March 17, 2020: Monica Gandhi sat staring at an email she’d just received from S.F.'s health officer.

It was the first time — but hardly the last — that she found herself questioning the city's conservative approach to the pandemic.

She’d spend the next year and a half living in an uncomfortable gray space, advocating for a harm-reduction approach to the pandemic that sometimes ran counter to a far more cautious approach held by many in San Francisco and other liberal enclaves.

As one of S.F.’s loudest voices in favor of harm reduction, she’s received fierce backlash, and sometimes death threats, particularly on Twitter.

“I’m not saying anything crazy,” she says. "I’m really not.”