[Drug War Chronicle] Effort to Bring Safe Injection Facility to New York City Getting Underway

Last Friday, more than 150 people gathered at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City for a daylong conference on the science, politics, and law of safe injection facilities (SIFs) as part of a budding movement to bring the effective but controversial harm reduction measure to the Big Apple. Sponsored, among others, by the college, the Harm Reduction Coalition, and an amalgam of 17 different New York City needle exchange and harm reduction programs known as the Injection Drug User Health Alliance (IDUHA), the conference targeted not only harm reductionists but public health advocates and officials, law enforcement, service providers, and the general public.

The Safe Injection Facilities in New York conference aimed to create public awareness of SIFs, provide evidence that they are cost-effective, and start developing a plan for implementing SIFS in New York. As the conference program indicates, organizers relied heavily on experts from Vancouver, where the Downtown Eastside Insite SIF has been in operation -- and under evaluation -- since 2003, to provide the evidence base.

The first SIFs opened in Switzerland in the mid-1980s. Since then, they have spread slowly and there are now 65 SIFS operating in 27 cities in eight countries: Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Norway, Luxembourg, and Canada. Although advocates have been working for the past year-and-a-half to bring an SIF to San Francisco, that effort has yet to bear fruit.

SIFS are credited with saving lives through overdose prevention, reducing the spread of blood-borne disease, reducing public drug use and attendant drug litter, and creating entryways to treatment and other services for hard-core drug users not ready to abstain. The results reported by the Vancouver delegation on Insite were typical:

• No fatal overdoses at the SIF.
• No increase in local drug trafficking.
• No substantial increase in the rate of relapse into injection drug use.
• Reductions in public drug use, publicly discarded syringes and syringe sharing.
• SIF users 1.7 times more likely to enter detox programs.
• More than 2,000 referrals to counseling and other support services since opening.
• Collaboration with police to meet public health and public order objectives.

But despite such research results, the United States remains without an operating SIF. The obstacles range from the legal, such as the federal crack house law and its counterparts in many states, to the political and the moral. But for harm reduction and public health advocates, it is the failure to embrace such proven life-saving measures that has the stench of the immoral.

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