Howard Husock: Why New York City’s Drug Death Epidemic Is No Surprise

New York City’s drug overdose deaths have reached a record. This is no surprise. As reported by the city Department of Health last week, 2,668 New Yorkers died from overdoses in 2021 – the logical (and deadly) result of a failed approach by “public health” authorities to the City’s fentanyl epidemic. While the data does not reveal every cause of this spike, this wave of death makes clear that the city’s endorsement of safe drug use, or harm reduction, has failed.

In fact, acceptance and acquiescence lead to death. Anyone looking for public health campaigns that actually work? Discourage drug use — similar to the high-profile prime-time ads warning against cigarette smoking — would have looked in vain this past year in New York City.

Instead, last May, passengers on subways and buses were treated to the city’s “Let’s Talk Fentanyl” campaign.  It was more of an instruction than a warning. “Start with a small dose and go slowly,” One sign urged. One poster stated that it was important to always have naloxone on hand as an overdose prevention drug. The possibility that high-fentanyl users might not act responsibly is not something that occurred to the public’s health. “authorities”.  

This campaign was launched after the opening of two so called “food courts” in downtown. “safe injection sites” — pseudo-health clinics to which opioid users may bring illegal street drugs and shoot up under supervision. These two locations, one in East Harlem, and one in Washington Heights are illegal under federal law. “controlled substance” They are not required by law but the city still approves and funds them.

Most crucially, these sites do little to actually discourage drug use or encourage drug treatment — the most effective measures against rising drug deaths. As CBS2 New York reporter Jessi Mitchell uncovered at the supervised injection site OnPointNYC in Harlem, there are no serious effort to monitor any decline in drug consumption. “How are you tracking the actual reduction of drug use?” Sam Rivera was the director. “That’s difficult. It really is. It’s a challenge. So for us, it’s anecdotal,” Rivera replied. 

It was a pilot program with no clear checks and balances. Officials from the city report that it is a proof-of-concept. that 585 people have registered at the sites and have used the locations 4,974 times. What we don’t know is how many would have chosen Not You can inject yourself without the approval of the city. What we don’t report is the effect on the quality of life of the surrounding neighborhoods, which have become magnets for open-air drug use, often in front of school children passing by on their way to school. 

Yet the city’s arbiters of culture, as well as its officials, appear to be on board with this institutional lack of accountability.  Its compassionate reporting on a Harlem woman who used heroin for 40-years shows its understanding. the New York Times essentially endorsed the safe injection approach, Rennee Jones, a South Bronx grandmother, felt marginalized by her family “community” Recovery periods for drug addicts “When I sit around people that are getting high and I’m clean,” She said: “I feel like the outcast.” 

No serious consideration of the subway campaign — or safe injection sites — could fail to connect them to the rise in overdose deaths. Officials predict that these deaths will only increase. This trajectory is particularly worrisome considering what’s happened in San Francisco, a once-shining city where drug-addicted homeless now line the sidewalks and safe-injections sites have morphed into full-fledged encampments. 

Pot advocates, of course, distinguish between weed and fentanyl – and they should. They miss the point, however: That the pursuit of pleasure is not necessarily the same thing as the pursuit of happiness — the latter often the product of achievements such as holding a job and building a family.

It is important to connect the dots between overdose deaths, the slow rollout of legalized marijuana in New York State and the misdirected rollout. The state let hundreds of unlicensed pot shops spring up in cities across the country by legalizing marijuana before it granted legal licenses. Not only do these businesses impact quality of life, their proliferation also reflects, again, state approval of drug use — in this case in pursuit of increased tax revenues.

Messages sent by authorities matter — and can prove effective.  Back during the  Bloomberg Administration, the city’s Human Resources Administration mounted a subway and bus campaign 2013 warning against teenage motherhood, which was linked to poverty for families and even imprisonment for children. Is it not a coincidence that from 2000 to 2015, during two socially conservative mayoralties? the pregnancy rate among New York City residents ages 15 to 19 declined 60% and the number of teen-pregnancies dropped by more than 16,000.

Ending New York’s fentanyl epidemic won’t be easy, but the City seems to be doing all it can to make this process even harder. The Department of Health has almost preordained that drug-overdose deaths will exceed record levels in 2023. It’s not a record for which any city should feel proud.

Howard Husock Is a Senior Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies with the American Enterprise Institute.