Bill on safe injection sites is held another year
In the midst of a deadly overdose crisis, California lawmakers said they will wait until next year to consider a bill that would allow people to use drugs in a supervised setting — a delay that advocates and local leaders criticized as both dangerous and unnecessary.
That bill, sponsored by Sen. Scott Wiener, DSan Francisco, would allow San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles to open safe consumption sites under a pilot program. But Assembly Member Jim Wood, chair of the Health Committee, said Tuesday that he paused action on the bill until January so the U.S. attorney general has more time to assess whether the sites violate federal law.
“Allowing time for that response is the prudent thing to do,” Wood, DSanta Rosa, said in a statement.
The delay comes as the entire country experiences a deadly rise in overdose deaths. Nearly two people a day died of an overdose in San Francisco last year, and 2021 is expected to be just as deadly, if not more so.
It also comes as Rhode Island Gov. Daniel McKee made history Wednesday by approving a pilot program for the country’s first safe con
sumption sites.
Public health experts widely agree that safe consumption sites, where people can use drugs around medical professionals and also access treatment services, are critical to helping reverse the trend. About 100 such sites exist around the world, including in Canada, Australia, Switzerland and France.
They are currently illegal in California. Efforts to change the law have hit hurdle after hurdle over the past few years — including a veto by former Gov. Jerry Brown. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who faces a recall election Sept. 14, has previously said that he is “very, very open” to a pilot program.
But on the federal level, it’s unclear where the Biden administration stands on the sites. Biden’s team is expected to be much more amenable to the idea than Donald Trump’s administration, which threatened “20 years in prison, hefty fines and forfeiture of the property used in the criminal activity” in any city that opened an injection site.
Mayor London Breed and several other mayors, including Oakland’s Libby Schaaf, sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland in April seeking clarity on his position. They have yet to receive a response.
Wood — who has approved previous versions of the safe consumption bill — said he wants to wait until Breed gets clarity from Washington before taking action on the bill, SB57. He said clarity is critical.
While such delays are not uncommon in the Legislature, Wiener said he is “extremely disappointed” that the committee postponed the hearing on the bill until next year. He maintained optimism that it will pass and be signed into law.
“SB57 is very much alive, albeit delayed,” Wiener said. “I’m committed to this fight for our community’s future. We will get it done.”
If the federal government does not respond by January, the committee will still move forward on the bill, a spokeswoman for Wood said.
Breed’s office clarified Tuesday that “we don’t need to wait for a response from the federal government before passing SB57.”
“The letter relates to federal law and SB57 relates to California’s state law,” said Andy Lynch, a spokesman for Breed. “We’re simply trying to make sure that all of our legal bases are covered when we open one of these sites, and we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to do that as soon as possible.”
Supervisor Matt Haney, who represents the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods — where the majority of San Francisco’s overdoses occur — said he appreciates the concerns about the federal government, but the “delays are deadly.”
“Our main concern over the past few years was the Trump administration,” he said. “Now that they are out of the way, it is incredibly disappointing that the state is now our obstacle.”
Laura Thomas, director of harm reduction policy at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said the delays “will cost lives.”
“Overdose is a public health emergency and must be addressed as one,” she said in a statement. “We urge legislators to prioritize new solutions that will help us turn the tide on overdose. We can’t afford to leave any options on the table now.”