Questioning ‘Safe Spaces’ for Addicts

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And some believe that includes using tax dollars to care for people while they inject illegal drugs.

Seattle recently announced it would establish a government-funded “safe” drug space, where heroin users could inject without fear of repercussions. On-site nursing staff would monitor the addicts and keep them from fatally overdosing.

“We estimate that we’ve diverted at least a third of patients from the ER,” said one “safe space” advocate.

The mayor of Ithaca, New York, announced a similarly controversial plan. And in Boston, the nonprofit Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP) opened a space where users could come down from their highs.

The opioid crisis has reached epidemic proportions across America. As many as 2.1 million Americans are currently addicted to opioids, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. More than 28,000 people died from overdoses in 2014 alone.

Making it easier and safer for drug addicts to hurt themselves — and make no mistake, drug users are hurting themselves no matter where they engage in their activities — seems a highly counterintuitive way to curb the addiction epidemic. Critics of the centers say they could encourage or enable even more people to use drugs.

Related: A Letter to My Heroin Addict Daughter

The centers, however — called supervised injection facilities, sanitary consumption facilities, or drug consumption rooms — are there to keep people who are already addicted from dying. A person isn’t going to start using heroin simply because he or she heard of safe places to shoot up. People are more likely to begin using out of curiosity, desperation for a bigger high, friendships with people who use, or other factors.

A place where people can inject safely — such as those proposed for Seattle and Ithaca — could keep people from dying in the streets, parks, and public bathroom stalls.

[lz_bulleted_list title=”Safe Spaces for Drug Users” source=”http://www.drugwarfacts.org”]The first supervised drug consumption room opened in Berne, Switzerland, in 1986. Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Greece soon followed with their rooms. By 2015, more than 100 of these existed worldwide.[/lz_bulleted_list]

These spaces would also place users in regular contact with health professionals who could encourage them to enter rehabilitation programs.

The facilities needed to offer more than just safety, said Cathy Herndon, a certified health education specialist in Illinois. “Are we just giving them a spot to go and either use or recover from use — or are we supplementing this with other things as well?” If addicts just come, shoot up, and leave — “that is enabling,” she said. “But if we have some adjunct services to get people lined up with things that may help them or improve their lifestyle, then I think that it’s not such a big deal.”

The Boston program — the BHCHP safe space — is a little less controversial because people aren’t allowed to shoot up in the vicinity. Nurses are prepared to administer Narcan, and they have information available for patients to get admitted to rehabilitation facilities at the drop of a hat. Barry Bock, CEO of the organization, said they knew they had to do something when they were finding five overdoses a day in their building.

“We estimate we’ve diverted at least a third of patients from the emergency room,” he told LifeZette.

Clean equipment is a big part of these drug spaces — it helps reduce the spread of HIV, Hepatitis C, and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The plans for the Seattle and Ithaca spaces did not (at least publicly) include a cost analysis — which is worth seeing. One safe drug space in Vancouver, Canada, costs taxpayers upwards of $3 million a year. The people using it bring their own drugs — and the space provides syringes, cotton pads, antiseptics, and a crack pipe vending machine. The clean equipment is a big part of these drug spaces because it helps reduce the spread of HIV, Hepatitis C, and other sexually transmitted diseases.

So far, the Vancouver program has decreased drug overdose deaths by 35 percent in the surrounding area. There’s still debate, of course, over whether tax dollars would be better spent on Suboxone rehab clinics. And the jury is still out on whether the safe space concept will work over the long haul.

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Safe spaces, the advocates note, can protect people who aren’t actually using drugs. Addicts are more prone to commit crimes, enact violence, and pass on sexually transmitted diseases, so creating a space could curtail some of the devastating ripple effect of illicit drug use.

Many people remain wary of the notion — and the debate will continue.