Anyone laboring under the misimpression that California is a progressive utopia should contemplate the state’s stupefying debate over safe drug injection sites. In the face of an overblown reputation for liberalism and the mounting toll of drug overdoses, the state’s leaders have resisted departing from their drug war footing of yore to adopt a proven means of saving lives and restoring order.
The Legislature passed a bill to allow such sites in cities that want them four years ago, but according to the dictates of the failed effort to police our way out of a public health problem, then-Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it. Another attempt failed to make it out of the Legislature in 2020 despite evidence of surging overdoses during the pandemic. Last week, however, the state Senate voted narrowly to send Sen. Scott Wiener’s latest bill on the subject to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who previously described himself as “certainly very, very open” to the idea.
More than being open to it, the governor should help close the door on decades of counterproductive drug policy by signing it into law.
Senate Bill 57 proposes a modest concession to reality, allowing pilot safe consumption sites in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles County, where local officials struggling to turn back the overdose epidemic support the approach. As Wiener, D-San Francisco, put it, the legislation “isn’t about whether we want people to use drugs. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment that people are using drugs, and our choice is whether we want to make every effort to help them survive and get healthy.”
Driven to record levels by the spread of opioids, drug overdoses killed over 100,000 Americans last year, up 15% from the year before, including over 10,000 Californians. In recent years, overdoses have outkilled gun violence in Sacramento and COVID in San Francisco.
Safe injection sites can stem the toll by shifting the official response from punishment to treatment, giving people who are using drugs a place to do so with access to lifesaving medical attention and rehabilitation services. They have the additional benefit of providing an alternative to streets and parks, keeping drug use and paraphernalia out of public places.
New York opened the nation’s first safe consumption sites last fall, and several other American cities are planning to do so in the face of legal barriers. Though the federal government has opposed the facilities, particularly during the Trump administration, Joe Biden’s Justice Department has signaled that it could reverse course, which it should.
Supervised drug consumption facilities are not novel in much of the world, having operated for decades in Europe and Canada. That has provided ample opportunity for research, which consistently shows that the strategy promotes safer use, prevents overdoses, encourages treatment, and reduces public use and litter. Studies have also shown that, contrary to critics, the sites do not promote drug abuse or crime.
A 2018 research review by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction found that the facilities encourage “improvements in safe, hygienic drug use ... increased access to health and social services, and reduced public drug use and associated nuisance. There is no evidence to suggest that the availability of safer injecting facilities increases drug use or frequency of injecting. These services facilitate rather than delay treatment entry and do not result in higher rates of local drug-related crime.”
None of that prevented state Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk from declaring Wiener’s bill “one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation that I’ve seen sent to the governor,” tantamount to “leaving people on the streets in squalor rather than getting them help.” While that is precisely the opposite of what the bill would do, Wilk’s fulminations offer a preview of how his party could cynically weaponize the legislation against a governor aspiring to national office.
Signing the bill would require Newsom to put facts, principles and vulnerable Californians ahead of political concerns, which would be a compelling demonstration of progressive leadership indeed.
____
