Overdose Prevention Centers are right for city of Boulder
House Bill 23-1202, generally known as Local Control of Life-saving Overdose Prevention Centers (OPC), is good policy and a good bill that deserves our support. Primarily because, as shown below, OPCS reduce the problems associated with criminalized drug use, reduce criminalized drug use and don’t increase crime around the centers.
Drug overdoses are a major leading cause of death in the United States and in Colorado, with nearly 107,000 people killed in the U.S. and 1,500 in Colorado in 2022. Above and beyond the extraordinary loss of life, in Boulder, criminalized drug use has been pushed into our other public spaces, such as parks, public restrooms in our public spaces like the library and other places where the practices aren’t acceptable.
So, what is an Overdose Prevention Center? OPCS are legally sanctioned and supervised facilities designed to reduce the health problems associated with drug use. At these sites, people bring drugs obtained prior to their arrival and consume them in a hygienic and low-risk environment. They can also have access to addiction treatment help, clean needles, overdose prevention medication and on-site medical professionals.
Numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies have proven the positive impacts of Overdose Prevention Sites. These benefits include:
• Increased access to drug treatment, especially among people who distrust the treatment system and are unlikely to seek treatment on their own.
• Reduced public disorder, reduced public injecting and increased public safety.
• Attracting and retaining a high-risk population of people who inject drugs, who are at heightened risk for infectious disease and overdose.
• Reduced HIV and Hepatitis C risk behavior (e.g. syringe and other injection equipment sharing).
• Reducing the prevalence and harms of bacterial infections (e.g. staph infection, endocarditis).
• Successfully managing overdoses and reducing overdose death rates.
• Cost savings resulting from reduced disease, overdoses, and need for emergency medical services, and increased preventive healthcare and drug treatment utilization.
• Not increasing community drug use, initiation into injection drug use and drug-related crime.
Decades of propaganda created in our failed War on Drugs has left many folks scared, including me (at first), that allowing OPCS in our community would increase crime and drug use in the areas around the centers. However, OPCS are nothing new to the world. What we are proposing is happening in 16 countries and over 150 sites operating for the past 20 to 30 years. Research on criminalized behavior surrounding the site shows the opposite effect. One study of a Vancouver OPC, operating since 2003, and one in the United States, operating since 2010, have shown criminalized activity either decreased or at least did not increase surrounding those facilities.
I get it, allowing sanctioned use of criminalized drugs in our community can be scary, but, I would argue, the current policy of criminalization and minimal support (on our terms), is even more scary and unpredictable. If we keep doing the same things, we are going to get the same results. We need new ideas, backed by decades of research, to move in a different path.
YES, we need comprehensive medical and addiction support and many other systematic changes to reduce criminalized drug use, and YES, we can help the people, and families, affected by Criminalized Drug Use with the passage of HB23-1202.
Doug Hamilton is a parent, lawyer, engineer and human who believes in free public spaces and a more participatory society. Contact him at hamilton1801@aim.com or @doug_c_hamilton on twitter.