In a bid to stop overdose deaths, California could allow drug use at supervised sites

Diamond Mendoza rolled up the sleeve of her shirt — a yellow tee decorated with an exuberant rendering of the Mona Lisa — to show the scars of abscesses that had been lanced and healed. Jerry Brown, who vetoed a bill to try out such sites in San Francisco and said that “enabling illegal and destructive drug use will never work.” The Center for Harm Reduction uses blue pins on a map of downtown L.A. to denote drug overdoses that were reversed. “It generally seems to be good for public health and social order outcomes, in the same way that it does elsewhere in the world.” The California bill has drawn opposition from groups including the California Narcotic Officers’ Assn., which argued that “rather than a robust effort to get addicts into treatment, SB 57 alarmingly concedes the inevitable and immutable nature of drug addiction and abuse.” It pointed to a contested report from Alberta, Canada, that raised concerns about police calls, needle debris and overdose deaths near such sites. Researchers with the Rand Corp. Drug Policy Research Center pored over published research on supervised consumption sites and found it was “almost unanimous in its support, but limited in nature.” Center director Beau Kilmer said “there seems to be little basis for concern about adverse effects,” but the bulk of the studies don’t have a “credible control group” to gauge if results are caused by the facilities themselves. On a recent weekday, a small board near its doors bore the quotation, “50% of something is better than 100% of nothing.” When a man careened on his bicycle up to the doors of the center, where folding tables had been set up to form a makeshift window, harm reduction specialist Arlene Lemus asked brightly, “What can I get for you, sir?” Her shirt bore the slogan “WE LOVE DRUG USERS.” Before she picked up a brown bag of syringes, alcohol wipes, sterilized water and other “safe injection” supplies, she asked, “Your drug of choice?” to make sure she provided the right kind of syringe.