Has Philadelphia found a more effective way to treat drug addiction?
They found her out in the fields
About a mile from home
Her face was warm from the sun
But her body was cold
I heard a policeman say
Just another overdose
...Just another overdose
“Heroin Girl” — Everclear
“Safe Injection Sites.” I can remember the first time I heard of this phenomena…partly because it was too shocking to the conscious to conceive as real and partly because the concept of being “shocked” is clearly coming to an end in this world, but mostly because I’d only heard of it maybe five days prior to writing this.
For those blissfully unaware, this is a mechanism in which people bring their own drugs to shoot up under the watch of medical staffing a facility that provides clean needles and other equipment. Advocates say the goal is to provide a bridge to treatment.
The tip of the spear (needle?) in this case is the City of Philadelphia, who cites success stories from 90 other such facilities across the world—none of which are on American soil, of course. They are at this point because they are clearly desperate as a city who saw over 1,200 fatal overdoses last year. (That was “twelve-HUNDRED”…drug related overdoses, so yes. You get to be “desperate” at such a point.)
The city’s new district attorney, Larry Krasner, has promised he would not prosecute users at the safe-injection site.
“Supervised injection sites are a form of harm reduction,” says Krasner, who was sworn into office just last week. “The only way to get people to turn their lives around,” he says, “is to keep them alive long enough so they can do that. And we’re going to do that.”
Did I mention that this was the District Attorney for the City of Philadelphia?
The size and lethality of the problem, Krasner says, should be shifting the conversation away from the country’s long history of responding to drug users with criminal punishment…which conveniently leads us to the slack-jawed response of law enforcement.
You can brace yourself but as it turns out, the Philly Police Commissioner (Richard Ross) has a hard time signing off on designating a legal place for the use of an illegal narcotic...but his opinion may be moot because the Federal Government has already promised to “aggressively crack down” on similar plans in Vermont.
Patrick Trainer, a special agent out of the Philly DEA’s field office, politely states “This…is just not a concept we can get behind.”
Would a centralized spot not attract dealers and therefore increase sales? And if the overdoses continued…what was the next step? Government supplied drugs as well as a government facility to inject illegal drugs “for the greater good”?
This is an opinion column and my word limit is drawing near, so what’s your humble narrators take on this idea?
Philadelphia’s fatal overdose rate is four times that of its homicide rate. This is, at best, an average number from city to city (Chattanooga included).
People are shooting up with or without OD’ing under bridges, in alleyways, on the streets, in abandoned buildings…not to mention the backyards and stoops and basements of our houses, our elementary schools and churches.
My opinion is only that whatever we are doing now is clearly not working. We’re all in the same boat and I’m just “the help” after all, so the real question is…what do you think our next step should be?
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.