#safe injection sites

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

#us politics #suicide prevention #suicidal thoughts #tw suicide #public housing #communal housing #public and subsidized housing #affordable living #living wage #standard of living #addiction therapy #recovering addicts #safe injection sites #decriminalize drugs #drug addiction #memes #social programs #social progress

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Timmins first safe injection site is days away from officially opening.

Safe Health Site Timmins is opening on July 4 and will operate seven days a week, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. It's located in the former Living Space location on Cedar Street North across from city hall.

It's a place where people can use previously obtained drugs in the presence of trained medical staff and connect to services. It's being operated by Timmins and District Hospital

#submission #safe injection sites #supervised consumption sites #harm reduction

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Coercing drug users to get sterilized, rounding them up into labor camps, and executing dealers are just some of the more extreme policy ideas being floated by politicians to address the U.S.’ overdose crisis.

But experts say the proposed solutions violate human rights and won’t solve the problem.

During a recent meeting with Mineral County residents, West Virginia state Sen. Randy Smith, a Republican, said he wants to draft a bill that would give people convicted of drug crimes the option to sterilize themselves in order to receive shortened prison sentences.

“If you get caught with drugs—and it’s all voluntary, you don’t have to—but if you want to lessen your prison sentence, if you’re a man, you can get a vasectomy so you can’t produce anymore,” Smith said, according to the Cumberland Times-News.

“If you’re a woman, then you get your tubes tied, so you don’t bring any more drug babies into the system. Now, you don’t have to. If you don’t you’re going to jail for a very long time. If you volunteer for the program, then you get a lesser sentence.”

More than 107,000 Americans died of a fatal overdose in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with fentanyl and other synthetic opioids claiming the lives of over 70,000 people. West Virginia has the highest fatal drug overdose rate in the U.S. with 81.4 deaths per 100,000 people.

Smith’s suggestion is a form of eugenics—a practice of controlling the human population by reproducing “desirable” traits and breeding out those considered undesirable, often based on racist and prejudiced assumptions. As VICE News previously reported, the non-profit Project Prevention gives drug users money to get sterilized. Government-funded sterilization programs have also taken aim at people with mental illness, poor people, incarcerated people, and people of color.

“This is part of a broader trend for some people to say that certain people aren't worthy of becoming parents and that they could pass on— genetically or environmentally—certain traits that are undesirable,” said Sheila Vakharia, deputy director of research and academic engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance.

Vakharia said a eugenics-based solution writes off people with addictions as having problems that they can never overcome. It also ignores the fact that people who use drugs can be good parents, she added.

However, she thinks Smith’s suggestion is mostly “political theater.”

“A lot of politicians are grasping at straws and want to look like they're doing something, but also want to look like they're proposing new solutions,” she said.

Hostility has also been ramping up toward drug dealers. Former President Donald Trump, for example, said he wants the death penalty for everyone caught selling drugs—a position shared by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. At a Nov. 7 rally, Trump also expressed admiration for the idea of having a “quick trial” for drug sellers, that he dubiously claimed came from China.

“If they’re guilty, they are executed,” he said. “The bullet is sent to their families… It’s pretty tough stuff. There’s no games. So they have no drug problem whatsoever.”

While there has been an increase in states passing drug-induced homicide laws, through which dealers are charged with murder if they sell drugs to someone who dies, there’s no evidence that those prosecutions make a dent in the overdose crisis.

In fact, media coverage about such cases have led to spikes in overdoses because people get scared to call the authorities if someone needs help, according to a 2021 report from the Health in Justice Action Lab at Northeastern University.

Vakharia said this is an example of “individualizing the problem,” rather than addressing systemic issues.

“Many people's analysis is that we’ve got to blame individual dealers, drug transporters, and distributors because that's what the problem is, rather than actually seeing that the reason why the drug supply is so unpredictable is because of broader social, structural, and policy factors, namely prohibition, which by its definition leads to an unregulated and adulterated drug supply,” she said.

Hiawatha Collins, community and capacity building manager at National Harm Reduction Coalition, said this rhetoric ignores the fact that a lot of drug dealers are selling drugs to manage their own addictions.

“Nobody's really making a whole lot of money and getting rich doing that,” said Collins, a former marine who has used heroin in the past.

“If people had jobs, if people had education, if people had good health care, if people were able to pay their rent If he was able to pay their rent and keep food on the table—nobody wants to sell drugs.”

As the pandemic has exacerbated societal inequities, large homeless encampments have become another political flashpoint in the War on Drugs. Some policymakers have even suggested forcibly removing them as a solution—or started the process.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently launched an initiative that directs city employees, including the police, to hospitalize mentally ill people who are in public against their will, “even when there is no recent dangerous act,” per state guidelines. In Spring, the mayor also directed the city to start clearing homeless encampments, and some people who refused to leave were arrested.

Many of the encampments are most visible on the West Coast. California had cleared more than 1,250 homeless encampments between September 2021 and August 2022, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office. In a recent op-ed in the California Globe, Edward Ring, founder of the conservative think tank California Policy Center, wrote that people addicted to drugs “could be removed to regional camps set up in inexpensive parts of California’s urban counties.”

“To help earn their keep, they could participate in conservation projects and other character building work, and recover their sobriety, their dignity, and eventually their freedom. The truly mentally ill would have to be placed, involuntarily, in psychiatric hospitals,” Ring said, which drew comparisons to concentration camps on Twitter.

Vakharia said sending people to far-off locations will likely make it harder for those who are overdosing to get medical attention. The appeal of these proposals is that people won’t have to come face to face with visible poverty, she said.

“A lot of this is because of out of sight, out of mind. Some people just don't understand how some people struggled and we don't want to see it.”

Leo Beletsky, a Northeastern University professor of law and health sciences who leads the Health in Justice Action Lab, said a lot of these “fringe ideas” have been previously discredited.

“First of all, they're ineffective. Second of all, there are human rights abuses and ethical issues and moral problems with these kinds of approaches.”

But he said they’re also an indictment of mainstream political leaders who have failed to get a grip on the overdose crisis by implementing more widespread treatment and harm reduction measures, including access to methadone and safe consumption sites.

He pointed to President Joe Biden’s administration backtracking on providing funding for crack pipes as one example. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, recently rejected the idea of using any of the $2 billion the state has received in opioid settlement money from pharmaceutical companies to fund safe injection sites after widespread condemnation from the right.

In Philadelphia, harm reductionists have been trying for years to open a safe injection site but they were sued by former U.S. Attorney William McSwain because the sites are federally illegal. The case has since escalated, with the Department of Justice asking for more time to come to a “possible amicable resolution to continue” earlier this month.

“The rhetoric goes, ‘Well, what we're doing isn't working like, the scientific and quote unquote humane approach, isn't working. We need something else,’” Beletsky said. “But we never tried it, really.”

#us politics #news #vice news #drug addiction #addiction therapy #decriminalize drugs #safe injection sites #Sen. Randy Smith #sterilization #genocide #eugenics #Project Prevention #Sheila Vakharia #Drug Policy Alliance #executions #death penalty #Health in Justice Action Lab #Northeastern University #National Harm Reduction Coalition #Hiawatha Collins #concentration camps #War on Drugs #mayor Eric Adams #Gov. Gavin Newsom #California Globe #Edward Ring #California Policy Center #Leo Beletsky #Gov. Kathy Hochul #William McSwain

[im-the-hazard]

Lil rant post but do Yk what the U.S and really every country needs? And idc if you disagree Bc it’s a fact that having them would save lives.

Safe injection sites.

No they don’t condone drug use at all. The condone being safe if you are going to do drugs and they in fact tend to always have nurses and doctors and counselors who try and work with the people who come in to get them substance abuse help.

Making them legal, free and disagree including requiring them to follow hippa laws would drastically lower the amount of yearly death related to drugs use including but not limited to, overdoses, infections, heart attacks, hepatitis and HIV.

For those of you who don’t know what they are, a safe injection sight is a place drug users who shoot can go to where they have access to a safe environment with volunteer nurses and doctors on sight with the necessary equipment to help with any of the users emergency medical needs and the users are giving kits with a sterile syringe and needle, alcohol swabs, tourniquets, filers and sterile cookers. They do not help the users inject or inject the users nor do they sell or supply them with IV. They simply provide a safe environment with safe tools for users.

Lots of safe injection sites also provide free pregnancy, HIV and Hepatitis test however I also believe they should provide confidential urine and blood drugs test in order to lower the rate of overdoses due to substances being laced.

Having these all over the world will not make the rate of users climb, only lower the death rate amongst users and maybe even lower the number of users and raise the number of recovered addicts.

#drugs tw #war on drugs #drug abuse #safe injection sites

[loreeebee]

Safe Injection Sites

So much for saving lives by decriminalizing drugs and funding safe injection sites. That, of course, was the political and sentimental argument for creating these sites. The Economist makes this claim: The aim was to contain open-air drug markets and combat diseases spread by dirty needles. Since then, dozens more have opened across the continent (by 2018, the Netherlands led the way with 31…

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#@PierrePoilievre #decriminalizing drugs #enabling #safe injection sites #The Economist

[sleep-safe]

California gov votes to continue allowing preventable drug overdoses, more at 11.

#anger #drugs tw #overdose tw #California #politics #us politics #West us politics #drugs #war on war on drugs #emotional headache #the urge to jostle that guy #... it's there #current news #tw overdose #tw drugs #harm reduction #safe injection sites #also i realized this is fully headline reaction syndrome and im reading the full article rn #ik he at least had a moment of thought before voting #and disgustingly this would be politically dangerous #still

[joseywritesng]

Is There a Future for Safe Drug Consumption Sites?

Is There a Future for Safe Drug Consumption Sites?

PHOTO CREDIT: Kent Nishimura / Getty Images SOURCES: Cornell Law School: “21 U.S. Code S 856 – Maintaining Drug-Related Buildings.” The New York Times: “Nation’s First Controlled Drug Injection Sites Open in New York.” Filter: “NY Bill to Expand Safe Consumption Sites, In Short Time.” Gothamist: “After years of delay, NYC opens first controlled injection sites in US to fight opioid…

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#damage control #safe injection sites #safe places to eat

[jhscdood]

we are missing out on a huge opportunity for Jason Todd to be a force of Chaotic Good

#red hood #jason todd #look if he's the protector of crime alley and Gotham's downtrodden #I'd expect a lot more effort put into destabilizing the systems that keep people down #burn down the payday loan place and replace it with a nonprofit equivalent with a 0% interest rate #subsidize an afforable grocery store because you know that place is a food desert #buy up the slums and remodel them to be safer and cleaner and healthier without increasing rent #put up needle exchanges and safe-injection sites #ban cops from setting foot in the district without a warrant #ban stop-and-frisk #ban cops from schools #FUND THE SCHOOLS #put everyone on triple food stamp benefits #free medical clinics and dentists every 3 blocks

[katyakazanovas]

i think me being obsessed with sarah lynn from bojack and jane margolis from breaking bad says something about what a sad girl i was growing up lmao

#rachel says things.txt #breaking bad #bojack horseman #jane margolis #sarah lynn #safe injection sites save lives

[bibleofficial]

talked w the professor i want to sponsor my weed dissertation & she said it sounds better as a phd & that it may be ‘too big’ to do in like 5 months 😭😭

#stream #ALSKALKSLAKSALKSLA #ok so i’ve got a NEW IDEA ALREADY #i’m going to go bother somali & yemeni people until i find khat ALSKALSKALSKALSKALSKLA #do we see people going into other illegal substance following the ban - it’s now underground so what’s the new source ? would it be easier ? #will the needle exchange in the area be familiar ? is there still open public use ? #where are the safe injection sites ? are there any ? #girl i’m living #also see if i can find hash floatin around #like well i’m doin the weed research REGARDLESS #like this was a pet project & will CONTINUE TO BE

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A new bill in the capitol would legalize safe spaces to use drugs.

The bill would allow the Department of Human Services to license what the bill calls “Overdose Prevention Sites.” People could go to these locations and use illegal drugs under direct supervision, with no fear of criminal prosecution.

Right now, they are far from common in the United States. Rhode Island is the only state to legalize them, but New York City and several other cities have them. A pair of lawmakers are saying those spaces are the next logical step as the state tries to curb overdose deaths.

Opioid overdoses continue to be a leading cause of accidental deaths in the state for those between the ages of 18 and 49. In 2021, 3,013 people died from overdoses. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. La Shawn Ford (D-Chicago), said supervised injection sites are a logical step to help curb those numbers.

“Why would we turn our backs on people struggling with a substance use disorder saying, ‘no, we don’t want to allow space for you,'” Ford said. “‘We would rather see you die on the streets.'”

Taylorville Police Chief Dwayne Wheeler takes his own unique approach to helping people who are suffering from addiction. The Taylorville Safe Passage program has helped hundreds of people get clean before they get in trouble with the law. The increased supervision is a sensible idea for Wheeler, but he is skeptical of the ramifications that come with giving people a safe space to use.

“There’s a lot of work to be done,” Wheeler said. “But let’s treat the people.”

Ford said in an ideal situation, there would be treatment options available at these facilities.

“I think we should have the debate to make sure that when we have overdose prevention sites, that they’re not places where people just go use drugs,” Ford said. “It’s the place where people go and get the help that they need while struggling with a substance use disorder.”

But the bill does not require those services. At a minimum, the bill would require these facilities to have a clean space to use, have naloxone to help people survive an overdose, staff that can help people who are in the middle of an overdose and equipment like fentanyl testing strips. It also would give legal immunity to people who use in those facilities.

Wheeler’s Safe Passage program gives people the opportunity to come into the police department and say they need help. It’s gained state wide acclaim, and even earned his department a $250,000 grant from the state to expand.

The program prioritizes getting people to treatment centers. It relies on people to take that first step and admit they need help, and once they take that step, the department — and it’s long list of volunteers — will drive that person to whatever rehab center they can find a spot in, no matter where it is in the state.

He said if the state is going to allow supervised injection sites, they need to carefully design the program, and make sure it leaves no questions unanswered on how it would work.

There is data that shows supervised injection sites have positive impacts, but they also come with societal ramifications, including arguments over where the sites will be located.

“Illinois should answer the call, knowing that this is the best harm reduction tool that we have in our toolbox,” Ford said. “When you look at overdose prevention sites, and you look at other harm reduction tools, this is the number one harm reduction tool that has proven to save lives across the world.”

This is not the first time the proposal has made its way around the Capitol, but it hasn’t found any traction in past years. So far, the bill has not been voted on in any committees.

#us politics #news #wcia #2023 #Illinois #Overdose Prevention Sites #Illinois Department of Human Services #Opioid overdoses #opioid crisis #La Shawn Ford #supervised injection sites #Dwayne Wheeler #Taylorville Safe Passage program #substance use disorder #substance abuse #drug addiction #addiction #Illinois legislature

[tanadrin]

that's wild. my doctor gave my oxy "just in case" bc my menstrual cramps weren't responding to otc stuff. very different experiences we're having in our respective medical systems

Even though I don't experince any kind of recurrent or chronic pain issus (thank god), I'm kind of radicalized on the question of how w should treat pain. If our options are suffering in silence 24/7 because of the fear someone, somewhere might be getting high, or being stoned to the gills constantly, I think we should err on the side of the latter. Pain sucks! Sometimes people are in a lot of pain for no reason! Epidemics of opioid addiction and overdose deaths are a real problem, and I don't want to minimize that, but a big part of that problem is how healthcare is managed and how pain is treated! Plus, AIUI, the big danger with opioids is the variably quality and dosing of street narcotics--a drug-seeker coming into the ER is coming into a much less dangerous environment (and if they overdose, well, they're already at the hospital!).

#ideally safe injection sites would also be a thing #and more availability for things like methadone #and society being less shitty to addicts in general

[valiumgf]

literally I want to be a case manager so bad...it's my passion and my dream career

#txt #i dont want to fuck with any other branch of social work except maybe like working at a safe injection site idk

[thekintsugi-adult]

YOU CANNOT SUPPORT PRISON ABOLITION IF YOU SUPPORT THE INCARCERATION OF DRUG ADDICTS.

#PRISON ABOLITION MUST INCLUDE ACTUAL SAFETY AND CARE FOR ADDICTS #SAFE INJECTIONS SITES ETC #sasha speaks

[joseywritesng]

Is There a Future for Safe Drug Consumption Sites?

Is There a Future for Safe Drug Consumption Sites?

PHOTO CREDIT: Kent Nishimura / Getty Images SOURCES: Cornell Law School: “21 U.S. Code S 856 – Maintaining Drug-Related Buildings.” The New York Times: “Nation’s First Controlled Drug Injection Sites Open in New York.” Filter: “NY Bill to Expand Safe Consumption Sites, In Short Time.” Gothamist: “After years of delay, NYC opens first controlled injection sites in US to fight opioid…

View On WordPress

#damage control #safe injection sites #safe places to eat

[katamarigender]

Not my manager being anti- safe injection sites...

#my stuff #because their kid with diabetes has to pay for needles but the drug users don't???? i guess? #'either everybody gets them or nobody does'. bro. #surely you can advocate for better healthcare for your child without putting down people who use safe injection sites? right? #as if they aren't demonized enough already.