Vardanega first tried illegal drugs when he entered high school, taking prescription drugs at a friend’s house.
According to his mother, he soon became addicted and turned to cocaine, heroin and fentanyl, which were available in the city’s seedy Tenderloin district.
Tillman admitted he was uneducated and even naive about the hard drug epidemic. But it wasn’t something she encountered every day. “I think it’s a lot worse now than it was when I grew up here,” she said at the time. “When I was a teenager, we used to come to Tenderloin because we thought it was just fun and edgy, and as a teenager I felt unsafe. No, but I don’t remember people coming to me and asking if they wanted to buy drugs.”
One of the first clues that my son was in serious trouble was when she was with him on a tour outside City Hall when he was in high school. It’s a few blocks from the Tenderloin, and some of the homeless people on the street know his name, as if he spent a lot of time with them there. was – that was what he was scoring drugs for.
she tried to help Vardanega spent 11th grade in a rehab facility, but persuaded her mother to return. She welcomed him into her home, but so did the city.
Courtesy: Tanya Tillman
According to his mother, Roman Vardanega showed musical talent at an early age and was plagued with addictions.
By then, her neighborhood had changed so much that drugs were freely available just to get home on the local transportation system, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).
“When I walked out of the BART station, the first thing they asked me was if I wanted to buy drugs,” Tillman said. The easy availability and use of drugs made the city a dangerous and sometimes deadly playground for people like her son.
Vardanega started living on the streets full-time when the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020. Cities shut down, residents either went out or stayed indoors, and more people died from drug overdoses than from COVID-19 at the height of the pandemic.
“All the tents have started to be erected in the city,” Tillman said. “The open-air drug market has deteriorated considerably, which made it easier for him to buy drugs and use them in public.”
And to Tillman’s confusion, the city just seemed to turn away.
“I can say that the city’s policies completely hurt my son, hurt us, and made him even more addicted,” she said.
“If you get arrested for drug possession, you probably won’t go to jail. The police will just release you,” she said. “That made the situation even worse, especially for his son because he was really young and still kind of in a party mood.”
Tillman’s state of mind was focused on one goal: finding her son. She knew he was an addict. She knew she loved him to the point that it hurt. And she knew she wouldn’t stop her search until she found him, even if it meant putting herself in danger.
She walked the streets looking directly into the eyes of people living on the streets, staring at things most people would avoid. Sometimes she gave me a blank look. She also sometimes listens to her sympathetically and gives hopeful hints as to where her son is.
She didn’t find him, but there were many people like him. “What saddens me is seeing my son’s face in everyone’s face on the street,” Tillman said.
With the spread of the new coronavirus, many residential residents began to disappear, and tent cities exploded onto the sidewalks with signs of drugs, addiction and mental illness.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
A rectangle is painted on the ground urging homeless people to practice social distancing at a city-sanctioned homeless camp across from San Francisco City Hall in May 2020.
The mayor of London Breed has declared a state of emergency in the city, including the establishment of a Tenderloin “linkage center” touted as a place for addicts to receive support services.
When it opened in January 2022, Tillman went to see it one day, hoping it might be the place his son could find it. When I got there, I heard music blaring, so I took a peek inside.
“I saw people doing drugs. I couldn’t believe it. said.
A little later she pretended to be an addict and went to the center for a closer look.
“I told them I wanted to get off drugs and needed help,” she said. “And they laughed at me. But if you need help getting off drugs, you’ll have to come back tomorrow,” Tillman said.
The center was supposed to have an area where people could treat overdoses, but it became known as a place to take drugs rather than seek other services.
“The most infuriating thing is that the harm reduction area felt like a party venue,” Tillman said. “Even if my son wanted to use the service and went there, he was a drug addict and saw a party scene where people were dancing and singing and doing drugs and probably indoors selling drugs. Even so, there’s no way for him to access the service because he’s too distracted and too excited to run errands.”
She felt that the city’s laissez-faire had gone too far.
“When you can walk into a store and steal $1,000 worth of merchandise and get away with it, that’s going too far,” she says. “It’s going too far if you smoke crack in front of a police officer and they just stare at you and don’t even arrest you.”
The struggle to save her son has exhausted her. Tillman said not once, but three times, when he became so depressed and desperate that he tried to kill her.
For Tillman personally, and perhaps for her city, things are starting to change.
The Tenderloin Linkage Center, later renamed simply the Tenderloin Center, closed last December. Tillman has found new support and a mission to work with Mothers Against Drug Addiction and Death. A new district attorney took office after being recalled by voters who judged the previous attorney to be criminally inept. Tillman’s son Vardanega got into legal trouble, served time in prison and was sent to a court-ordered rehabilitation program.
In Tillman’s mind, imprisonment is good for him — keeping him alive, off the streets, and giving him a chance to enter a treatment programme.
For her, San Francisco is still beautiful: the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio, Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Italian enclave of North Beach. But it’s getting more and more frightening, and she feels that part of her responsibility must go to politicians whose job it is to clean the streets.
“I’m a liberal,” said Tillman. “My politics haven’t changed, but things are going crazy around me.”
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