The House of Representatives will vote this week on more than a dozen bills to combat opioid addiction. On Wednesday, they passed a bipartisan bill to address pain management prescription practices, and there will still be votes on gathering data on infants affected by opioid abuse, and establishing federal grants to prevent and treat opioid addiction. This push comes in the wake of a broad opioid addiction bill passed earlier this year by a 94 to 1 margin in the Senate.
It’s encouraging to see bipartisan legislative efforts to address the opioid epidemic in our country. In doing so, lawmakers should pay attention to a public health strategy with growing support – supervised drug injection sites.
In February, Svante Myrick, the mayor of Ithaca, New York, made national headlines by announcing plans to create a supervised heroin injection facility to address the heroin crisis crippling his city. As proposed, drug users would be allowed to bring heroin into a health care facility and then inject the drug under clinical supervision.
Myrick’s proposal drew quick opposition from law enforcement and drug policy groups. Critics argue supervised injection sites will merely exacerbate the problem by promoting drug use. After all, the logic behind supervised injections seems absurd. If we want to fight heroin use, why would we make it easier for people to use heroin?