Seattle could be the first city in the U.S. to host safe-injection sites for heroin users

By Casey Jaywork

“This will happen,” Shilo Murphy, executive director of the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance, announced Friday to an enthusiastic crowd at Town Hall. With Seattle in the grip of heroin and homelessness epidemics that have lasted years already, he says, “The time is now . . . Get on the bandwagon, or get the fuck out of our way.”

Murphy is blunt, and he’s not alone. The Public Defenders Association has joined his call for one or more such sites in Seattle, as has the Capitol Hill Community Council. And Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, a drug-abuse researcher at the University of Washington, says such locations are a public-health no-brainer. “The evidence base is very clear,” he says, “ . . . that [safe drug sites] have very good health outcomes and do not have a big downside.” This matters, he says, in a city where 70 percent of injection-drug users are infected with hepatitis C. The site would be the first of its kind in the United States.

There’s also some support at City Hall. Every single member of the incoming City Council (including both candidates in District 1’s too-close-to-call race) say they either support or are open to safe drug sites. Mayor Ed Murray also says he’d consider coordinating safe drug sites with the county, but would need to know more about how they would work.

“In the late ’80s/early ’90s,” he says, “when needle exchange was considered a very controversial idea, handing out needles to people so they could inject seemed wrong to so many people at the time.” But it saved lives, he says. If a safe drug site can do the same, “I absolutely would be very interested in exploring it.”

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