Threading the needle
Under prodding from City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, Mayor de Blasio commits to a plunge no city in America has taken before in an attempt to stem the horrific toll of opioid overdoses. If only answers to what to do about the savage crisis of opioid addiction were anything close to as clear as the epidemic’s toll — 1,441 dead last year in New York City — it would be easy to dismiss de Blasio’s commitment to a test run of privately run and funded facilities for open use of heroin and similarly hazardous substances as good intentions gone wild.
But opioid abuse lends itself to no silver bullets, no simple solutions, no one path out of addiction alive. Any bag of heroin purchased by an addict on the hunt for a fix might also contain in the mix dead-powerful fentanyl, with the power to stop respiration in minutes.
Meanwhile, those who shoot up in unsanitary conditions — like the open-air heroin den the Daily News spotlighted in its Opioid Nation series one year ago — risk disease and are a blight on the city’s quality of life.
Hence the difficult necessity of testing in New York City the potential already shown in cities like Sydney and Vancouver to encourage drug use that would happen anyway to take place in supervised facilities, with staff at the ready to reverse overdoses using the antidote naloxone.
And also — this is crucial — offer referrals to treatment and health care, to help break the terrible cycle of addiction.
Testing how the concept plays out on the ground means applying rigorous, objective, scientifically sound analysis of a yearlong experiment, and not settling for the dressed-up numbers that too often pass for proof of success for de Blasio.
At any sign that injection centers cause harms in the name of reducing them — or heaven forbid promote drug use by lowering the stakes — game over.
The mayor acts at the urging of a report from his Department of Health and Mental Hygiene plainly geared toward getting to yes.
It somewhat glibly bills supervised injection facilities as a natural next step for needle-exchange facilities themselves born in a storm of concern and controversy in the AIDS era, but is nonetheless realistic about obstacles to be overcome.
Not least: A federal law that makes open harboring of drug use illegal. The state Department of Health will also need to buy in by approving a proposed research study. Gov. Cuomo says he’s prepared to consider it, but not there yet.
De Blasio rebrands supervised injection facilities as “overdose prevention centers” and says that with the state’s OK he looks forward to seeing them come for one year to Washington Heights in Manhattan; Gowanus in Brooklyn; Longwood, the Bronx, and Johnson’s own Midtown West.
Some of those sites are barely recovered from past traumas inflicted by the drug trade, still vulnerable to resurgent dealing that the NYPD will be duty-bound not to turn blind eyes to.
A New Yorker President better than the current one famously said, “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another.
“But above all, try something.”