The Harlem injection site sits across the street from a pre-school.
The establishment of supervised drug-injection sites in two New York City neighborhoods has predictably rankled area business-owners and residents.
The two sites, located in Washington Heights and East Harlem, are the first of their kind in the country. They provide clean syringes and overdose-prevention services to addicts, who bring drugs from outside. The sites previously housed needle-exchange programs, according to the New York Post.
“There’s needles on the sidewalk all the time,” the owner of a store near the Washington Heights injection site told National Review. Customers are “afraid” of addicts when “they’re standing in front of the store.” The store-owner asked to remain anonymous to avoid backlash.
Moreover, the East Harlem injection site sits across the street from a preschool, the Echo Park Children and Family Center.
“The reaction of our coalition was shock that the city would consider a location which is directly across from a pre-K . . . building,” Shawn Hill, an East Harlem resident and co-founder of the advocacy group Greater Harlem Coalition, told National Review. GHC was established to combat what the group calls the “over-saturation” of neighborhoods of color “with social services rejected by wealthier neighborhoods.” (The school itself did not respond to a request for comment.)
The East Harlem clinic opened in an area with a high concentration of opioid-addiction treatment clinics, which serve patients from across New York City.
“The key consideration should be, is East Harlem overburdened by more than its fair share of treatment programs in its midst? And I think the answer is clearly yes,” Hill said. “Why do we not have smaller-scale, effective treatment programs that are focused on recovery located in all neighborhoods — not just in communities of color, but also in wealthy, whiter neighborhoods as well?”
Both facilities began operating at the beginning of December, as part of a new nonprofit called OnPoint NYC. This nonprofit was created following the merger of two organizations, the New York Harm Reduction Educators and Washington Corner Project, that provide addiction-treatment services.
OnPoint NYC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. However, the group told the Gothamist that during the first two weeks of December, over 350 patients took advantage of the facilities. Of those, staff were able to reverse 43 overdoses.
“We’re keeping people alive so that when — I say when — when they have the opportunity or believe they’re in a place to reduce their drug use, or really see themselves for who they are on the inside, they can be here to do that,” Sam Rivera told PBS’s NewsHour earlier this month.
“You got to understand that the majority of us don’t really want to be here,” a man preparing to inject heroin at the Harlem clinic told PBS. “I can only tell you about me. You know, I’m here because I really needed their help, and they gave me the help I needed.”
The so-called harm-reduction initiatives come as the U.S. suffers through record levels of overdose deaths, with over 100,000 Americans having died of drug overdoses between April 2020 and April 2021. New York City alone saw 2,062 overdose deaths, with over 85 percent of those overdoses caused by opioids.
The sites are also a glimpse into the likely future of addiction in America. Media focus turned to New York because that’s where the country’s first safe-injection sites opened, but Philadelphia has already attempted to open such a site, and the Rhode Island legislature passed a law last summer to establish a pilot program with so-called harm-reduction centers across the state to prevent opioid overdoses. The legislature acted following a record 384 overdose deaths in the state in 2020.
The Boston Globe Editorial Board has also called to open such centers in Boston, and a spokeswoman for New York governor Kathy Hochul said the governor wants to “explore the efficiency” of prevention sites, in comments to the New York Times.
Federal law forbids owning, operating, or renting a location to use illegal drugs, meaning the U.S. Justice Department could sue to shut down the sites. While the DOJ did just that in 2019 to prevent the opening of Philadelphia’s proposed safe-injection site, under Attorney General Merrick Garland the agency has not commented on the opening of the New York sites. So long as there are no major instances of violence at the sites, one could reasonably expect the Biden administration to allow the sites to operate without the threat of prosecution.
The opening of supervised drug-consumption sites in upper Manhattan heralds a potential major change in the way society handles drug addiction. Whether or not communities are comfortable with it, government officials seem willing to give overdose-prevention centers a try in the real world.