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 [www.DrDave.org] [Haight Ashbury Free Clinics">
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 [www.DrDave.org] [Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, Inc]

The Haight Ashbury Free Clinics - The 1999 HAFC Logo
The Haight Ashbury Free Clinics

Dr. David Smith &

Dr David Smith Web Site.
Dr Dave's Web Site
    A Medical Mission in the Haight Ashbury
By, David Perlman
Science Correspondent 

A new clinic, still woefully short of volunteer physicians and nurses is operating in the Haight-Ashbury.  In barely a week the word has spread fast and already the clinic is crowded each night with sick and sometimes frantic youngsters seeking help.  It is part of “Happening House,” a venture designed to offer cultural activities, education, and medical care to the hippies of the New Community.

Happening House has been founded with the help of a group of San Francisco State College faculty members, and the cooperation of leaders in the hippie world.  Private donations pay the rent.

The Action

The clinic and Happening House are located in an old upstairs flat at 558 Clayton street.  It once housed a suite of dentists’ offices, and its big old-fashioned windows look out at the action at the corner of Clayton and Haight.  The night-time scene outside is full of sound and potential violence;  a barefoot girl is questioned by police for panhandling; hunting for sex, three sailors gawk at the hippies; a trio if tribal types walk by, beads dangling, ankle bells tinkling; one whacks a tambourine and the rhythm penetrates into the clinic.  Dr. David Smith, director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Screening Unit at San Francisco General Hospital, devotes three hours and more of his own time each night as the volunteer Medical Director of the new clinic.  He can call on eight other volunteer doctors for scheduled service and ten registered nurses.  With 30 patients a day and more coming all the time, he could use twice as much manpower.  With its bilious Victorian green walls and the sparse furniture, the clinic could be any pad in the Haight-Ashbury.  A radio plays rock music.  A coffee pit steams.  Kids, the boys mostly bearded, squat on the floor; many are stoned – turned inward to their private layers of drug peeled consciousness.  The girls look particularly frightened; some are very young, runaways perhaps; many have come with vaginal infections and fear far worse.  An occasional older alcoholic comes in, cut and bruised.  The volunteer nurses are in street clothes; one almost fainting from overwork, is barefoot.  They are patient, sympathetic, rushed.  They keep a medical record on each patient.  It is simple and wholly confidential.  One question is only two words; “Drug history?” Dr. Smith comments:  “The surveys talk about the incidents of drug use among young people – 20 per cent, they say, use marijuana; 5 per cent for LSD.  Here the figure is 100 per cent.  I haven’t seen a kid in the clinic who hasn’t used drugs, and most are using them right now.  Marijuana, methedrine, DMT, LSD, and now the new one, STP.  We want to tackle the drug problem here now.  Not just help the kids come down from a bad trip, but by recruiting volunteer psychologists and psychiatrists for a serious aftercare program that will follow up every patient.  We’ll do it if we get the volunteers.” 

Helpers

Bob Conrich, 30, a bespectacled former private investigator who “dropped out of business to do something constructive” manages the clinic.  He keeps a card file on quiet citizens in the straight world who are willing to be called at any hour of the night when a youngster needs fast transport to a hospital. He helps recruit doctors.  He keeps book on the medicine.  Conrich wears hippie clothes – the colorful shirt, the necklace -  but his hair is short.  He knows the kids:  “They’re confused, searching young people whose immaturity had led them into the drug world,” he says.  “They’re alienated from all the structures of society – from schools and families and even the world of straight jobs. 

Dental Care

He discussed, the other night, a plan to launch dental services because so many of the clinic patients have such serious dental problems.  Many haven’t seen a toothbrush since they left home.  A local dentist dropped in, committed; he had served in the farm workers’ union clinic in Delano, now he wants to volunteer here.  The dentist and Conrich debate the best way to scrounge a dental chair and oxygen equipment, and the drills and tools that will be needed.  The clinic is luck because the right kind of plumbing is already installed, left over from the flat’s more prosperous days as a private dental office.  Conrich rifles through the night’s clinic business:  a boy with cuts and burns; he’s vague about how it happened, but the injuries need simple treatment.  A half dozen serious respiratory infections; they’re common these cold night.  Several severely sore toes – athlete’s foot.  Abdominal rashes, migraine headaches.

VD Cases

There are plenty of VD cases – they are referred quickly to the city’s venereal disease clinic at 33 Hunt Street.  The worried patients go there willingly because the VD clinic is “cool” – non punitive, eager only to help.  A man, no youngster, comes in overwhelmed by acute anxiety.  He has been on a drug trip for three straight weeks – LSD, weed, speed, bennies, the works, all at once; he’s malnourished too.  Tranquilizers start his treatment.  A girl is worried by a mole on her shoulder that has begun to change.  Dr. Smith phones Children’s Hospital; she’s referred there for a biopsy.  Another is sent to Children’s with an infected uterus, an infected kidney, malnutrition and serum hepatitis.  Still another girl has a bad vaginal trichomonas infection and possible hepatitis.  The drug for trichomonas is expensive:  she’ll panhandle to earn the bread, she says.  Conrich says no; he phones the local hospital, wangles the prescription free.  A long haired, charming girl, smiling shyly, has climbed the dingy stairs to the clinic because her stubborn cold won’t ease up after a week.  She wants something now because she feels terrible, and plans to hitch hike to New York in the morning.  Dr. Smith examines her with extra care. He asks Bob Conrich:  Do we have any injectable penicillin?  There’s only one ampoule in the clinic.  Dr. Smith uses it swiftly, tells Conrich to hustle a volunteer with a car, and calls San Francisco General Hospital.  “The girl doesn’t have a cold,” Dr. Smith says.  “It’s a left lower lobe pneumonia, and it could flare up virulently.  If that child started hitch hiking now she’s collapse.  Untreated she could die.”

Needs

The clinic goes on and on, hour after hour.  The kids wait their turns patiently, worried.  Dr. Smith won’t be through until almost midnight.  Nor will the nurses.  Conrich talk about the urgent needs at 558 Clayton:  for doctors’ drug samples, for dental equipment, above all for more volunteer physicians and nurses.  The clinic phone number is 431-1714; it operates for emergencies and phone consultations 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  Medical clinic hours are 8pm on, seven nights a week.  A young boy interrupts:  He’s been hallucinating for almost three days now, and it’s a bad trip. Conrich calms him. Dr. Smith will help him soon.  The boy wanders through the clinic rooms.

Cool

“I can’t afford to get busted,” the boy says softly.  “Look man,” says Conrich.  “I’m cool.  Don’t worry”  “But what about the doc?”  asks the boy.  “He’s the coolest man that ever wore a tie,” Conrich says.  “Look, don’t you understand, if we weren’t cool here nobody would come!  We’re here to take care of people, not get them busted.”  The boy quiets down, smiles and sits.  “Groovy,” he says.  The clinic’s address:  558 Clayton Street, corner of Haight.  The phone: 431-1714

   


[www.DrDave.org] [Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, Inc]

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