A better way to take on drug addiction

“As a department that traditionally has been on the side of enforcing and the accountability side of drug use, we recognize that our efforts have had very little, if no, impact in the reduction of people using drugs.”

New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes

It’s easy to come up with arguments against a plan to distribute drug paraphernalia on the streets of one of Connecticut’s largest cities, where drugs and crime have long plagued the life of residents. Using illegal drugs is supposed to be discouraged, so why would anyone in a position of authority do anything to make it easier?

New Haven, though, last week announced that it has started distributing free plastic bags that contain items including clean needles, sterile glass pipes and information about local rehabilitation services to people who have been released from the city’s detention facility. It’s part of an initiative to use “harm reduction” principles to curb addiction and a turn away from what are considered the failed policies of the long-running “War on Drugs.”

For now, part of the plan is on hold. The State’s Attorney’s Office says the glass pipes in the packets could pose complications to future legal cases involving drug paraphernalia, and the city will wait for a clarification of state law before going ahead with that aspect. But the reasoning behind the plan is sound, and it’s one other communities should explore.

“The focus of this program is harm reduction,” New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said this week. “As a department that traditionally has been on the side of enforcing and the accountability side of drug use, we recognize that our efforts have had very little, if no, impact in the reduction of people using drugs.”

This is dispiriting to consider, but important. For all the millions of dollars spent on enforcement and thousands of people who have spent time behind bars, some serving extraordinarily long sentences, the tactics that police have used to fight drugs over recent decades have had little to no impact in reducing the numbers of addicts.

The harm reduction that New Haven seeks to encourage includes “meeting people where they are, and … creating opportunity for people that are on a destructive path, to hopefully give them a chance to find a way out,” Reyes said. It doesn’t mean law enforcement stands down, but it does mean that a rethink of proper strategies is necessary. New Haven is smart to lead the movement.

City and health officials have compared the distribution of glass pipes to needle exchange programs, which have been in effect for decades and have helped cut the spread of communicable diseases. A change in state law in the 1990s removed syringes from a statute defining drug paraphernalia, and the same should happen for glass pipes like those in the harm reduction kits.

The prevailing wisdom for too long in this country has been to treat drug addiction as a moral failing rather than as a health care issue. The result is a waste of police resources, thousands of people locked up for years on end and a lack of improvement in the state’s addiction statistics. It only makes sense to reconsider how we go about this fight.

The result, if other communities adopt similar policies, could be not just a drop in overdoses and spread of disease, but the decline in addiction rates that was supposed to be the goal all along.