State-funded Burlington ‘safe injection site’ now in planning stages
by Paul Bean
A group of New York City residents are begging President Donald Trump to close the ‘safe drug injection site’ after which a Burlington center is patterned.
“Every day in the area outside the facility and in the blocks surrounding the facility drug dealing occurs regularly in broad daylight, while drug addicts can be found nodding off, lying in the street, begging for handouts, and committing petty crime,” reads a letter by East Harlem Neighborhood Group, One City Rising, and residents.
On February 17 the letter was sent to President Trump’s newly appointed Attorney General, Pam Bondi. “Our daily living situation has become wholly untenable as a result of this facility opening in our residential neighborhood,” they wrote, “We need federal intervention to shut it down.”
A New York Post article also reports that the East Harlem Facility has seen consistent open-air drug dealing just outside their doors, “The Post witnessed the mayhem this week, including a man palming $20 bills from a giggling, hunched-over junkie before handing him a plastic baggie just 150 feet away from the facility’s entrance on East 126th Street, across from a preschool.”
The Safe Injection Site in Harlem is operated by the nonprofit OnPoint, “the largest harm reduction service provider on the East Coast.”
Last spring, Democrats in the Vermont Legislature lawmakers voted to override a veto by Governor Scott to approve the establishment of a Burlington Safe Injection Site. Gov. Scott criticized the move, and in the past has referred to the sites as “government injection sites,” and after vetoing the bill last May, said the money would be better spent on “expansion and enhancement of prevention, enforcement, treatment, and long-term recovery services” and strengthening “the law enforcement response to the increasingly toxic drug stream entering our state.”
In January, WCAX reported that Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak appointed a special assistant to oversee the facility’s setup, commonly referred to as a safe injection site or ‘harm reduction facility.’ The city is currently drafting a proposal to select a service provider to operate it. A specific location has yet to be named.
Supporters argue that “harm reduction sites” give authorities more options for dealing with the city’s growing opioid crisis. Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak told WCAX, “It is still a life-saving policy and it is still critical to put this tool among other tools on the table for us to support folks living with substance use disorder in the city, as well as the secondary impacts of that reality with needles and other things in our city.”