Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, you could say that the debate over public safety and how to use New York City resources to provide adequate housing and drug treatment to New Yorkers who need it can be found in the Northwest corner of Washington Square Park, which has been closed "Until further notice." According to the parks department, that move was in response to complaints from nearby residents, who said they didn't feel safe in their historic neighborhood park. The New York Post said the area had turned into a "Drugged in" here's the police commissioner, Dermot Shea.

Dermot Shea: We'll have an increased presence in the park. The parks are clearly not for people to use drugs, they're not for people to do any other nefarious activities.

Brian Lehrer: As we talked about on the show yesterday, the police response in the park has intensified even beyond that partial closure with imposed curfews over the past weekend. While we can all agree that public displays of intoxication and drug use are not okay, the questions that come after that are more tricky. Why are people using drugs in the space, to begin with? Is there another approach to addressing these issues besides policing? Melissa Moore, New York state director of the Drug Policy Alliance joins us now, along with Jawanza Williams organizing director at VOCAL-NY. Melissa, welcome back to the show and Jawanza welcome.

Melissa Moore: Thanks so much for having me.

Jawanza Williams: Oh, thanks so much, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Jawanza, like I said, at the intro, the city decided to close the Northwest corner of Washington Square Park until further notice. Can you just describe, who's been hanging out there and why the city would make that choice?

Jawanza Williams: Yes. First of all, thank you so much for having this segment in two days in a row, especially because this is very important for us to be thinking about. I think that there's a number of things that are happening in the parks that we need to take a step back and reconsider the moment that we find ourselves in New York City. One, we are coming on the better end of a global pandemic that in fact strangled the city to a halt and people are, euphoric.

They're outlaying wanting to have a good time, but also we have to remember that we're also experiencing a homelessness crisis that rivaled that of the great depression, but I mean, people in the park or people experiencing homelessness and sometimes people experienced homelessness are also people who use drugs. Sometimes those same people are also people experiencing mental health care complexity. Also as the Gothamist noted in a previous article about this space and this issue that the West Village is 80% white and roughly 40% of the neighborhood's residential population fled during the pandemic, one of the highest rates in the city.

Now the park is becoming increasingly space for Black and brown young people to gather and hang. There's a convergence of a number of kinds of folks in the park. I think that this is a very racialized and dehumanizing or ideologically problematic way to be thinking about who's occupying public space, who has the right occupancy of public space and then using drugs and drug use as a spectacle as a reason to move Black and brown and poor people out of a rich white community.

That's what I think is in the park and that's why I think people are trying to get out of the park. I think that they're using a lot of drug war propaganda, a lot of like, fear-mongering instead of relying on evidence-based realities and solutions to public drug use, et cetera. Instead, they're relying on boots, mace, riot gear, and police officers that oftentimes kill Black and brown people.

Brian Lehrer: Melissa. I want to play a clip of a police officer who called into the show yesterday. I asked her if she could defend the police wearing full riot gear to enforce the curfew in Washington Square Park over the weekend and here's 30 seconds of what she said.

Police: I am a female. I am not a large female. If I'm approaching someone and they are going to not like the message that I am delivering, I want to be safe and I want to go home to my children at night. We are there to protect, we are there to serve, but we are not obligated to be injured so that someone can use heroin in the park.

Brian Lehrer: Melissa, I think things are getting confused here because the curfew was set to address noise complaints that were mostly coming from rowdy kids, NYU students, for example, and not primarily because of people using drugs. Like you heard from that caller, she also talks about needing protection to address a possibly violent heroin user. What are you thinking when you hear that clip? The connection between danger and drug use. I don't want to sugarcoat things because drug addiction is a powerful thing that can make people desperate and in some cases violent, depending on the drug but what do you think when you hear that connection?

Melissa Moore: I think the distinction that you're highlighting is really important. There's a lot of things that are being conflated in this moment. As we see so often drugs and drug use and people who use drugs are being blamed for a much larger structural issue that's going on within the city. In a lot of ways the park is a microcosm of New York City itself and also the state, I think. With both the narrative around drugs being the root of everything that's going on in the park, as you said that the supposed reason for the really escalated show of force by the NYPD coming into enforce the curfew was about something completely unrelated.

It was about the noise complaint. It was about young people of color in particular, as Jawanza was saying, being out in the park and enjoying a public space that they have every right to be in as well, especially when there wasn't previously any messaging out to people about the fact that there would be a curfew or that it would be enforced in that way. Hearing the comments from that officer, I really take issue with the heart of it being about drugs because clearly, that wasn't the case, but we know that all too often that's exactly what happens within broader public discourse.

Within the fear-mongering that we see over and over again is this twisted logic that people who use drugs are to blame for everything that's going on. When in fact that's, so often not the case and instead they're the ones experiencing the convergence of all of these root causes. As Jawanza was highlighting, we're experiencing a massive homelessness crisis on top of the upending that people have experienced because of the pandemic. People not even being able to provide enough food for themselves and their families and having to access food banks at still really elevated rates all across the city.

I think really is an indicator of the much broader structural issues that we're dealing with here. Also the racialized dynamics. The ways in which the escalation happened in Washington Square Park and Tompkins Square Park, all across the city. We're seeing these really militarized shows a force from the NYPD where they're basically manufacturing a crisis and then trying to pin the blame on drugs and people who use drugs. When in fact there's a totally separate conversation that needs to happen about our cities, public spaces, about our actual resources, and how we're choosing to spend our dollars within the city budget.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we're going to open up the phones to you for you to participate in this conversation. Do you or a family member have a history of injecting drugs and experiencing homelessness? What would you like listeners to know about that experience and reality, particularly as it pertains to drug use in a public space, perhaps because you didn't have access to a private space or for some other reasons? (646) 435-7280. If you, or someone have used opioids or crack and done it in public, why in the park?

Why in a public space? What's life like day to day that it wound up being like that for you or someone you know? (646) 435-7280, (646) 435-7280. What's life like day-to-day if you or someone you know has been in that position because of the potential for interactions with the police at any moment? I'm sure you or the person you know would have rather avoided that. Maybe keep it out of view of police officers, but there you were, there they were in a public space.

Call in with anything you want to say about drug use addiction, safety, public use, public space. (646) 435-7280, (646) 435-7280 or a tweet @BrianLehrer as we continue with Melissa Moore, New York state director for the advocacy group Drug Policy Alliance and Jawanza Williams organizing director at the advocacy group VOCAL-New York, VOCAL-NY.

Jawanza, a solution to people using drugs in public spaces is to give people a private safe space to use. That's the idea between behind safe consumption spaces like where needle exchanges could happen legally and people could also go to shoot up if that's what they were doing safely. Three years ago they were on the verge of opening one or more of those in New York, what happened?

Jawanza Williams: First of all Brian, I really want to point out that safer consumption spaces are not just for people that inject drugs, but also the number of ways that people have consumed drugs. The state's consumption space, just the city would call the overdose prevention center would allow people to bring their pre-obtained substances, which are illegal into this space where they're able to use safely under the guidance and supervision of medical and health care professionals, where they're able to access love, care, and compassion.

I think that VOCAL-NY recently released reports of a caring, compassionate, new deal really talks about like, what do we mean by that as it relates to removing money from the carceral system like the NYPD's and DAs, and courts as it relates to substance use disorder, homelessness, unmet mental health needs, and investing that money in these kinds of evidence-based solutions like paper consumption spaces, like syringe exchange programs, a lot of the harm reduction-based services.

What actually happened was, there's multiple ways that we're able to implement safer consumption spaces across New York state. One, there's a safer consumption services act on the state level that we could pass which has a very difficult roadblock because of Governor Cuomo's unwillingness to move forward in this very progressive and needed intervention to the overdose crisis, which is ravaging out of control, by the way.

In New York City the city is blocked from being able to do it because we needed the state health department person Zucker to be able to sign off on the efficacy of safer consumption spaces, which we know has 30 plus years of evidence-based reality that this actually does improve the conditions of people's lives. It offers people recovery pathways to stability and it also helps us prevent the spread of HIV, hepatitis. It prevents endocarditis, it prevents those heinous wounds that people get from injecting with previously-used syringes, et cetera.

It's common sense, I'm thinking we should be doing, but what happened is the politics as we see happening right now in New York City, yet again in Washington Square Park, a politics that is rooted in anti-Black racism I would argue, a framework of safety and violence that depends upon the mythologized character about who uses drugs that was propped up for the sole purpose of moving the drug war and allowing the drug war to continue throughout this country and throughout the city and throughout the state.

I think what we saw in the last few years, when it comes to safer consumption spaces or overdose prevention centers, for people that don't know, this also means supervised injection facilities or SIP is that we had to deal with this mobilization and this politics. I really think what needs to happen right now in the city of New York. One, the city council just passed intro 146, which would increase the CityFHEPs housing voucher to a fair market rate. We need to aggressively implement that to get people experiencing homelessness, some of whom are using drugs into stable housing.

Today the legislature is slated to pass the HONDA bill, Housing Our Neighbors With Dignity Act, we need Governor Cuomo to sign that bill, which would allow the state of New York to buy dilapidated and struggling hotels and commercial properties across the state and just convert those into permanent housing. We need to remember that this is a question about quality of life, about housing security, about access to comprehensive healthcare, including wraparound services, including mental health care services, including harm reduction-based services for people that use drugs.

Safer consumption spaces fit into a continuum of care, but that continuum of care only works if one, we decriminalize the registers, we're fighting to do that right now across the state of New York and if we actually make sure that the people experiencing homelessness, that means people on the streets, people that might be sleeping in the park are not brutalized by police and demonized by people living in the Village or the Upper West Side for that matter but to actually respond to people with love, care, and compassion. Our Caring and Compassionate New Deal really helps us understand what it is that we need to be doing. It's a paradigm shift.

We need the city of New York to think and operate in a way that ignores the problematic ideology that is at the root of a lot of the response that led to this violent crackdown in Washington Square Park and actually center evidence-based solutions, center people experiencing homeless and people that have a history of drug use and a harm reductionist response. I'll stop here Brian saying, harm reduction I think of it in two dimensions. It is one a methodology, how do we treat people who have a substance use disorder? What are the medical ways that we can respond to them? Simultaneously, it is an ideology.

It is a worldview. It is a political orientation that says that people that use drugs are people first and every policy that we write, every action that we take, every institution that we activate to respond to reality, or the conditions that they are experiencing are a part of that we respond in a way that centers as humanity and cracking down with militarized police presence in the park is not how you do that. I do want to also make that as we come towards the anniversary, the one-year anniversary of Occupy City Hall that led to the creation of Abolition Park, this massive call to defund the police, defund the NYPD, and invest billions of dollars into the kinds of services that are mainly housing care, compassion.

It's no mistake that Black and brown young people, also of Black and brown young activists being in this space, [unintelligible 00:15:15] up this space with claiming our rights to be a public space, to call for the future that is safe for all of us and that includes people that use drugs. I need the police commissioner. I need Mayor Bill de Blasio. I need all city council members. I need the resident of the Village to understand that we are talking about human beings who need love, support, and care, not this kind of violence. It just absolutely disturbing to me and I think that there are many solutions that we can push forward and we're ready to offer those up. They exist, there are evidence-based realities that we can respond to them.

Brian Lehrer: Just to put a couple of additional stats on all that, New York City's share of injection drug users who report reusing their needles has increased more than fourfold recently, according to a recent CUNY study to 22% and though there are currently no such private drug use sites like we were talking about a minute ago in the United States zero, there were about 100 sites worldwide, mostly in Canada and Europe where the politics are different. Jason in Brooklyn you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in, Jason. Hello.

Jason: Hello. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you. Hi. Can you hear me?

Jason: Yes, I can hear you. I'm happy that you're having this discussion. Someone who I love very much as a heroin addict, I drive him to his drug spots. I let him shoot up in my car. There's been a number of ODs and I don't understand why we don't have any safe injection sites in the city. I think it's even called by a different name now. There was a mobile van up in Washington Heights for a while. I haven't seen that for a while. The de Blasio administration proposed this, but they said the Trump administration blocked them. Why are these safe injection sites not being set up? They can be set up really quickly, within a couple of weeks.

Brian Lehrer: Melissa Moore from Drug Policy Alliance. Can you take that and answer as to why?

Melissa Moore: Yes. First of all, Jason, thank you for the harm reduction approach that you're taking with your friend and for caring about that person and being there to make sure that they're not overdosing and dying. I think what you're raising really speaks to the core of a lot of the conversation that we're having right now is how are we actually using our resources? How are we using the institutions within our city to better protect people and to actually keep people safe, amid a skyrocketing overdose crisis that we're seeing in New York City, where we're losing somebody every six hours to a preventable overdose and have been for years and years.

As you said, we were on the brink of establishing overdose prevention centers or safer consumption spaces in the city. A couple of years ago, the city council had done a feasibility study. The mayor finally came out and endorsed this as a public health initiative that could save lives and then instead of taking action, he punted to the state department of health and said that we needed authorization, as Jawanza said before, when in fact that simply isn't the case. The city could move forward under emergency public health authorization and say, we're losing far too many New Yorkers to preventable overdoses, we need to take action now.

With this proven evidence-based solution that would actually provide not only a place for people to use under supervision like Jawanza said to have Naloxone and other remedies if there is an overdose to be able to save that person's life, but also connect them with care, connect them with other resources so they can transition out of that problematic use if that's the space that they're in.

Really this comes down to a fundamental question about whether we're going to use the criminal legal system and punitive approaches and criminalization to deal with what's fundamentally a health problem that people are experiencing or a health dynamic in people's lives that can be tied to all sorts of other trauma and experiences that people have had and instability from lack of housing and other things, or are we going to marshal our resources in a way that is supportive of people and actually builds toward a situation in which they're able to have stability and able to remain safe? We would certainly posit that the city could move forward.

Mayor de Blasio signed on to an open letter to the department of justice a couple of months ago, along with mayors from San Francisco and other cities across the country saying we need clarity on what the DOJ's position is going to be with regards to safer consumption spaces or overdose prevention centers but in the meantime, unfortunately, the situation is such in New York City, that people are cobbling together any response that they can very much like what Jason described, in order to keep people safe.

We know that fentanyl poisoning is a real thing and that's where drug checking and other resources that can also be placed at overdose prevention centers are really crucial to make sure that people just know what's even in their supply. In the era of the pandemic, we've seen so much upheaval and change within drug markets and supplies and what people are getting, it's really caused a fundamental problem in terms of driving up the rates of overdose even further, not to mention that every risk factor in the book basically skyrocketed during this time.

Governor Cuomo also stopped funding harm reduction programs, just straight up was withholding funds for the better part of last year, causing some programs across the city in the state to have to close their doors or to operate basically just with volunteers, giving their time, recognizing that if they didn't do it, people were going to die so they remained committed. I placed this squarely at the feet of our leadership in City Hall and our leadership in the governor's mansion in New York and knowing full well, that there are evidence-based solutions that we could be employing right now to save lives, and they're choosing not to act.

Brian Lehrer: Joanna in Queens, you're on WNYC, thank you so much for calling in. Hi.

Joanna: Hi, thank you, this is a wonderful subject, very important. Hello, Jawanza and Melissa, I am a drug user, a former IV drug user, and just as a little reason for why people use drugs in parks, it's very practical. Most people, at least in my experience who inject drugs, don't purchase the drugs in their own neighborhood and have to travel to another area to pick it up. In that case, especially if you're dope sick, or for any reason, you're just going to want to shoot it up right away. The most logical place since we don't even have public bathrooms is a city park. Luckily, I'm a white girl so I never really got any trouble, but I just can't imagine how much trouble I would have gotten were I a Black or brown person. This is really a problem that needs to come, like you were saying, from the city government and from the state government.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much and since she didn't ask a question, I'm going to go right on to Francesca in Midtown. You're on WNYC. Hi, Francesca.

Francesca: Hello, thank you so much for this opportunity. I will try my best to say what I need to say, I have personal experience. Unfortunately, my dear brother died in a car crash at 21 as a heroin-addicted person, his son died of drug abuse, he was homeless. I have a different perspective on all this because I've experienced the devastation to my family for years and years and prayers and years. I don't love the public conversation that's going on because there's no use of the word, responsibility, or tough love, or balancing the scales. I became less tolerant and not more tolerant because I have personally experienced that this is dragging down our society.

If we don't try to at least market the idea that human beings can pull their selves out of this pit of evil that drugs are and if we just make it easy for everyone, they're devastating families, devastating the communities, the police officer that called in yesterday who had children, and said that they have to make a decision, are they going to get killed themselves to defend a heroin addict in the park, I had a brother and a nephew, I would not defend them. I don't mean to sound nasty or mean, or heartless. I lived through it. I think we need to go towards the light to fix our society, to give people the impression that maybe through personal responsibility, they can at least try to pull themselves out of it by just having, I can't even listen to the conversation, it's very upsetting to me.

Brian Lehrer: Francesca, I'm going to leave it there because the show is going to end in two minutes and I want our guests to be able to respond to you. Melissa you first for maybe 45 seconds and Jawanza you can get the last word but this shows the parameters of the emotional as well as policy thoughts of people who've been close to this problem.

Melissa: Right. First, off Francesca, I'm very sorry for your loss and for the pain that you and your family have experienced. I think this goes back to, right now we're at the 50th anniversary of the War on Drugs being declared. We've seen very substantively in what Francesca described in what we were talking about earlier in the program, that the War on Drugs has been a complete failure in its stated goal of reducing drug use or preventing drug use and keeping people safe. Instead, it has drawn resources away from precisely the types of programs and help that could have possibly been able to reach Francesca's family members, and certainly other people who are still around, which would be a lot more appropriate.

Brian Lehrer: Jawanza, 30 seconds, really 30 seconds.

Jawanza: Again, I too am sorry about Francesca's loss. I also 100% reject that analysis and that finding about how we should respond. At VOCAL-New York we've organized a drug users union with other people who are active and former drug users and any way that we want to respond to the crises related to drug use not necessarily reviews needs to be centering people's humanity and allows them the ability to have the agency to choose the best pathway forward for them and us as a society should wrap them with love and implement policies rooted love care, compassion, and that allow people to have the space to be able to grow--

Brian Lehrer: That will be the last word on this for today. Obviously, we'll keep talking about these issues, as we leave it with Jawanza Williams, organizing director at VOCAL-NY, and Melissa Moore, New York state director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Thank you both so much.

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