Mayor proposes supervised heroin injection site in Ithaca

ITHACA, N.Y. — Ithaca’s mayor wants the city to be the first in the U.S. to offer a supervised facility where heroin users would be able to shoot up under the care of a nurse.

A supervised injection facility is just one part of a larger plan, announced Wednesday, that will include creating an Office of Drug Policy, a 24-hour Crisis Center, a Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program and a medicated treatment facility.

"I think we need a comprehensive plan because I think every community does," Mayor Svante Myrick said earlier this week. "I mean I think the federal government needs a different plan but they’re not doing it, and the state’s not doing it. So we sort of had to do it ourselves."

There are only two sanctioned facilities for injecting illegal drugs in North America, both are in Vancouver, British Columbia.

One of the facilities, Insite, was founded in 2003.

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About 700 people visit Insite each day, according to Anna Marie D’Angelo, senior media relations officer for Vancouver Coastal Health. Insite is open to the public, whereas a similar facility in Vancouver, the Dr. Peter Centre, is client-based.

D’Angelo said people who come into Insite are screened and must be long-term drug users. If they are not long-term users, Insite will connect them with social services. After being screened, people receive an “alias” for each time they come back. Each time they come in, users are given clean needles and inject in a booth with a mirror.

“It’s all very visible, and there’s (nurses) there that are supervising, so if you do overdose, they’re right there, they can provide naloxone. ... Afterwards you go into what’s called a ‘chill room,’ where you stay there for a little bit longer in case there’s a reaction, then you leave,” D’Angelo said.

There is a detox facility right above Insite, D’Angelo said.

“It’s a harm reduction model. You do reduce the harm that illicit drugs are doing to you, but you’re also connecting the client to care,” she said. “It’s just not someplace where you inject, there’s a whole kind of process.”

Insite also offers other services, including wound care, counseling and referrals to other health and addiction services.

According to a 2011 study published in The Lancet, overdose death decreased by 35% within 500 meters of Insite after the facility opened, compared with 9% in the rest of Vancouver.

In a commentary in The Lancet that accompanied the study, Dr. Chris Beyrer of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore said, “Supervised injection facilities clearly have an important part to play in communities afflicted by injection drug use.”

Myrick said an Ithaca facility would be modeled after Vancouver's, though smaller, and more discreet.

"What you don't want to do is normalize drug use,” he said. “You don't want to romanticize it, and you don't want to advertise it."

Myrick said he expects the project to face big hurdles, possibly at the local, state and federal level.

State health officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Contributing: The Associated Press