NYC lawmakers call for compassion in treating drug overdoses

NEW YORK CITY — Public health advocates and legislators rallied on the steps of New York City Hall on Tuesday morning, calling for a more compassionate approach to the city’s burgeoning drug overdose problem.

“When we talk about drug addiction, we must approach it as a public health issue and not a criminal justice issue,” New York state Sen. Gustavo Rivera, D-Bronx, told the crowd huddled under umbrellas in the rain.

“Harsh penalties do not work, they do not make people healthier, [and] they do not make people safer,” he added.

Heroin overdose deaths in New York City have more than doubled in the last three years, surging from 209 in 2010 to 420 in 2013, according to the city’s Department of Mental Health and Hygiene.

Experts have warned that growing abuse of expensive prescription painkillers like Vicodin and OxyContin has created a new class of heroin users who switch over to the cheaper street drug and then get hooked. The result has been a national epidemic, with prescription drug overdoses now the leading cause of accidental death in the United States.

At Tuesday’s event, organized New York City advocacy group VOCAL-NY, lawmakers said that rather than criminalizing drug abuse, the city ought to focus on more widespread dispensing of naloxone, a drug that works as an antidote to heroin and opiate overdoses.

They also urged support for a wider variety of drug treatment programs for those who want help, including what’s known as harm reduction, a strategy that doesn’t necessarily call for quitting drugs altogether but instead promotes safer use through programs like needle exchanges.

Several states including New York, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio and Vermont have relaxed restrictions on naloxone, allowing laypeople and first responders to carry it by prescription or standing order at health clinics and needle exchanges. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a similar bill into law on Tuesday.

The New York City Police Department moved to equip nearly 20,000 of its officers with naloxone kits in May. The city’s Department of Public Health has also distributed more than 22,000 doses of the drug since 2009, counteracting at least 500 known drug overdoses, according to Dr. Hillary Kunins, an assistant commissioner at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, who attended Tuesday’s event.

In that period, however, heroin overdoses have still risen. “What we don’t know is would they have gone up more had we not been distributing the kits,” Kunins told Al Jazeera. But she said her department distributes free kits to drug treatment and needle exchange programs, veterans groups and homeless shelters, and trains staff members at the groups to administer naloxone.

“I think the goal is to continue pressing to help people realize they can do something, they can recognize overdose and administer naloxone,” she said.

But a drug abuse problem also involves treating addiction — and that’s not necessarily a simple process. While the approach in previous decades has centered around the so-called war on drugs, and its emphasis on incarcerating users and dealers, the lawmakers on Tuesday emphasized funding for treatment programs rather than criminal sentencing.

“In my experience in Albany, we have become addicted to harsh penalties,” New York state Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, D-North Brooklyn, told the crowd. “What has it done? It certainly hasn’t done anything to solve the addiction problem. Otherwise, Rockefeller would have worked,” he said, referring to the harsh New York state drug laws enacted in 1973 under Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller that became a model for other states.

Under the Rockefeller laws, drug users and dealers caught with four ounces of any illicit substance were given mandatory jail sentences of 15 years to life. The laws were eventually eased in the 2000s, but had the effect of overcrowding prisons with drug felons, many of them first-time offenders.

“You are seeing a rising of more enlightened drug policy,” said Howard Josepher, a social worker who is president and CEO of Exponents, a New York City-based group that aims to help drug users, who attended the event.

He said that five years ago, none of the government officials who spoke at the rally would have dared to show up to an event backing overdose prevention. “The thinking back then was, ‘They’re using drugs. They’re better off dead,’” he said. “But dead addicts don’t recover.”

Josepher’s group aims to cover all the bases — whether it’s traditional drug treatment that involves abstaining completely, treatment involving methadone or buprenorphine, or harm reduction treatment.

In terms of harm reduction, he said, “Our experience has been that people, while they may not be ready to get off drugs, there’s always a part of them that want a better life, and want to take better care of themselves. So that’s what we try to focus in on.”

And that’s been a strategy that has worked for people like Terrell Jones from the South Bronx, a former drug dealer who said he's been clean for six years after two decades of addiction to crack cocaine.

Jones, who emceed the rally on Tuesday, now works as a peer and community development associate for New York Harm Reduction Educators, helping spread the word about syringe exchange programs and educating his peers about how to administer naloxone.

He was introduced to the group by George Plaskett, 57, another peer educator with NYHRE who administers acupuncture treatments to drug users to help reduce their cravings and stress.

The two men used to know each other from playing basketball in the South Bronx. After Jones was released from his second stint in prison — he says he did a combined seven years for robbery and selling drugs — he ran into Plaskett in his old neighborhood, where Plaskett was doing his advocacy work.

Plaskett convinced Jones to start volunteering with the NYHRE and began mentoring him there. Jones said he was eventually inspired to cut back his drug use little by little, and stopped completely after about two years. He credits harm reduction for his recovery.

“I told my family that I would never go back to prison again, and I’ve kept my word,” Jones said. “But,” he added, “I had help. I had people supporting me.”