Cities defiant after Justice Department's threat on 'supervised injection sites'

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Cities defiant after Justice Department’s threat on ‘supervised injection sites’

By Lenny Bernstein and Katie Zezima
September 4 at 10:45 PM

Cities seeking to open sites where illegal drug users are monitored to prevent overdoses responded defiantly Tuesday to a Justice Department threat to take “swift and aggressive action” against that approach to the nationwide opioid epidemic.

Plans for those “supervised injection sites” — under consideration in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City, Seattle and elsewhere — collided with a stern Justice Department warning issued last week, threatening to create a standoff between federal and local authorities like the confrontation over “sanctuary cities.”

As they have before, some liberal-leaning cities trying to cope with conditions on their streets find themselves at odds with more-restrictive Trump-era policy and enforcement.

“Just as local governments had to lead during the HIV epidemic, cities like ours will be on the forefront of saving lives in the opioid crisis,” James Garrow, a spokesman for Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health, said in a statement Tuesday. “The federal government should focus its enforcement on the pill mills and illegal drug traffickers who supply the poison that is killing our residents, not on preventing public health officials from acting to keep Philadelphians from dying.”

-snip-

But in the United States, the facilities appear to violate a 1986 federal law aimed at crack houses. The law criminalized opening or running places where illegal drugs are knowingly used. That is the position that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein took in an interview with the Philadelphia radio station WHYY last Wednesday and in an opinion column in the New York Times the following day.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cities-defiant-after-justice-departments-threat-on-supervised-injection-sites/2018/09/04/fcf798d6-b056-11e8-a20b-5f4f84429666_story.html

[mr_lebowski]

1. Need to make some kind of kit that can quickly determine relative opioid potency

And distribute them widely and freely, along with naloxone.

Most people just want to use, they don't want to die. If there was a way to just put a tiny smidge from a bag you just bought onto like a test strip and see red/yellow/green color appear? Something that simple could save 1000's a year in big cities I bet. Doesn't seem impossible offhand ...

Supervised sites seems like a good idea too but I doubt many people come unless you make it like in the UK where you can actually get Rx Heroin from the site ... think you just have to register as an addict, but someone from the UK would likely know more than I.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Britain, Netherlands, Vancouver and other places have some success with this approach...

although the same arguments against it still pop up. The arguments are largely moral-- don't subsidize a bad habit.

The arguments for it are largely pragmatic-- it works. It reduces deaths and injury from bad smack and dirty needles. It reduces crime by allowing addicts to work for a living without the daily scramble for a fix. Well, it just works and has far fewer downsides than blowing money away trying to stop addiction by law or methadone.