NYC, on this one, learn from Philly

Last week, Mayor de Blasio announced that New York City will move to open four safe-injection sites, to be called overdose prevention centers, in the coming year, giving hope to thousands of people who are using drugs and the activists who pushed the mayor on the issue.

I have a message from Philadelphia: The fight is far from over. Back in January, Philly officials announced they would encourage private entities to open safe-injection sites. Praise poured in. Then nothing changed on the ground.

New York’s announcement is more concrete than Philadelphia’s was. De Blasio set a time frame, included a community outreach process and identified four neighborhoods in which the centers will open. However, like Philadelphia, New York City was unwilling to put funding behind the lifesaving initiative.

New York can learn a few lessons from Philadelphia’s experience, and hopefully avoid finding themselves with little to show for it. The Big Apple needs to prepare for a disinformation campaign, brace for disingenuous arguments that are rooted in stigma and recognize that harm reduction must come in tandem with dismantling legacy policies from the war on drugs.

Immediately after the Philadelphia announcement, a disinformation campaign started. One of the leading voices in that campaign was Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, whose statements were deemed “Mostly False” by PolitiFact Pennsylvania.

In New York, it didn’t take much time for a prosecutor to jump in with false statements. In the morning after de Blasio’s announcement, Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon tweeted a statement calling the plan “unfathomable” and saying he “believes” the centers “only serve to normalize the use of deadly drugs.”

With all due respect to McMahon, there is no need to argue on beliefs when we have concrete evidence. In a scientific review of 75 studies, overdose prevention centers are proven to reduce overdose mortality without being associated with increased drug use or crime. Further, the studies show that the centers reduce dropped syringes and public injection — a benefit to the neighborhoods that will host them.

The fact that the mayor’s plan includes a community outreach process is critical to fighting NIMBY resistance that stems from disinformation and stigma. That process must include the broadest definition of “community” possible, one that includes people who are using drugs, people in recovery, longtime neighborhood residents, newcomers, homeowners, renters, immigrants and perhaps most importantly, the future users of the centers.

In Philadelphia, opponents claimed that the majority of people who will use the sites aren’t “native” Philadelphians or “native” to Kensington, the neighborhood in which the site will probably be. If sites would open, the foes argue, we’d see a flood of people who are using drugs from the nearby counties, demanding compassion and resources from longtime residents. That is also not based in fact; 90% of people who overdose to death in Philly, for example, are the city’s residents. Another early lesson from Philadelphia is that the debate must be seen through a racial justice lens. The racial makeup of 2016 opioid overdose deaths in New York City is not far from the relative proportion of the white, black and Hispanic populations of the city.

But overdose prevention centers should not only be open to users of opioids, the drugs that are taking the highest death toll on the white community. Centers should have smoking tents and crack-smoking kits in addition to safe-injection booths.

For the centers to be able to save lives in their full potential, all New Yorkers should believe they are meant for them. There are good reasons for New Yorkers of color to be skeptical. After all, the NYPD made 17,500 marijuana possession arrests in 2017; 86% of those arrested were black or Hispanic.

Philadelphia failed to convey that in its original announcement, leading Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner to co-author an essay titled, “Criminalizing crack addiction was a mistake. Philly’s approach to opioids must be different.”

Both Philadelphia and New York City have long fights ahead of them. It is incumbent on us to hold responsible the politicians whom we applaud for their announcements.