Residents Outraged Over Federal Judge Allowing Nonprofit To Open Safe-Injection Site

The first open injection site, run by a nonprofit called Safehouse, is set to be opened in South Philadelphia now that a federal judge has ruled it doesn’t violate federal laws.

The residents of South Philadelphia are outraged over the Judge’s ruling and rightfully so. This will be the first such site to open in the United States, and it opens right in their neighborhood. There are some social workers that are supportive of the nonprofit opening its doors saying that this would be successful in bringing in opioid users off the streets.

The US Attorney, William McSwain, said in a statement last year that he filed the suit against Safehouse:

“Because these deadly drug injection sites undoubtedly do violate the law. …Normalizing the use of deadly drugs like heroin and fentanyl is not the answer to solving the opioid epidemic.”

Pennsylvania has made the CDC’s overdose list in two different categories. It is the third-highest state regarding rates of death due to drug overdose were Pennsylvania sees 44 per every 100,000 drug users die in an overdose. The CDC has also seen a “statistically significant increase in drug overdose death rates” in Pennsylvania.

Also, according to the CDC:

“70,237 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in 2017. The age-adjusted rate of overdose deaths increased significantly by 9.6% from 2016 (19.8 per 100,000) to 2017 (21.7 per 100,000). Opioids—mainly synthetic opioids (other than methadone)—are currently the main driver of drug overdose deaths. Opioids were involved in 47,600 overdose deaths in 2017 (67.8% of all drug overdose deaths).”

Safehouse claims that their facility operates on the idea that giving drug users a safe place to inject their drugs will be beneficial and helping to lower the overdose rate. Some residents believe that this will aid in enabling drug use.

The former mayor of Philadelphia and Governor of Pennsylvania was Ed Rendell. Rendell has been openly supportive of the non-profit Safehouse opening its doors in South Philadelphia saying,

“I think people misunderstand what Safehouse is. It’s a clean injection facility. We don’t handle narcotics. People have to bring their narcotics with them. We give them clean needles and we make sure that the needles they use in Safehouse are confiscated before they go to the streets. But most importantly, we talk to them about treatments. Before they can inject themselves in front of our professionals, our nurses and doctors, before they do that, we have social workers talking to them about getting into treatment programs.”

Did you notice how he kept saying, “we?” Well, the “we” he is talking about is “Safehouse” because the mayor is on the board for this nonprofit. It is no wonder residents like this woman have voiced their opinion. By the way, this woman is my hero!

Passionate exchange from a South Philly mom to Safehouse official and Governor Rendell. Says they sprung this on community @NBCPhiladelphia pic.twitter.com/iuixVnuMOP

— Miguel Martinez-Valle (@MiguelMValle) February 26, 2020

Mark Squilla is a City Councilman who traveled to Canada last year with a group inspecting Safehouse’s injection sites in Toronto. He reversed his support for Safehouse after seeing the conditions surrounding the building. The Councilman told CNN,

“There’s really no safe way to do this and our goal should be trying to get people treatment.”

The opioid problem in America is only growing. Finding safe ways to get addicts the help is a growing problem. It will continue to be a problem while doctors frequently prescribe opioids in cases where the patient can heal without them. There have been clean needle nonprofit acting in America for decades. These nonprofits have made strides in helping to reduce the spread of diseases like HIV and Hepatitis, but it has not helped to reduce the number of addicts currently being owned by their addiction.

I am afraid that Safehouse while acting on the premise of goodwill, will not perform well at putting addicts in recovery. If you were an addict, would you go to rehab if you had a safe and clean place to shoot up?  Would you quit if you knew that there was a place you could go to get high and have a medical professional insuring you don’t overdose? This seems like textbook enabling wrapped in a community service bow.

The statement from the U.S. Attorney:

“Yesterday morning, Safehouse announced during a press conference that it intends to open a heroin injection site in South Philadelphia next week – although it did not specify the precise location or the precise date, in keeping with Safehouse’s consistent lack of transparency in dealing with the community.  By contrast, I wanted to update the community on the efforts of the U.S. Attorney’s Office to prevent this proposed site from opening.  First, yesterday afternoon, my Office filed its official Notice of Appeal with the U.S. District Court, which begins the process of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit’s review of the District Court’s decision.  Second, my Office will be filing a motion today for the District Court to stay its final order during the pendency of the appeal.

This request for a stay is critically important.  My Office filed suit against Safehouse in the first place to bring order, reason and fairness to a potentially explosive situation.  The current dispute over injection sites should be settled in the courts, not in the streets.  But, that court process is not over, and I believe that a stay is appropriate so that the dispute will continue to be resolved via careful, reasoned analysis and not deteriorate into a literal street fight.  Here, a stay would preserve the status quo while the Third Circuit examines the legality of the proposed site, and would prevent the chaos that would occur should Safehouse lurch forward with an opening while the case is still ongoing.

This unnecessary chaos was on full display at Safehouse’s press conference yesterday morning.  That press conference was a dumpster fire.

The press conference featured, among other things, understandably angry South Philadelphia residents yelling at former Governor Rendell, calling him unworthy of the title of Governor and berating him as a “sneak” for hiding his intention to locate the first injection site in South Philadelphia, as well as a sitting City Councilman (Mark Squilla) screaming at Safehouse’s founders that their proposal was “horrible and a disgrace” and “not a part of democracy” because he and his constituents had never been informed about Safehouse’s plans.

It also featured plenty of logical inconsistency: Governor Rendell, for example, claimed that an injection site in Philadelphia would have saved the life of his friend’s son (who tragically overdosed in his parents’ home) on the assumption that this young man would have traveled from the suburbs to the site to inject.  Immediately contradicting this, Safehouse co-founder Ronda Goldfein, in response to angry questions from South Philadelphia residents who fear that the site would draw addicts to their neighborhood, adamantly insisted that “nobody” from outside the South Philadelphia neighborhood would use the site.  Goldfein quickly became irritated with the residents’ legitimate questions; things got so bad that she threw in the towel and deferred any questions to an imaginary, future community meeting to be held at an unnamed time and place.

The sad fact is that Safehouse’s secretive, haphazard “plan” has not been vetted with any of the affected neighborhood residents, community groups, City Council members, State Representatives or State Senators.  It is being unfairly foisted on them on the assumption that they don’t matter.  It is treating them like fools.

The residents of Philadelphia deserve better than this.  And my Office will continue to fight for it – and for them.”