A Safe House 🏡 for shooting up 👆

In a controversial move, New York city is considering safe sites for drug users, to help with cutting deaths from overdose

In 2016, the opioid epidemic claimed 1,374 lives in New York City. That’s roughly four drug overdose deaths each day. One death every seven hours.

It’s a harrowing statistic that continues to soar, and New York City officials are floating an idea that has not been tried in the United States: sanctioned locations where drug users can shoot up under the supervision of medical staff ready to revive them if they overdose.

They are called safe injection facilities, and the city has been eyeing them for more than a year, despite potential federal opposition.

In 2016, the City Council allocated $100,000 for the city health department to study the feasibility of the facilities, which exist in Canada and Europe. Mayor Bill de Blasio hinted in late January that the report would soon be released.

The two sides

At community meetings and among officials, the mere idea of the sites has generated a heated debate over their legality and their potential effect on the neighbourhoods where they might be located.

Opponents of the idea fear that crime and drug use would increase and that the sites would attract drug dealers. Others say the government should not act to encourage drug use. Advocates argue that if addicts are going to inject themselves, they might as well do it in a safe environment where they can be saved if they overdose and possibly be connected with drug treatment services.

“We recognise that people are using drugs that are illegal and we also recognise that people are dying at astronomical rates,” said Kassandra Frederique, New York director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organisation that wants to decriminalise drug use. “What is most important to us is saving lives.”

Supporters point to Vancouver, British Columbia’s safe injection facility, the first in North America, to highlight the positive effects. Fatal overdoses dropped 35% in the neighbourhood surrounding the site in the two years after it opened in 2003. Although activists say not a single person has died there, the city is still struggling with a spiralling increase in fentanyl-related deaths.

In New York, proponents of the idea insist the sites would keep dirty needles from littering the streets by keeping injections indoors. They say the facilities do not increase crime and drug use and reduce risk behaviours associated with hepatitis C and HIV infection.

A Bill introduced in the state Assembly by Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal, D-Manhattan, would help implement safe injection sites by providing immunity to the owners and workers and the drug users who walk in. The Bill is still in committee and would likely face an uphill battle in the Republican-controlled state Senate.

“The sites are untried and untested in the U.S.,” Bridget G. Brennan, special narcotics prosecutor in New York City, said. “The nation’s largest city hardly seems like an appropriate petri dish for such an experiment.”

The New York Police Department has not taken a position on the issue but is discussing it with the Department of Health.

Across the world

The first safe injection facility opened in Switzerland in 1988. There are now more than 100 sites in more than 60 cities throughout the world, according to the Drug Policy Alliance.

Recently, the idea of safe injection facilities has found a foothold in several cities nationwide dealing with skyrocketing overdose deaths.

San Francisco officials said two privately funded sites could open this summer. Philadelphia announced in January that it would begin a process to implement a site.

In Seattle, council members appropriated $1.3 million to study and possibly implement the idea. The mayor of Ithaca, New York, in the Finger Lakes region, proposed the idea in 2016. Those cities, however, might end up clashing with the federal government.

The Justice Department said in December that a proposed safe injection site in Vermont would violate federal law.

“It is a crime, not only to use illicit narcotics, but to manage and maintain sites on which such drugs are used and distributed,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office warned in a statement.

“Rather than encourage and normalise heroin injection by affording a purportedly legal setting for use, the government must help addicts stop using.”

Vermont has backed off the plan.NY TIMES