Cities clash with feds on safe injection sites
Cities seeking to open sites where illegal drug users are monitored to prevent overdoses responded defiantly Tuesday to a Justice Department threat to take “swift and aggressive action” against that approach to the nationwide opioid-abuse epidemic.
Plans for those “supervised injection sites” — under consideration in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City, Seattle and elsewhere —collided with a stern Justice Department warning issued last week, threatening to create a standoff between federal and local authorities like the confrontation over “sanctuary cities.”
As they have before, some liberal-leaning cities trying to cope with conditions on their streets find themselves at odds with more-restrictive federal government policy and enforcement.
“Just as local governments had to lead during the HIV epidemic, cities like ours will be on the forefront of saving lives in the opioid crisis,” James Garrow, a spokesman for Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health, said in a statement Tuesday.
“The federal government should focus its enforcement on the pill mills and illegal drug traffickers who supply the poison that is killing our residents, not on preventing public health officials from acting to keep Philadelphians from dying.”
On the other side of the country, California state legislators and San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who lost a sister to a drug overdose, vowed at a news conference Tuesday to open a supervised injection site soon. State Sen. Scott Wiener said the city would act “even if the federal government threatens us with criminal prosecution.”
A bill to authorize San Francisco’s plans passed the California legislature last week and is sitting on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk. The officials urged Brown to sign it.
Advocates contend that drug consumption sites have saved the lives of countless thousands addicted to drugs who would have used them anyway under less safe and sanitary conditions, although the most recent research has reopened the debate.
They say the facilities also curb the spread of HIV and hepatitis C by limiting needle sharing. Researchers report that no one has ever died in a supervised drug consumption facility in the nearly 20 years that they have existed.
But in the United States, the facilities appear to violate a 1986 federal law aimed at crack houses. The law criminalized opening or running places where illegal drugs are knowingly used.
“Because federal law clearly prohibits injection sites,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote, “cities and counties should expect the Department of Justice to meet the opening of any injection site with swift and aggressive action.”