“We Will Just Encourage Them”
The United States has had, and presently maintains, the War on Drugs as its official policy. This war on drugs was pioneered by Nixon and further expanded under the Reagan and George Bush administrations. Nancy Reagan championed the “just say no” approach. “Drug education” was pushed with programs like D.A.R.E which was founded by Police Chief Daryl Gates who was of the belief that “casual drug users should be taken out and shot.” Under Bush domestic drug enforcement became even more militarized with SWAT raids even for misdemeanors. The impact so far has been skyrocketing incarceration, criminalization of addiction, and no decline in drug use.
The shift to viewing this as a public health rather than a criminal problem has been slow and as of yet mostly unsuccessful. It was only in January of this year that congress ended the ban on federal funding for needle exchanges, but this money still cannot go to actually buying the needles, only to support expenditures such as salaries and counseling. The base issue is that federal law has not been changed. Even though needle exchange programs have been in existence at the state level for awhile with legislature at the state level, this did not protect them from federal intervention or legal action.
This is the same issue for safe injection centers. They quite simply are not legal in the US. In 2007 the idea was explored at a symposium in San Francisco and got no farther than that. In the words of a South Carolina senator, “It is beyond ridiculous to ask people to pay for drug addicts to inject themselves with heroin and cocaine.” In February of this year the Mayor of Ithaca, is trying to establish these centers and two Baltimore lawmakers want safe injection centers in Annapolis and decriminalize personal amounts of drugs. This goes with a general liberalizing of the discussion about addiction as a health problem mostly in response to the explosion of opium and prescription abuse in suburban, white America, but American laws don’t reflect this. Again, even of these platforms pass, at the federal level they are illegal, doctors working there would risk their medical licenses, and agencies like the FBI could still arrest people for possession.
The national narrative still rejects the measures being taken in Ireland. People still don’t want to “encourage people to use drugs.” They are entirely missing the mark. Our whole campaign since Reagan has been to discourage, to just say no, and to implement harsh criminal repercussions. It is not working. There is international evidence from over 100 safe injection centers that they work. Drug use does not explode. More people are getting referrals. The spread of HIV is decreasing dramatically, as well as the number of overdoses deaths. The only thing keeping us from actually making a productive change and following the new Irish model is a skewed moral understanding of addiction, keeping us from making the legal changes necessary. These people need help, but the controversy is simply too much for most lawmakers and indeed most of the American public. It really is a shame.
