For the second straight year, the Hochul administration has rejected the recommendation of a panel of experts — some appointed by the governor — to use funds from settlements with opioid producers and marketers to support overdose prevention centers, a crucial tool in preventing deaths from the same, citing the fact that the facilities don’t comply with federal prohibitions on providing space for illegal drug use. Once again, this is a mistake.
We certainly don’t mean to minimize the legality question, even if we disagree strongly with the law. Laws are supposed to be enforced regardless of anyone’s view of the merit in violating them. The existence of bad laws should be resolved by the legislative process or the courts, not through simply ignoring them.
In practice, though, there are plenty of exceptions and discretion and the messiness of attempting to actually regulate reality. If every prosecutor zealously enforced every law, the system would collapse. Judgment isn’t only a long-term tradition of law enforcement, it undergirds the whole system, making it workable and, in the best of cases, much more fair (in the worst of cases, stacked in favor of the already privileged).
Some archaic laws should be righteously ignored, often because they are openly discriminatory or antidemocratic, and ignoring them is correct and moral. Others are ignored because they’re unworkable, impractical or we’ve simply all decided that it doesn’t make much sense to enforce them.
Take the federal prohibitions on cannabis, which remain on the books. But that doesn’t bother Hochul from championing this new industry, celebrating the opening of new retail outlets and a belated effort to shut down the illegal pot shops.
But under U.S. law, cannabis is no less illegal than overdose prevention centers. In fact, the latter are only seeking some funding and state sanction — and coming up empty — while the state has busied itself setting up full-fledged regulatory bodies and a business development program for marijuana (that it has done a poor job with the retail cannabis rollout is beside the point.)
Why is the sale of federally-controlled cannabis acceptable, encouraged even, while life-saving overdose prevention centers at best tolerated — and often not, as exemplified by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams’ threats to shut down the state’s two existing centers, in Upper Manhattan?
We suspect the answer comes down to the simple fact of political pragmatism, where the public has come around to approving of retail marijuana sale, whereas people might have a reflective skepticism about overdose prevention centers if they’ve heard about them at all.
One way to fix that is to make clear what these facilities are and are not. They do not provide drugs to anyone, and there’s no evidence that they incentivize drug use that wouldn’t have occurred anyway.
They do save the lives of people whose overdoses were either going to occur in the facilities, supervised by trained staff ready to both keep them on this side of death’s door and help them with additional recovery efforts, or out on streets or subways, where they would likely die, alone. And by save the lives, we mean in every single case; no one has been recorded as dying in an OPC, anywhere in the world, ever. Funding them translates directly to lives saved.
from New York Daily News https://ift.tt/0tI3C2q