On Thursday, The New York Post posted an article about OnPoint NYC the “safe injection” sites where hard-drug addicts shoot up under medical supervision. The sites were set up in 2021 and funded under President Joe Biden, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration quietly awarded the program a $2 million annual grant — and paid out just over half of it.

The article reports:

That grant, revealed here for the first time, has been terminated under President Donald Trump, SAMHSA Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Art Kleinschmidt told me.

OnPoint, he said, was “a misguided harm reduction program that [was] incompatible with federal law and applicable Executive Orders.”

Indeed, Trump’s July 25 order specifically barred funding for “safe consumption efforts that only facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm.”

True: Acquiescing in drug use only serves to encourage it — as well as other outrages documented by The Post, including sidewalk sex and drug dealing outside OnPoint’s sites in East Harlem and Washington Heights. 

But unless Trump’s Justice Department moves to shut down OnPoint — the only such program in the country — federal defunding won’t pull the plug on its dangers. 

The SAMHSA grant was just a small part of OnPoint’s $14 million annual budget, which includes millions in taxpayer dollars from New York state and New York City, along with private funding from the New York Community Trust, the Open Society Foundation, Deutsche Bank and others.

The article notes:

Yet OnPoint could do much more than just accept drug use as a valid lifestyle choice.

It could help us learn important information about the addicted, including statistics on how many have overdosed and died elsewhere, how many have been arrested for assault or robbery, and crucially, how many have sought treatment to beat their drug habit.

A reformed and constructive OnPoint would seek such data — perhaps through required electronic ankle bracelets — to not just reduce overdoses, but to reduce addiction itself.

The article reports that last September the Canadian province of British Columbia passed a law permitting involuntary commitment for both psychiatric problems and substance abuse — a policy New York state legislators have rejected.

Putting that policy in place in New York City would save lives and reduce crime.