Cities defiant after Justice Department’s threat on ‘supervised injection sites’

By Lenny Bernstein and Katie Zezima
September 4 at 10:45 PM

Cities seeking to open sites where illegal drug users are monitored to prevent overdoses responded defiantly Tuesday to a Justice Department threat to take “swift and aggressive action” against that approach to the nationwide opioid epidemic.

Plans for those “supervised injection sites” — under consideration in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City, Seattle and elsewhere — collided with a stern Justice Department warning issued last week, threatening to create a standoff between federal and local authorities like the confrontation over “sanctuary cities.”

As they have before, some liberal-leaning cities trying to cope with conditions on their streets find themselves at odds with more-restrictive Trump-era policy and enforcement.

“Just as local governments had to lead during the HIV epidemic, cities like ours will be on the forefront of saving lives in the opioid crisis,” James Garrow, a spokesman for Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health, said in a statement Tuesday. “The federal government should focus its enforcement on the pill mills and illegal drug traffickers who supply the poison that is killing our residents, not on preventing public health officials from acting to keep Philadelphians from dying.”

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But in the United States, the facilities appear to violate a 1986 federal law aimed at crack houses. The law criminalized opening or running places where illegal drugs are knowingly used. That is the position that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein took in an interview with the Philadelphia radio station WHYY last Wednesday and in an opinion column in the New York Times the following day.

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