The history of San Francisco is often told through gold rushes, but its most enduring architecture is the spiritual infrastructure of Glide Memorial Church. During the 1980s, while the federal War on Drugs built prisons, Reverend Cecil Williams was building a bridge. This movement was born in the cramped hallways of SRO hotels, where Glide proved you cannot save a city until you claim its most contested spaces. By performing The Ministry of Presence in these rooms, Glide bypassed the cold bureaucracy of early TAP (Treatment Access Protocols) and affirmed the Universal Truth that Belonging Is Precedent To Healing.

Glide’s Radical Inclusion created an Epic List that welcomed the addict and the activist and the sex worker and the dealer and the devout, refusing to partition humanity into deserving and undeserving. This defiance went global at the 1989 National Crack Conference, where the Glide Model was bolstered by pioneers like Dr. Beny Primm, who championed community-based methadone and HIV advocacy. They proved recovery was a communal triumph. This Spiritual Combustion is why the National Park Service recognized Glide in 2022 as the birthplace of a recovery movement that treated social justice as medicine.

The Contemporary Crisis

In 2026, San Francisco is trapped in Managed Decline. Today’s leadership is paralyzed by a false binary between survival and success. While figures like Nora Volkow at NIDA have revolutionized our understanding of the brain science of addiction, the city has struggled to translate that science into the soul-level intervention Glide mastered. Modern Harm Reduction has too often made the floor the entire house.

The city’s failure stems from a decoupling from Radical Transformation. We have clinical data points where we once had raw testimonies of Lived Experience. We are currently living in the Gutter of a leadership vacuum, waiting for a voice capable of believing that the gutter is the most sacred place to start a fire.