U.S. attorney reproaches plan for injection site

Philly strategy to stem overdose deaths ‘illegal’

PHILADELPHIA — Calling the idea “fundamentally illegal,” the Philadelphia region’s top federal law enforcement official said that his office will take measures, possibly including arrests and prosecutions, to prevent the city from becoming home to the nation’s first safe drug-injection site.

But he is already reviewing possible options to stop it.

“The bottom line is that the sort of facility that is being proposed is illegal under federal law,” U.S. Attorney William McSwain said. “We’re not going to look the other way.”

Supporters contend that their plan is legal, and they intend to proceed. No site has been chosen, but backers have indicated that it’s likely to open in Kensington, the neighborhood that has become both the center and public symbol of the city’s opioid epidemic.

McSwain, in an interview, declined to commit to any specific action. Still, the options he described offered the most concrete outline yet of the federal government’s potential response should the proposal’s backers move forward. They also seemed to signal a looming court battle that could decide the legality of supervised injection sites across the United States.

“Nobody is above the law, and by that I mean nobody,” McSwain said. “I mean the leaders who would be involved in setting up this proposed deadly drug injection site, the board members … the city officials who would be involved in supporting it, the medical personnel who might be staffing it or the folks who might be using the drugs.”

Despite threats of court action, Jose Benitez, president of Safehouse, the Philadelphia safe injection site nonprofit, said he and his colleagues remain undeterred, especially in a city where 1,217 people died of overdoses last year.

City officials have said they would not stand in the way of such a facility in Philadelphia, though they would offer no funding. Pennsylvania

Attorney General Josh Shapiro has come out against the idea, but he has not spelled out any steps he could or might take in response.

Rendell, Benitez and Ronda Goldfein — the third member of the Safehouse board — this month took the first concrete steps toward establishing a safe injection site. They incorporated the Safehouse nonprofit and began fundraising effort to get the $1.8 million they say they will need to operate the facility in its first year.

Under their plan, the site would ban drug dealing, drug sharing, exchanging money, and the sharing of needles or other drug paraphernalia. Participants would not be able to help one another use drugs, and staffers would not handle drugs taken to the site.

Goldfein, who is also executive director of the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, said she and her colleagues have been consulting lawyers should their plans land them in court.

But even in their word choices, the U.S. attorney and Safehouse’s backers remain miles apart.

Both reject the widely used term “safe injection site.” The nonprofit’s backers refer to their proposal as an “overdose prevention site,” while McSwain used the term deadly drug injection site.

And even with the precautions Safehouse has laid out, McSwain views their plan as unworkable.

“It doesn’t really matter that the city’s not involved in funding it,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter that the city isn’t literally grabbing the needles and injecting the addicts with the drugs themselves. They’re setting up a drug house, and that’s clearly illegal under our view.”