The mayor of Ithaca in upstate New York wants his city to host the nation’s first supervised injection facility, where heroin users would be able to shoot illegal drugs into their bodies under the care of a nurse without getting arrested by police.
Canada, Europe and Australia are working to reduce overdose deaths with these facilities, but in the United States, even the idea of creating supervised injection sites faces significant legal and political challenges.
That has to change and quickly, said Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick.
“My father was a drug addict. He split from the family when I was 5, 6 years old,” the mayor, now 28, explained in an Associated Press interview. “I have watched for 20 years this system that just doesn’t work. We can’t wait anymore for the federal government. We have people shooting up in alleys. In bathroom stalls. And too many of them are dying.”
Myrick said he will ask New York’s Health Department to declare the heroin epidemic a state health crisis, which he said would enable his city to proceed without involving the state legislature. Myrick told the AP about his proposal ahead of a wider announcement planned for Wednesday.
Once dismissed as a radical idea, injection sites are increasingly being discussed as a possible response to huge increases in overdose deaths nationwide. In New York state, overdose deaths involving heroin and other opiates shot from 186 in 2003 to 914 in 2012.
Ithaca alone had three fatal overdoses and 13 non-fatal overdoses in a three-week span in 2014, prompting city officials to begin looking at alternatives to simply jailing addicts. The city of 30,000, which hosts Cornell University and Ithaca College, is considered one of New York’s most liberal communities and is a prime candidate for new approaches, Myrick said.
The mayor said this facility would be staffed by nurses or physicians who could quickly administer an antidote if and when a user overdoses. But addicts also could get clean syringes and be directed to treatment and recovery programs — part of a more holistic approach that deals with addiction more like a public health issue than a criminal justice problem.
Myrick crafted his plan in collaboration with police and prosecutors, overcoming initially strong opposition from District Attorney Gwen Wilkinson.
“What brought me around was the realization that this wouldn’t make it more likely that people will use drugs,” Wilkinson said. “What it would do is make it less likely that people will die in restaurant bathrooms.”
Spokesmen for the Department of Health and Gov. Andrew Cuomo didn’t respond Monday to the AP’s request for comment.
Canada’s first injection facility opened in Vancouver in 2003. Every day, 800 users visit, and between 10 and 20 of them overdose each week, but no one has ever died there, according to Dr. Patricia Daly, chief medical health officer at Vancouver Coastal Health, which operates the “Insite” facility.
“These overdoses are completely reversible,” Daly said. “People die because they inject alone.”
Insite receives the bulk of its funding from government now, but faced significant initial opposition from officials in Ottawa. A 2011 Canadian Supreme Court decision ordered federal officials to stop fighting the facility, noting that it has saved lives “with no discernible negative impact.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
He is partly right. However not enough are dying! We need to start government sponsored facilities where addicts can come and use as much and as often as they want. There should be treatment facilities too. The options are: Get sober or use until you leave horizontal. Do not resuscitate will the order of the day. Eventually, the weak will be weeded out and the public will see what a dead end, literally, the drug scene is. The demand will lessen due to the obvious consequences.
While. I know this seems uncaring, the costs of unsupervised drug addiction is becoming too costly for society. Give them what they want until no one wants it anymore.
Since there is evidence that there is a genetic component to addiction, letting them just kill themselves off might help unless as the Mayor said, his father already had children since addiction reduces sense of responsibility. Would our money nor be better spent on cures?
Why does one person’s body not naturally produce the chemical endorphins that allow addicts to feel the same senses of happiness, accomplishment and well being as non active feels?
Why does the treatment have to be more of the bad stuff?
Not my definition of “treatment”.
How much can the rest of us continue to be charged for the extremely small percentage that MIGHT possibly benefit. Is this not just supporting the illness instead?
I am o.k. with just giving them the drugs if it keeps them from stealing from someone in order to buy it. It would also stop dealing and selling if there were no profit in it.
But I’ll be damed if I want to pay for free doctors, nurses and facilities that hard working tax payers can not get when they are sick with something they did nothing to bring on themselves.
Even the tweaked morality we are using now should say no. Not until you can provide EQUAL service to all; cancer patients, organ failures, etc.
If we legalize all drugs the crime is eliminated. OD’s will lessen. We would have to build more rehab centers, give more education on drugs but that would add jobs.
Hes not just a dope. Hes got a lacka…
A lack of common sense. Where did all these
Pea brains come from. What happened to
Majority wins. Because im pretty sure the majority would vote against this. What a
Bunch of nuts. Ive seen squirrels with
More sense than these morons.
THESE POOR ADDICTED FOLKS, THERE IS NO REAL CURE. THEY HAVE DESTROYED THEIR LIVES AND SOME OF THE PEOPLE AROUND THEM, NOT TO MENTION A LIFE OF CRIME TO SUPPORT THEIR HABIT. SOONER OR LATER THEY WILL OVERDOSE. YOU HAVE TO ASK YOURSELF WHAT IS THEIR FUTURE. WE HAVE A MORAL OBLIGATION TO TRY AN CURE THEM, BUT MOST GO BACK TO DRUGS. AT ANYRATE ITS A NO WIN DEAL. THE ADDICT LOSES AND THE REST OF US HOOF THE TAB. MAYBE DEATH IS THE ANSWER..
If I eat rat poison to get high, is some idiotic leftist going to ask taxpayers to provide a facility where I can eat all the rat poison I please with round the clock tax-payer funded supervision? Do I even need to say how idiotic this is? What ever happened to individual responsibility?
And i guess the price of this will be put on the tax payers.What a joke
Here is how the LIBERAL politicians should handle the drug problem, they all probably live in mansions with extra room…
So they need to open THEIR houses and pocket books, to pay for staff and drugs for these POOR wayward individuals!!!
Let the POOR individuals stay as long as they want and when they die , Mayor Svante Myrick can pay to have them disposed of at his personal expense !!! I for one am tired of these politicians putting the finical burden on the backs of hard working people, it is one thing to be charitable and the next to be forced to pay for another s STUPIDITY !!!
Hey, the druggies win again. Look around the country and you will see the majority are being jerked around by the minority at everything illegal. The leadership, at all levels, seem to have a total lack of common sense.
Compassion is more economical than moralism. Check out the evidence from where this has been tried in other countries such as the UK.
This guy is no dope. The dope is the one that thinks he is a dope. A legal facility for drug addicts is exactly what is needed to prevent addicts from contracting deadly diseases through dirty needles, etc., and having these addicts end up gracing the state prisons.
It’s sick out there and getting sicker.
Dumbest thing i have heard of.
HaHa! The “health” charlatans who run massive ad campaigns on the media to make trillions of their lethal “health” dugs are laughing all the way to the banks they OWN! The same banksters run the street drug cartels with sheer idiots manning their flocks, while the puppeteer politicians smear everything and promote even more mayhem as “politically correct” bull honky!
It’s no wonder one Constitution framer(“Writer” for you whose dubious public school English is too twisted and filled with massive gaps to know the words and terms of this elegant language) remarked to a partisan who aske, “What have you wrought?” – We have wrought a decree whereby you the citizen have the power and the authority to stand OVER the government and it shall do YOUR bidding!” The “government” he spoke of was NOT AT ALL DEMOCRATIC! It was a federated republic, where elected individuals were held to the flame for ALL their acts. The OPOSITE of democracy!
The bankster tugs then in power proceeded to redefine the Constitution to where, today, it is used against the citizen.
Go figure, you who worship under the shoddy table of democracy. You are “OWNED.”
Commonsense is already a missing agent in many of our people, and brain cells are dying off because of drugs . This should really finish our future for us all. We will all be totally not able to think move or have normal children if we support this incorrect habit, which can cause birth defect in our children and our ability to care for them properly!. People who are thinking up this stuff, are like having a person dangling candy in front of a diabetic and hoping to kill them! What a set up, in order to turn us all into zombies!? Why would we ever be wiling to pay for it too!