As the unofficial “Crime Week” continues here at Freedom Reconnection, here’s another story that piqued my interest.
Boston’s NPR station WBUR has a story about a group of doctors and nurses belonging to a non-profit organization who want to give substance abusers a place where they can ride out their drug-induced highs. The group seems certain that their idea could save abusers from overdosing and killing themselves.
A room with a nurse, some soft chairs and basic life-saving equipment. Together, this is the latest tool a group of local doctors and nurses plans to create to fight the state’s opiate epidemic.
Though it doesn’t have all the funding yet, Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP) plans to open the so-called “safe space,” where heroin users could ride out a high under medical supervision, at the beginning of next year at the corner of Mass. Ave and Albany Street.
“It really is the epicenter of opiate overdose in Boston,” Dr. Jessie Gaeta, the BHCHP chief medical officer, says of the area where, if all goes according to plan, the space will open.
Gaeta says she and her colleagues are desperate to offer an option for the people they see overdose every day, whom they must sometimes step over to get into the program’s clinic.
“The epidemic feels like it’s been crescendoing on this block,” Gaeta says of the stretch of Mass. Ave known as the “Methadone Mile.” “We’ve got to try new things.”
Dr. Gaeta was quick to say that the planned “safe space” will not allow drug users to get high in their designated wrecked room. It will only serve as a place where users can go after they get high.
“It’s not a place where people would be injecting,” Gaeta says. “[It would be] a place where people would come if they’re high and they need a safe place to be that’s not a street corner or not a bathroom by themselves, where they’re at high risk of dying if they do overdose.”
The residents and businesses in the neighborhood should love this idea. The homeless and the drug-addicted hanging around, getting spaced out, stumbling around, trying to make their way to this place. That is assuming the ones doing the heroin and other drugs want to ride out their highs in a sterile medical environment. Takes the fun out of getting stoned, I would think.
The group hopes to get $250,000 from local foundations to fund this venture. What happens if no private groups want to put money into this? Would bleeding-heart liberal politicians demand that the public gets on board with this brilliant life-saving plan and make them pay for it?
The article says that there have been “hushed conversations” amongst those treating the addicted in Boston to start what is called a “Supervised Injection Facility,” or SIF. Nine other countries have them. These are facilities that allow users to bring their personal drugs and inject them into their bodies under the supervision of medical practitioners. They’re essentially government-approved drug abuse-enabling sites.
Vancouver, Canada, has a place for drug users to get their smack groove on, which has been in operation since 2003. The Canadian Ministry of Health looked into the results of their experiment in 2008 and found that only 5 percent of those who inject drugs like heroin and cocaine did so at the SIF (or SIS, for “Supervised Injection Site,” as they called it). 80 percent of the 600 drug users who went to the Vancouver SIS every day would go there to shoot up in their safe spaces. Only 20 percent of the visitors would go there for counseling. While the doctors, nurses, and other staff might have helped a few stop abusing drugs, the program seemed to make very little impact on getting people to break their addictions. The report admitted that “[t]here is no evidence that SISs influence rates of drug use in the community.”
The Ministry concluded that the SIS was able to save one life a year, at a yearly cost of $3,000,000 to run the program at the one Downtown Eastside facility in Vancouver. The average annual cost per individual to get blitzed at the site on the taxpayers’ dime was $1,380. If it can save just one life…
Glad they were able to make it to one. I wonder if they rounded up or down.
Because of the results in the report, the government sought to shut down the SIS program, but in 2011, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of keeping the Vancouver facility (called “Insite”) open.
As indicated by the aforementioned “hushed” talk, the BHCHP hopes in time to allow users to shoot up inside their facility. Who’s going to check up on the BHCHP to make sure they don’t allow users to come in and get high before the city allows it?
The BHCHP’s plan is to have a nurse and street outreach worker on-site who “would move among 10 or so users to check breathing, other vitals and general health.” Eventually, the group hopes to set up a detox program.
The group’s heart seems in the right place. But I just don’t see how giving drug users a safe space/safe place to be drugged up is going to make all that great of an impact on the drug problems in our communities. This idea should bring up all sorts of questions.
“Are they going to shoot up right outside the room and then go in?” asks Richard Winant, who runs Kelly House, a sober home for men in Wakefield.
Winant applauds the goal of preventing overdoses. But he doesn’t think heroin users will have the wherewithal to come in or be open to talking about treatment if they do come in.
“When [heroin users] come down from that high, they’re not going to be feeling well,” Winant says. “How long do you expect them to be in the room?”
Patients would be free to come and go. Gaeta says the goal is for nurses and recovery workers to build relationships and trust with heroin users over time.
Ray Tamasi, the CEO at Gosnold, an addiction treatment network on Cape Cod, says his staff tried a similar approach with alcohol addiction about 15 years ago.
It was marginally successful, Tamasi says, “but it was taxing, very labor intensive and difficult. You have to have the resources to be able to do it.”
No one, except for illicit drug dealers, want people hooked on drugs. But will this effort evolve to a point down the road where activists demand that taxpayers pay the cost of allowing drug abusers to inject drugs into their veins in government-approved facilities? It could.
I see this working in a similar fashion to Obamacare, where the undisguised end-goal is to get to single-payer. In the case of Boston’s facility, they would create this facility that allows drug users to be high under medical supervision, but it claims it won’t allow people to get high inside the premises. If it works according to plan, that means drug-induced zombies will converge on this one area, leaving who knows what sort of mess in their wake. The solution to one problem creates another problem that must be fixed. Thus, the bleeding hearts will call for allowing addicts to do drugs within these facilities, not just be high in them. They’ll make the public feel guilty for its lack of compassion–and inherent racism, most likely. The masses will finally be convinced of the plan’s good intentions and allow it to go forward, exacerbating the problem instead of solving it. Because private funding won’t be enough–it’s never enough–the government will step in to provide subsidies, creating yet another taxpayer-funded disaster. A disaster that must be kept from worsening by way of…that’s right, more government “investment.”
Start a new system of doing things under the guise of trying to fix a problem, screw it up horrendously, then go for broke–literally. For the children drug addicts.
But you know, because Canada and Europe do it and it almost but not really works there, it’ll surely work here in America. Our people are just like them.
No. We’re not. But we certainly love our safe spaces.
