Justice
Does New York City Need a Supervised Injection Facility?
Perhaps, according to new research on drugs and public restrooms in the city.
There are about 100 facilities worldwide that allow addicts to legally and safely inject drugs, from Vancouver to Barcelona to Sydney. Might New York be next to embrace this strategy for reducing disease, public blight, and drug overdoses?
Some emboldened form of intervention is needed in New York, where overdose deaths, mostly from opioids, jumped 43 percent from 2010 to 2014. But the political will has so far been lacking for a supervised injection site, where users have clean equipment, social workers, and medical staff poised to administer naloxone and other overdose antidotes. (Heroin-swamped Ithaca, New York, is arguably more progressive on the matter.)