Bill would open centers for safe use of illegal drugs

Advocates gathered Wednesday at the state Capitol to call for the passage of S.B. 9, which among other public-health initiatives would establish places where drug users can safely use illegal opioids.

Harm reduction centers — also called safe injection sites — are found worldwide, in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Ukraine, according to Drug Policy Alliance.

In the United States, they are legal only in New York. The 22 state senators who are co-sponsoring S.B. 9 hope Connecticut will be the second.

Saud Anwar (D-south Windsor) is one of them. He held a news conference in advance of the public hearing on S.B. 9 urging passage of the bill. According to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,371 Connecticut residents died of drug overdoses in 2020.

“Today we have to ask ourselves a question: How many more? If there is a number that they are waiting for, I want to know what that number is,” Anwar said.

“Every day, we are losing four people in our state. Four people who were beautiful individuals, part of a family … with a full, hopeful life ahead of them, and it was taken away from them,” he said.

At harm reduction centers, those with drug addictions can bring drugs bought elsewhere and consume them at the sites. A staff of trained health care workers will monitor their usage and reverse an overdose should one occur.

Onpoint NYC, which operates the New York safe injection sites, announced last September that 500 overdose deaths were prevented by staff at the centers.

No one has died of overdoses at the centers.

At the news conference, Mark Jenkins, executive director of Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance, anticipated pushback. “The most effective public health responses don’t always tend to have favor with the public,” he said. But he urged passage of the bill.

“And at what point will we stop doing some of the same things and expecting different results? … The recovery world is doing the same thing and expecting different results,” Jenkins said. “We’re asking you all to think outside the box.”

John Lally of Ellington, an ARPN and executive director of Today I Matter, Inc., brought a photo of his son Tim to the news conference. Tim died of an opioid overdose at age 29.

“We’re talking four people lost a day in Connecticut. But we’re not talking about numbers, are we? We’re talking about people,” Lally said. “What we’ve done has not helped. Let’s try something different, because what we’re doing is not working.”

S.B. 9 would authorize the state departments of Mental Health and Addiction Services and Public Health to establish harm reduction centers in three municipalities in the state, with the permission of those municipalities’ elected officials.

Centers would employ health care professionals with overdose-prevention experience, who would keep an eye on people using drugs, provide sterile needles if needed, reverse overdoses should they occur using naloxone or other opioid antagonists, and refer people to drug counseling.

Among those giving testimony at the hearing on Wednesday in support of S.B. 9 were dozens of health care executives, social service workers and family members of overdose victims.

One of them was Dita Bhargava of Shatterproof, which advocates for easier access to addiction treatment. Bhargava’s son, Alec Pelletier, died of an overdose of fentanyl on his 26th birthday.

“Our moral, social and economic obligation is to find bold solutions to end this crisis,” Bhargava said. “Overdose prevention clinics have proven to keep loved ones alive long enough for them to find help.”

Other elements of the umbrella health-and-wellness bill include new legislation regarding fertility treatments, qualifications for health educators, opioid prescription controls, protocols for first responders, establishment of a health care career advisory council and access to reproductive health services.