Dear friend,
This week New York City made history by opening the first Overdose Prevention Centers in the United States ! After a devastating year, with the highest rates of overdose deaths ever recorded in New York City history -- we are thrilled to have won our years-long campaign to bring these life-saving sites to NYC. Click here to read the New York Times article about this historic moment. Overdose Prevention Centers are a proven public health intervention that provide a safe, compassionate place for people to use drugs. Trained staff are available to reverse an overdose, as well as provide wrap-around health and social services. To put it simply -- Overdose Prevention Centers save lives. This victory would not have been possible without the years of organizing, advocacy, and leadership of people who use drugs. Many of whom are not with us today, but whose memories inspire us to fight every day for the health and dignity of people who use drugs.
***
Our Overdose Prevention Center victory has been years in the making.
In 2015, we brought together over 600 New Yorkers for a town hall on safer injecting facilities and for the launch of the SIF NYC campaign. In 2016, New York City Council approved a feasibility study on safer injection sites. That same year, we joined Drug Policy Alliance, and other allies to launch a statewide Safe Shape Tour to show what these sites could look like and how they’ve helped people in other countries. In 2018, Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal took the fight to Albany and introduced the Safer Consumption Services Act - a bill we still need to get passed in the 2022 so OPCs can go statewide. The release of feasibility study was stalled by politics, but overdose deaths were on the rise -- so for weeks we turned up the heat and on May 2, 2018, we shutdown the street outside City Hall, and 11 people got arrested including Council Member Steve Levin. The next day, Mayor de Blasio came out in support of an Overdose Prevention Center pilot project. Although the Mayor was on board, we still needed support from Governor Cuomo. For the next three years we demanded action but he continued to stall and block the initiative. Thankfully our community did not relent, and this week our partners at OnPoint NYC opened the first OPC’s in the United States. On their first day -- they reversed 5 overdoses. ***
Thank you to VOCAL-NY's Users Union for your leadership on this campaign, and to all our staff, allies, and supporters -- together will end overdose in New York ! With love and gratitude, Jasmine. | 
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