Stores using blue lights to deter drug use
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — Colored bulbs cast an eerie blue glow in the restroom of a convenience store where people who inject heroin and other drugs have been seeking the relative privacy of the stalls to shoot up.
The blue lights are meant to discourage people from using drugs in store bathrooms by making it more difficult for them to see their veins.
“The hardest-core opiate user still wants to be accurate. They want to make sure the needle goes in the right spot,” said Read Hayes, a University of Florida researcher and director of the Loss Prevention Research Council.
Turkey Hill Minit Markets, a 260-store chain based in Lancaster, is one of two convenience store chains and a supermarket chain working with the loss prevention group to field-test the blue bulbs.
Earlier studies have questioned the lights’ deterrent effect, with people who use opioids telling researchers A restroom is bathed in blue light at a Turkey Hill convenience store in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. they’d shoot up in blue light if it meant avoiding withdrawal symptoms. Many public health experts oppose the practice, saying blue lights make people more likely to hurt themselves and stigmatize those in the grips of addiction.
Store owners say they have to do something.
In Luzerne County, where Turkey Hill has installed blue lights at a store in WilkesBarre, Coroner William Lisman said people have died of overdoses in the public bathrooms of fast-food restaurants, big-box stores and other retailers.
“It can very easily go unnoticed until somebody else wants to use that restroom,” he said. “Other patrons realize they can’t get in, the manager opens up, and we find people deceased.”
At some Turkey Hill locations in hard-hit neighborhoods, store workers often found used needles or even people slumped over from an overdose, said Matt Dorgan, the chain’s asset protection manager.
More than six months after the chain began using the blue lights in as many as 20 stores, “we’re not finding hardly anything anymore,” Dorgan said. “It’s a pretty dramatic reduction. We haven’t had a single overdose.”
Retailers aren’t the only ones experimenting with blue lights.
Philadelphia began distributing kits to residents that include a blue bulb for the front porch, no-trespassing signs, a tool to pick up used syringes, a needle disposal box and contact information for social services.
The city — where overdose deaths, fueled by the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl, surged more than 30 percent to 1,200 last year — has given out more than 100 kits since January.