Silver, Carol Ruth: Drug programs

Abstract

Carol Ruth Silver: Drug rehabilitation programs were new then. Today we just accept them as being “That’s the way it is.” But in those days, it was an exciting new insight that people who were on drugs; people who had been arrested were not just trash, were not to be discarded, were not to be ignored and that they could be helped to come back into society. So that new perception, which was part of this civil rights and the civil rights of people who are drug addicts. These things were new to Dan White, but they were embraced by George Moscone. They were embraced by Harvey Milk, myself, Gordon Lau, Ella Hill Hutch. They were embraced by the new leadership of the new population. The White, Italian, Irish, and German population of San Francisco was going down because those people were moving to the suburbs, and to fill their place were coming in Gays – not African Americans. They were also moving out. The older groups of them were moving out, but – Hispanics, and Filipinos, and then later Russian-Jews with that exodus. Immigrants. People from somewhere else were coming to San Francisco. They didn’t know the history of San Francisco. I don’t know if it was symptomatic or emblematic, but it was a part of what was going on. And the fight between Dan White, George Moscone, and the other supervisors over this siting of this rehabilitation house was a very important thing for Dan White. It was a miniscule thing for the rest of us.

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Type

Interview

Date Original

2010-07-21

Relation

The Moscone oral history interviews are part of the George Moscone Collection, MSS 328.

Contributing Institution

Holt-Atherton Special Collections and Archives, University of the Pacific Library

Rights Information

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