Safe injection sites in NYC reduce OD deaths, but not in the worst neighborhoods

There is a glimmer – the tiniest ray of hope – of good news about drug overdoses in New York.

The The city’s health department is reporting that overdose The number of deaths in 2023 decreased compared to the previous year, but only decreased by one percent, from 3,070 to 3,046.

A closer look at that number shows that not only is it small, but an important indicator has not declined.

As the city puts it, “overdose deaths remained disproportionately high among Black and Latino New Yorkers.”

Yet it is residents of low-income neighborhoods of color where overdose deaths should be reduced through so-called “harm reduction” centers – facilities where addicts can inject drugs they bring with them under medical supervision.

The two “overdose prevention centers” run by OnPoint NYC – not legal under federal law but allowed to operate in the city – both are located in the Black and Hispanic neighborhoods: one on East 125th Street in Harlem, another on West 180th Street in Washington Heights, not far from The Bronx, which suffers from the highest number of overdose deaths in the city.

With the city turning a legal blind eye to harm reduction sites, it’s important to wonder whether they might be encouraging hard drug use — and indirectly, the persistently high overdose death rates in the neighborhoods these facilities serve.

A study supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, conducted by NYU Langone Medical Center in collaboration with Brown University, was funded to “measure the impact of some of the first publicly accredited overdose prevention centers (OPCs) in the United States.”

But it won’t report final results until 2027 — and that’s too long to wait to learn more about a program that is neither legal under federal drug laws nor certain to be helpful.

It’s fair to say that OnPoint NYC has no doubts about the effectiveness of its program. It is confident that its guidelines for activities such as “safer snorting, safer meth use” and “safer IV injection and safer crack/speedball injection” will reduce overdose deaths.

It counts as a success that it has helped more than 5,000 patients and, it says, intervened to prevent 1,626 overdoses.

In other words, there is an argument to be made that without their efforts, New York would have suffered not a small decline but a sharp spike in OD deaths.

But the fact remains that overdose deaths remain persistently high in the neighborhoods served by OnPoint, suggesting that there are other ways to consider the impact of these efforts — which we can hope the NYU Langone-Brown- study will measure this.

The core idea that drug use can be safe sends a message: a message of encouragement rather than prevention.

Do OnPoint centers treat established addicts or encourage new ones?

Langone and Brown need to look at who is being served over time: the same addicts or new ones?

In the short term, moreover, the city’s own health department can—not in four years, but as soon as possible—examine the available information to answer this question: Are those dying of overdoses the same addicts that OnPoint allegedly saves?

The city doesn’t have to wait for the Langone/Brown study — which will try to identify 1,000 addicts over four years — to compare the death certificates of those who die of an overdose with the list of those seen in the safe injection sites.

Please note that these facilities are not open 24/7; Addicts can overdose anywhere.

So far, the city has not only agreed to the OnPoint operations, but encouraged them.

That’s the official message from Dr. Ashwin Vasan, commissioner of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, who said: “The facts are clear: overdose prevention centers save lives. Overdose Prevention Centers are an evidence-based harm reduction approach that we must authorize, invest in, and expand to combat our overdose epidemic.”

One can only doubt the claim that the evidence comes from – years before a major federally funded study produced the data.

New York City, like municipalities across the country, is lining up to receive millions in so-called “opioid settlement funds” from the manufacturers of opioids that have been abused.

The city should use its $50 million to send a clear message: drugs, from weed to fentanyl, are not a safe choice, they are a bad choice.

Howard Husock is a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Poor Side of Town – And Why We Need It.”