Cleaning up drug areas like Boston’s ‘Methadone Mile’
BOSTON — A young woman crouches on a dusty strip of grass alongside a busy Boston thoroughfare and plunges a needle into her arm. Around the corner, a couple stands zombie-like in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to passing pedestrians on a muggy morning.
Farther down the road, a man injects heroin into another man’s hand beside a gas station convenience store.
“It’s hard to be out here and not be high, you know,” said Jamie Allison, a 36-year-old woman with telltale black needle marks on her arms, shrugging as she took in the milieu from her curbside perch. “You need something just to get through the day.”
This is “Methadone Mile,” a stretch of Massachusetts Avenue south of downtown where methadone clinics, sober homes and other drug treatment services have grown in the shadow of Boston Medical Center, New England’s busiest trauma hospital. It’s an area meant for healing that has instead become the city’s most visible symbol of the national opioid crisis.
Mayor Marty Walsh promised to clean up the notorious drug haven last year, launching initiatives to break up the dealing and connect people to treatment. But the slow pace of change has frustrated residents and business owners, who credit the city for its efforts but believe more dramatic steps need to be taken.
“It’s just really sad,” said George Stergios, president of the local neighborhood association. “Most of us don’t want to live like this, surrounded by human misery.”
Walsh said he remains committed and believes “significant gains” are already being made.
“Recovery doesn’t happen overnight,” said the Democrat, himself more than two decades sober. “It’s about seeing this as the disease it is, and working hard to lift up everyone in the neighborhood so everyone’s quality of life improves.”
Boston has company in wrestling with chronically drug-infested areas that have only worsened as cheaper heroin and more potent opioids like fentanyl have flooded in.
In Los Angeles, a 50-bed “sobering center “opened on Skid Row in January; people can sleep off their high, receive food and get connected to substance abuse treatment and other city services.
This month, San Francisco will take a page from Seattle’s 6-year-old LEAD initiative with a plan to connect low-level drug offenders in its Tenderloin and Mission districts to housing, mental health counseling and other services instead of prosecuting them. Police on Chicago’s West Side launched a similar effort last year, and other cities have also adopted the idea.