Secret US drug injection site shows how supervision could save lives

By Amanda Holpuch, The Guardian

For five years, a secret supervised drug injection site has operated in the US, allowing drug users to inject more than 10,000 times in a sterile, protected environment.

The illegal operation is modeled after similar, legal sites in Canada and Europe, which seek to provide drug users with a place to get clean supplies, connect with social services and avoid overdosing in a dangerous place.

A study of the underground site published in the New England Journal of Medicine online on Wednesday revealed how lives could be saved if the US were to sanction such facilities.

At the clandestine site, there were 33 opioid-involved overdoses, which were reversed with the medication naloxone, according to researchers at the not-for-profit RTI International and the University of California, San Diego.

“Not only were the 33 overdoses all saved, none of them required anyone calling 911 or being sent to a hospital,” said Alex Kral, an RTI International epidemiologist. “This is a big piece of this – we don’t need to overburden the emergency system with all these overdoses if people are inside, if they have trained people monitoring them.”