How a once fringe idea — making it safe to get high — became a reality. moraffreports reports on New York's first supervised-drug-consumption sites
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The entrance to the Corner Project’s overdose-prevention site in Washington Heights.
A middle-aged man who said he came from Staten Island rattles off answers to a young staffer named Rayce, a slender young man with ringlets of long brown hair that hang beneath his shoulder blades, before washing his hands and choosing a syringe, tourniquet, and cooker for his heroin. Rayce led him to a booth close to the entrance and wheeled over the privacy screen that the man had requested.
When Louis Jones started using heroin in the ’70s, sometimes he would duck between cars or in an alley, relying on other users to keep lookout as he prepared his heroin in the cap from a bottle of cheap wine he carried with him. It was common for shooting galleries to recycle injection equipment, sometimes renting reused needles out of containers full of water that were tinged pink from blood.
Favaro, however, set about making them more accessible. She modified the doors to swing out instead of in and installed locks that could be opened from outside so that staff could intervene in the event that someone overdosed inside. Within a few years, other syringe exchanges across the city followed WHCP’s lead and modified their bathrooms. In 2017, I saw patrons at a Brooklyn facility patiently waiting to use a bathroom to inject.
Even as record numbers of Americans began dying of drug overdoses, within the framework of America’s zero-tolerance drug policy, the idea of running an organization in which people openly inject illegal drugs was still a nonstarter, even for many progressive drug reformers.
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