Heroin in Ithaca
Ithaca, New York—an Ivy League town that proudly styles itself America’s “most enlightened city”—provides a home for plenty of unusual ideas from the political left. The most recent among them is a publicly financed “shooting gallery” . . . for heroin users.
In late February, 28-year-old mayor Svante Myrick announced the city wanted to make this “injection center” the centerpiece of a new antidrug strategy. The center would offer addicts clean needles and free medical care. “It’s providing a safe place where they won’t overdose, where they can get treatment,” Myrick told the Associated Press. Addicts who use the center need never fear arrest.
Drug-policy experts are divided on the desirability, and the ethics, of this “harm reduction” approach. Because heroin is so physically addictive that an addict who misses a fix can die without proper medical care, toleration of its use imposes significant social costs. While injection centers, needle-exchange policies, and other similar approaches do appear to reduce deaths from overdoses, there is also evidence they spike both crime and drug use. Experiments with de facto heroin legalization in the United Kingdom and Netherlands were so disastrous even hardened leftists eventually rolled back their more extreme measures. If it’s worth doing at all, trying to reduce the harm of heroin use presents a very difficult case.
That’s why it’s so odd the same locale that’s saying “yes” to heroin harm reduction is answering calls for another type of harm reduction with a resounding “no.” In late 2014, before “vaping” became the word of the year, Ithaca’s surrounding Tompkins County imposed one of the nation’s earliest outright bans on e-cigarette use in public spaces.
The ban went into effect although there’s no evidence that e-cigarette vapor causes any of the ills associated with secondhand smoke. Conversely, there is evidence that e-cigarettes can help people quit using their far deadlier combustible cousins. Ithaca’s progressive leaders made their views clear. “I feel that the balance between personal liberties and public health here heavily weigh upon the side of public health,” Ithaca Democrat Kathy Luz Herrera told the Ithaca Journal.
Enough said.
