Safe injection debate should be over
San Francisco opioid overdoses are skyrocketing, a pandemic is shuttering businesses en masse and residents appear to be fleeing the city in droves. And yet we’re still debating whether it might be a good idea to reduce the harm and blight of addiction by making a modest concession to reality.
State Sen. Scott Wiener announced this week that he would renew his yearslong push for safe injection sites with a bill to be introduced when lawmakers reconvene in January. He was joined by Mayor London Breed, who, having lost a sister to a drug overdose, spoke of the imperative to save lives. The facilities, which would be authorized in San Francisco, Oakland and possibly other cities, give intravenous drug users access to addiction services and medical help to prevent deadly overdoses while offering an alternative to doorways and train stations.
Beyond the “public health crisis,” Wiener, DSan Francisco, said the question is whether “people use drugs or inject on the sidewalk by your home, by your business or the park that you’re using” or “do so inside in a supervised, safe, clean environment.” The answer from too many officials has been the former: They would rather allow people to use drugs on streets and playgrounds — and let more of them die — than face the outrage of illinformed moralists.
Wiener won final legislative approval of a bill to allow safe injection sites in San Francisco in 2018, but thenGov. Jerry Brown vetoed it on the ground that “enabling illegal and destructive drug use will never work” — almost as if criminalization and neglect were working fine. Despite continued staunch opposition by the Trump administration, a court ruling upheld a Philadelphia site’s legality, and Gov. Gavin Newsom seems more amenable to the idea than his predecessor. But despite being passed by the Assembly,
Wiener’s latest bill expired this year in a legislative session hobbled by the pandemic and intraparty acrimony.
The need for help, unfortunately, has only grown. San Francisco lost 441 people to drug overdoses last year, a 70% increase from the year before fueled partly by the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. Officials expect this year’s toll to be worse in light of disruption and isolation due to the pandemic, which for all its gravity looks likely to kill far fewer San Franciscans than drug overdoses.
Safe injection sites won’t cure the city’s drug problem, but research shows they can help. Studies of a site that opened in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2003, now one of scores worldwide, have found that it reduced overdoserelated deaths and public drug use while increasing entry into addiction treatment programs. And contra Brown, Trump and company, the evidence indicates that the site has not encouraged drug use.
Safe injection is an idea whose time should have come to San Francisco at least as long ago as it did to Vancouver, hampered by the same forces that saddled the country with a drug war that has achieved none of its supposed aims while wreaking untold collateral damage. Here’s hoping the governor and legislative leaders will see to it that the senator’s next measure becomes law.