San Francisco is a dangerous place to live. If in doubt, let me point you in the direction of Darren Mark Stallcup. An artist by day, a fentanyl citizen journalist by night, the young man recently made a shocking video documenting life in San Francisco.
A resident of the Tenderloin, a drug-infested neighborhood overrun with crime, Stallcup describes himself as a witness to a “zombie apocalypse” and “fentanyl genocide.” Every morning, he must navigate his way through sidewalks littered with needles, human waste, and even dead bodies. He describes “Frisco” as “a fourth world country within a first world country.”
“Living in San Francisco has been a wild ride,” Stallcup tells me. He has “personally witnessed the city go from being a cultural capital to the technological capital to the fentanyl capital. After the massive tech exodus, led by Elon Musk, San Francisco lost billions in tax revenue.”
According to Stallcup, “Local leaders who gained an appetite from tech tax money soon found themselves desperate to quench their newfound appetite for money. The only other way for them to achieve this was to enable the homeless-industrial complex by allowing fentanyl to plague our community and corrupt various nonprofits and organizations.”
For Stallcup, his mornings and nights begin and end in an eerily similar manner: opening and closing his eyes to the sounds of people screaming for their lives and ambulances speeding by, sirens blaring.
“Sleep,” he says, “is very difficult to come by, especially living in the Tenderloin, where my apartment building has been broken into multiple times.”
“It’s traumatic, to say the least, a fight for survival,” he adds. Quite literally, a fight for survival. On more than one occasion, Stallcup has had to fight off burglars with his own bare hands.
Stallcup’s apartment building is surrounded by bodies (dead and barely alive), inordinate amounts of litter, tents, and an array of drug-related accouterments.
“Every morning, I go out and count the bodies,” he says, “sometimes giving them a small love tap just to see if they are alive.”
