Plea to state
State had promised five overdose prevention sites
Effort underway to get five overdose prevention centers built.
Kathy, forever 58 years old. Jacob, forever 32 and Brittany, forever 22.
They were just three of names on the more than 100 gravestones set up in West Capitol Park on Saturday to represent New Yorkers who lost their lives to drug overdoses.
The gravestones were the backdrop for a protest over the state’s refusal to set up overdose prevention centers that were promised three years ago.
Organized by the group NO OD NY, the protest is a month-long campaign to push Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration to follow through with the creation of a pilot program of five centers. The group’s organizers, including Ryan Thoresen Carson, began walking from Brooklyn to Buffalo on July 1 to raise awareness. The protesters were joined by advocates from Vocal NY and several local elected officials.
Thoresen Carson, NO OD NY’S executive director, called the centers a common sense solution to prevent overdose deaths.
“The governor has really done a very good job of deflecting why it is we don’t have overdoes prevention centers,” he said. “People are dying every single day, and this is because the governor won’t take action.”
Advocates have argued for years that safe injection sites, or overdose preven
tion centers, are a way to prevent drug overdose deaths. The centers provide a space for users to inject illicit drugs while under the supervision of medical professionals. They also provide additional services to users, including clean needles, testing drugs for fentanyl and other substances before they are used, as well as a path to medical and substance abuse treatment.
The spike in overdoses during the coronavirus pandemic only added to the urgency of setting up these sites, they said. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were more than 81,000 drug overdoses nationwide from May 2019 to 2020, the highest death toll ever recorded in a year.
Opponents argue that the sites amount to the implicit approval of illegal drug use.
In 2018 the state Health Department said it would create a pilot program, with sites in Ithaca and New York City. The state has since said it needs authorization from the federal government before it acts after federal prosecutors sued a Philadelphia group that moved to create a similar program.
“We are waiting for legal clarity from the
U.S. Department of Justice before we can consider opening similar facilities here,” the state said in a statement to CBS New York after NO OD NY began its march.
There are no operating safe injection sites in the United States.
But there are other states moving forward with overdose prevention centers and safe injection sites.
On Wednesday, Rhode Island authorized a twoyear pilot program, according to the Providence Journal. California and Massachusetts are also considering similar programs.
A federal appeals court earlier this year blocked a municipal drug-consumption center proposal in Philadelphia, citing a 1986 federal law that makes it illegal to provide a place for people to use drugs.
Advocates compared the fight to open the centers to the push in the early 1990s to authorize needle exchanges. The idea of providing substance abusers with clean needles was controversial because opponents believed it implicitly supported drug use. But the programs have been shown to decrease infection rates for diseases such as HIV.
Latoya Melendez, a community health worker with Truth Pharm, a Binghamton-based, opioid overdose prevention program, lost her mother to an overdose on Dec. 30, 2020.
Creating these centers and ending the war on drugs will specifically help Black and brown
New Yorkers who have disproportionately suffered from addiction, she said.
“The only way that people that look like me, people that look like you, are going to stop dying is when this drug war is over,” she said. “I’m tired of seeing Facebook posts of people so young losing their lives when it could have been prevented because they could be safe in an overdose prevention center.”