Oct. 7, 2021, will go down in history as the day that New York surrendered in the war on drugs. Not a shot was fired, except for the heroin or meth shot into the vein of a drug addict on the streets of Midtown, the South Bronx or Harlem.
Gov. Hochul last week signed into law a bill pushed by state Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx) and backed overwhelmingly by the city’s Democratic delegation to the Legislature. It decriminalizes the possession or sale of hypodermic needles and syringes by addicts to inject drugs.
Touted as a move to reduce overdose deaths, it will instead be the death of downtowns and residential neighborhoods across the Empire State.
One result: NYPD cops are now under orders to let addicts freely shoot drugs and share needles. The Post had already reported recently on how junkies have overrun parks and other public spaces from Washington Square through Midtown to The Bronx. Hochul & Co. just guaranteed that it’ll grow worse.
“Having drug addicts, a frightful condition, freely injecting drugs and passing out in public is not tenable,” warns Barbara Blair of the Garment District Alliance of the “preposterous” new law, explaining rightly that addicts and the mentally ill should be “placed in high-quality settings, institutional settings, if necessary, where they get the shelter, food and care.”
IV use of illegal substances is inherently unhealthy and dangerous. Addicts who share needles expose themselves and others to HIV, hepatitis and other blood-borne infections.
“It was passed under the guise of compassion, but it’s one of the least compassionate bills I’ve seen come across the Legislature in a long time. There is nothing compassionate about telling people to keep doing something that is going to kill them,” state Sen. Andrew Lanza (R-Staten Island) told The Post. Needle sharing “contravenes any logical and reasonable science based upon public-health standards.”
Assaults, break-ins and robberies will soar as new addicts join the growing army of drugged zombies inhabiting once-vibrant city streets. City overdose deaths already spiked 36 percent for the year ending March 31; this law will send them higher, not lower as backers imagine.
Hochul has effectively decriminalized drugs by legalizing the sale and possession of drug paraphernalia and making substance abuse free of social consequences.
Disastrously, the new law will be near-impossible to repeal unless and until furious voters besiege the lawmakers who inflicted it. It’ll be a huge uphill battle merely to do the bare minimum and give judges the power to mandate treatment for IV drug users caught in possession of still-illegal drugs or who commit other crimes to feed their addiction.
Drug addicts need to hit bottom if they’re ever going to seek treatment. Hochul just denied IV drug users a bottom to hit, i.e., jail — and so pulled the rug from under treatment programs that Rivera & Co. claim to support.
New York is struggling to get back to normal after 18 months of madness, but Hochul and the Legislature seem bent on pushing normalcy infinitely far away.