Sitting on the pavement in downtown San Francisco, he then carried on undeterred.
When told many people would be shocked he was taking fentanyl before visiting his child, 34-year-old Jimmy said: “It is what it is. She misses me, she asked me, ‘Daddy, come see me today’.
“I will make sure I’m not ‘off’. If I don’t have this in my system, it’ll be hard to see her because I’ll be ill and dysfunctional as hell, throwing up.
“I would be anxious and in a rush to get back here. That’s what I don’t want.”
Addicts living on the streets of this vast city in northern California are no longer afraid of death. In fact, some even tell others not to revive them if they overdose “because it will ruin the high”.
Their biggest fear? The horrific, debilitating withdrawal symptoms. To those who have graduated from heroin to fentanyl, America’s biggest opiate crisis isn’t an emergency, it is a way of life.
But in San Francisco, one of the US’s richest areas and the home to cutting-edge technology businesses worth trillions of dollars, the drugs epidemic is ravaging the community.
One of the main elements fuelling the disaster is how cheap the drug is. Some dealers will sell fentanyl for as little as £8.
Some criminals will also “cut” their cocaine and heroin and mix fentanyl into it to maximise profits, increasing the chances that unsuspecting users will overdose on drugs they did not realise they were taking.
Jimmy’s friend Maurice Williams, 35, said: “I know lots of people who have died from fentanyl. Almost every day.
“My addiction keeps me from being afraid. I’m afraid of being sick. I’m afraid of trying to kick dope off the street. That is scarier to me than dying.
“I have saved 29 lives. I have never overdosed, I have never been saved.
“They get angry at you if you use [overdose treatment] Narcan and you were trying to save their lives.
“They are angry because it flushes the drug out of their system. It is an instant sickness.
“Instead of the people being grateful, they are angry because you have ruined their high. People have said to me, ‘Don’t ever Narcan me – if I die, I die’.”
Narcan, or naloxone, is part of an overdose prevention kit being handed out to addicts and San Francisco’s homeless along with “safe syringes”. Officials believe helping people to take drugs safely could prevent deaths. Both Jimmy and Maurice started taking fentanyl after years taking heroin.
This is common for the majority of those using the synthetic opioid.
Maurice briefly veers between conspiracy theories – namely that the drug has been “introduced” to wipe out sections of the population – to coherently explaining how the opiates have swept through San Francisco and ruined countless lives.
There were 563 overdose fatalities in the Golden City between January 1 and August 31, according to a report from the city’s chief medical examiner. Of those deaths, 456 involved fentanyl.
This puts San Francisco on track to hit 845 such fatalities in 2023, surpassing the record 725 in 2020.
Maurice said: “Initially, I was concerned it was going to kill me. But over time you build tolerance.”
In Eddy Street, near Union Square, every corner of a four-way junction is lined with the homeless.
Human excrement was left on the floor and one user, Orlando, brazenly showed the Daily Express his crystal meth.
The most shocking thing about this? There is a police station opposite.
San Francisco is in a battle against a drug epidemic and its soft approach is failing.
For addicts like Maurice and Jimmy, they believe they are on their own – abandoned by the government.
Maurice said of taking drugs in public: “We don’t have a home. The police haven’t bothered me much.
“A lot of people have been taken to jail for doing it.
“They act like there’s a state of emergency. There’s no emergency. This is normal. The only time anything happens is when people die.”
