San Francisco is in the midst of a hepatitis C epidemic. More than 12,000 people here live with hepatitis C, many of whom do not know they have it. The city has the highest rate of liver cancer in the country because of hepatitis infections. Treatment for hepatitis C is difficult, expensive and not always successful. People continue to become infected with hepatitis C in San Francisco, primarily through injecting drugs but increasingly through sexual contact as well.

For the past year and a half, I have been a member of the San Francisco Mayor's Hepatitis C Task Force, along with 30 other dedicated participants, including doctors, researchers, advocates and people living with hepatitis C. We spent more than a year gathering information, listening to research presentations and personal testimony, reviewing state and national hepatitis plans, and deliberating on what we could recommend to ensure that San Francisco does a better job of addressing hepatitis C and preventing new infections.

One of our recommendations has attracted attention, including an article in The Chronicle. As a part of our direction that San Francisco must provide effective hepatitis C interventions, we recommended the creation of a legal, supervised injection facility.

Supervised injection facilities are places where people can safely use illicit drugs such as heroin with sterile equipment and medical staff on hand. Supervised injection facilities are operating in 27 cities around the world, including in Vancouver, British Columbia; Sydney; and Oslo. The evidence is conclusive that they reduce HIV and hepatitis transmission risks, prevent overdose deaths, reduce public injections, reduce discarded syringes and increase the number of people who enter drug treatment. Few people would disagree with any of those outcomes.

The mayor and other San Francisco politicians who are committed to reducing the harms that drugs create for our communities would be well served by paying attention to the evidence and lessons from Vancouver. San Francisco has led the way in fighting HIV. The city needs to take these recommendations seriously and begin to address hepatitis C with the same courage and leadership it has shown for HIV. Politics can't trump science.

Even here, we have some officials who remain invested in addressing drugs as a criminal justice issue rather than a public health issue. They continue to support the status quo, where people cycle through our jails and emergency rooms at great cost. We will continue to waste resources putting sick people in jail until our elected officials and policymakers are willing to step up and redirect resources to more effective approaches that will save money over time, such as a supervised injection facility. There are too many lives on the line, and there will be a price for a slow learning curve.

San Franciscans face a choice: Do we continue to waste money and allow people to become sick and die, or do we follow the clear evidence and invest in something that works?