THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK: New York City’s Drug Experiment.
Step off the New York City subway at 125th and Lexington, and you will find yourself in what can only be called an open-air drug market. The subway entrance is an easy place to score—the day I visited, one man stood yelling, “Drugs! Drugs! Drugs!” like a ballpark vendor. On every block, people slump where they stand, “nodding out” from opioid intoxication.
According to one resident, however, last Tuesday morning NYPD cars temporarily replaced the users and dealers in advance of the media-heavy launch of New York City’s Safe Consumption Sites (SCS), officially sanctioned centers where people can use drugs under the supervision of medical professionals armed with overdose-reversing medication. In their first day, the two sites—one in East Harlem and the other in Washington Heights—permitted more than 70 people to consume drugs in a designated “overdose prevention center,” then ride out the high in a DMV-like waiting room.
The launch culminates years of work by outgoing mayor Bill De Blasio; his successor, Mayor-elect Eric Adams, has indicated he plans to support the project. The two seem to agree that the urgency of New York’s drug crisis—2,000 deaths last year alone, and a 200 percent increase in the overdose death rate in the last two decades—justifies this radical approach. As city councilman Mark Levine put it, “This strategy is proven to save lives, and is desperately needed at a moment when fatalities are rising fast.”
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and with 120 of them in operation across ten countries, Safe Consumption Sites are not an untried idea. But contrary to the reassurances of New York’s leaders, a sober reading of the evidence reveals how little we know about how well they work and their social side effects. New York is essentially conducting an experiment—an illegal one—not only on drug users but also on residents of some of its most-challenged neighborhoods, without any clear metrics for success.
The site is a particular burden to the residents of East Harlem, which already hosts many of the city’s drug-treatment facilities. Data obtained by the Greater Harlem Coalition, a neighborhood advocacy group, show that while central and eastern Harlem are home to just 3 percent of New Yorkers, 18 percent of the city’s drug-recovery patients go there for treatment. Just 17 percent of those people are from East Harlem proper, while 75 percent are from outside Harlem altogether.
Related: Theodore Dalrymple in 2003 on England’s drug experiment: “Incidentally, the rise in deaths from methadone in America is probably attributable to the adoption of British methods. For once, the Americans are copying us, with predictably disastrous results.”