On Tuesday, The New York Post reported that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has created the first legal ‘shooting gallery’ for drug addicts in the city.
The article reports:
With just four weeks left in office, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched the country’s first legal shooting galleries Tuesday morning, calling them safe havens for addicts — shortly before five people overdosed at just one of the clinics on opening day.
“Overdose Prevention Centers are a safe and effective way to address the opioid crisis. I’m proud to show cities in this country that after decades of failure, a smarter approach is possible,” de Blasio said in a statement.
The nonprofit-run centers, New York Harm Reduction Educators on E. 126th Street in Harlem and Washington Heights’ CORNER Project on W. 180th Street, opened Tuesday.
There were five overdoses at the East Harlem site that saw 85 users inject drugs laced with fentanyl including heroin on Tuesday.
This is not the way to deal with the drug problem. Also, this is a big change to make four weeks before leaving office.
The article concludes:
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), whose district includes Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn, called on the Department of Justice to block the sites, noting that under former President Trump the DOJ said such sites would violate the federal Controlled Substances Act.
Malliotakis wrote US Attorney General Merrick Garland Tuesday urging him to “take swift action to enforce federal law.”
The congresswoman cited a Jan. 2021 Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that determined it was a federal crime for a supervised injection site run by a Philadelphia nonprofit to allow consumption of illegal drug use at its location.
“Instead of focusing on the root cause of the drug epidemic, Mayor de Blasio is enabling drug cartels that continue to break our laws, smuggle illegal drugs over our border, and prey on our children,” Malliotakis said.
“Crime and fentanyl use are at record highs because of open borders, botched bail reform, and anti-police policies that keep releasing criminal drug dealers back onto our streets. Opening taxpayer-funded heroin shooting galleries is not a proper solution. These centers not only encourage drug use but they will further deteriorate our quality of life,” she said.
De Blasio has largely turned a blind eye to daytime drug sprees in major city hubs like the Garment District and the Triangle Plaza Hub in the Bronx.
It might be a good idea to acknowledge that a good deal of our drug problem in America is related to two things–an open southern border and the Chinese manufacturing and selling of fentanyl. Until we are willing to address those two issues, we will continue to have an addiction problem in America. Setting up ‘safe’ places to take illegal drugs does nothing to combat either problem. There is no law regulating illegal drugs or controlling what is in them. There is no guarantee that an illegally purchased drug will not contain a fatal does of fentanyl.