Newsom’s approach to the overdose problem is more about burnishing his resume than saving lives.
Newsom’s approach to the overdose problem is more about burnishing his resume than saving lives.
G avin Newsom wants you to know he cares deeply about America’s overdose crisis. In an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle last weekend, the California governor squarely placed the blame on the Trump administration for “abandon[ing] American families just as the country was making headway in our fight against the overdose epidemic.” But, he maintains, “where Washington retreats, California has stepped up.”
To fully grasp the audacity of this claim, you need only look at where this man cut his teeth. San Francisco, where Newsom served as mayor from 2004 to 2011, became the most visible drug disaster in the developed world. Not despite his politics — because of them. The Tenderloin became an open-air pharmacy. U.N. Plaza became unwalkable. The philosophy his administration embedded — harm reduction as an end in itself, accountability as an afterthought — metastasized into city policy and became its own kind of trap. It was too entrenched to challenge, too politically sacred to dismantle. Other mayors inherited the wreckage, but Newsom laid the foundation. He then left for Sacramento, where the problems were bigger, the podiums better, and accountability remained equally optional.
As governor, he has presided over a staggering surge in overdose deaths — nearly 11,000 Californians died of drug fatalities in 2021 alone. Fentanyl moved freely. Counties wanted addiction services that functioned as a whole. What they received was bureaucratic fog and press-release governance. The richest state in America, often the loudest about its compassion, watched people die on its streets for years: not for want of money, not for want of speeches. For want of a governor willing to admit that good feelings are not the same as good policy.
Then the numbers started improving — driven largely by federal investment in addiction treatment — and Newsom discovered the issue with remarkable speed.
His recent op-ed is a performance in selective memory. It speaks movingly about families torn apart by addiction, second chances, and human dignity. What it carefully avoids is any acknowledgment that California, under his leadership, became a case study in how progressive instincts — without discipline or accountability — can deepen the very suffering they claim to address. San Francisco doesn’t get a mention. His own record doesn’t get a sentence. History, for Newsom, begins the moment he has something self-serving to announce.
Credit is deserved where it is due: The work California did to help get naloxone to people who need it is real. California brought down prescription drug prices, distributed the overdose antidote widely, and saved lives. But the launch date was in spring 2024, long after the crisis took hold. Arriving with a fix that late was less leadership than opportunism in a good suit, showing up after the hardest years to take credit.
Newsom’s self-congratulation is relentless. The op-ed name-drops the CA Bridge Program, the CalRx initiative, the Recovery Incentives Program, and the California National Guard. It is less a policy argument than a curated highlights reel. Every paragraph answers a question no one asked: What has Gavin Newsom personally achieved? The people dying of overdoses are present in the piece as props; they are the supporting cast in a story that was always, ultimately, about him.
The presidential framing isn’t subtle. Each section follows the same architecture: Establish a problem, position California as the solution, position Newsom as California. The 2028 primary begins, apparently, in the opinion pages of March 2026.
What makes this harder to stomach is the human wreckage written across Newsom’s posturing. The overdose crisis has consumed hundreds of thousands of American lives. The families are real. The grief doesn’t go away between news cycles. These people deserved a governor who arrived early, who made hard decisions before they were popular, and who accepted that compassion without structure isn’t compassion at all. They got, instead, a governor who arrives when the cameras are ready.
California’s recent treatment investments are not nothing. Some are working. But a politician who spent two decades building the conditions for catastrophe doesn’t get to reframe himself as the rescuer simply because he eventually showed up.
People devastated by addiction needed leaders whose urgency arrived before the polling did. They needed honesty about what went wrong and who was steering. They needed politics measured in outcomes, not announcements. Instead, they got Gavin Newsom, a man who wrote a bad first chapter and is now demanding credit for a better ending.