Safe Injection/Consumption Sites Should Be Tax Exempt

The OnPointNYC office.

I have previously blogged about trap houses and their not yet tax-exempt clinical analogs, known as “safe injection sites.”  That prior post notes that there is only one exempt, would-be safe injection site in the U.S. and even with that one, assisting in the get high process is an unrelated illegal activity still. The Biden administration is supposed to be looking into it all, but no word yet. It’s not just the bleeding-heart liberal in me that supports clinical trap houses and thinks they ought to be granted tax exemption.  It’s also the hawk in me.  Trust me, I love a good war just like the next guy. I grew up around constant war preparation and even trained for it myself in a prior life. And I would gladly enlist in a winnable “war on drugs.”  Sometimes, though, we just need to sue for peace on whatever terms achievable. 

Safe injection sites are an inevitable concession to our losing lost war on drugs.  And the only thing standing in the way of “peace in our time” is the irrational and scientifically disproven notion that supervised injection sites – treatment centers really – are the cause of it all.  And that shooting or locking people up will not silence the natural law of supply and demand.  People demand drugs and will pay money for them.  Other people will supply them.  Inevitably.  So we should get over ourselves.

This, because the NY Times reports that the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan has issued an unveiled threat against an apparently very effective supervised injection site.  Here is how the Times reported it:

“I have repeatedly said that the opioid epidemic is a law enforcement crisis and a public health crisis,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement to The New York Times. “But I am an enforcer, not a policymaker.” Until New York policymakers take action to authorize the supervised consumption sites, he said, they are operating in violation of federal, state and local law.  “That is unacceptable,” he added. “My office is prepared to exercise all options — including enforcement — if this situation does not change in short order.”  The centers are considered illegal because the fentanyl, crack and other drugs consumed there are controlled substances, and because a federal law known as the “crack house statute” bars individuals from maintaining property where controlled substances are consumed.

The safe injection site to which the US Attorney refers is OnPoint NYC, a city (but not state or federally) approved clinic where users can inject safely.  If you didn’t know better, you would think the place is a normal health clinic from the pictures on its website.  And that is just the point.  Its a health clinic.  But here is the stark description of what happens from the Times article:

Among those who have had their overdoses reversed at OnPoint is Eddie M., 69, a former typesetter who travels almost every day to East Harlem from Brooklyn so he can inject his drugs under supervision. Because he uses illegal drugs, he asked that only the first initial of his last name be used. Last Tuesday afternoon, he sat in a mirrored booth, so that staff members could monitor him, and prepared a speedball — a mixture of crack cocaine and street opioids — before loading it into a needle. A staff member tied off his upper arm with a blue tourniquet to help him find a vein.  Participants bring in their own drugs, sign in and write down what they will be using, and can smoke or inject. Outside the supervised injection area, they can relax and watch television, or get other services.

It is impossible to know how many of the 1,000 overdoses OnPoint says it has reversed would have been fatal without intervention. Because they intervene so quickly, staff members are able to handle most overdoses simply by administering oxygen. When they do use naloxone, a drug that reverses the effect of opioids, they typically inject a small dose. They have called for an ambulance only about 20 times, said Rayce Samuelson, an OnPoint overdose prevention specialist.

The thought of clinicians tying off a vein so a dope fiend can get high is what repels most of us.  But war ain’t pretty.  Its ugly for the good guys and the bad guys.  And helping a junkie tie off a vein is a whole helluva lot prettier and cheaper than hunting buyers and sellers (but most just poorer buyers) down, shooting them or locking them up.  Safe injection sites lesson all of our [tax] burdens and should be granted tax exemption like any other nonprofit health care facility.

darryll k. jones