SACRAMENTO, Calif.-
The California State Assembly passed a controversial bill Thursday that allows Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco to establish places where opioid users can legally inject drugs in supervised settings.
The measure follows more than a year of legislative consideration, with supporters saying it would save lives and opponents saying it would enable drug addiction.
The Assembly’s approval sends the bill back to the state Senate for final consideration in August, after lawmakers return from a month-long summer recess. Senators passed a slightly different version more than a year ago, with no votes to spare.
The idea is to give people who would use drugs anyway a place to inject them while trained staff are on hand to help if they accidentally overdose.
The move comes amid a national opioid crisis and a surge in overdose deaths, especially if users inadvertently ingest drugs laced with fentanyl.
New York City opened the first two publicly recognized overdose prevention sites in the United States in December, intervening in more than 150 overdoses, although its operation does not have federal approval to operate. Rhode Island approved testing such centers for two years.
The US Department of Justice, under the Biden administration, recently signaled that it might be open to allowing the sites with “appropriate guardrails,” a spin by the Trump administration that won a lawsuit blocking a safe drinking site in Philadelphia.
The measure was approved by the Assembly with a vote of 42-28, one vote more than necessary.
But he faced bipartisan opposition amid a sometimes personal debate. Two members, Carlos Villapudua and Freddie Rodríguez, revealed that their brothers had died of complications from drug abuse and were among the Democrats who spoke against the proposal.
“This is not the only thing that will stop the fentanyl or opioid epidemic in our state, but it will help. It will help and save lives,” said Democratic Assemblyman Matt Haney, a former San Francisco supervisor who represented the troubled Tenderloin neighborhood and led the bill. law to the Assembly.
But some members of each party said the sites only make matters worse, as lawmakers cited dueling statistics from venues in other nations.
“Sending our kids the message that ‘Hey, we’ll help you deal with your drug addiction’ is not the answer,” said Republican Assemblyman Kelly Seyarto.
About 700 San Franciscans died from accidental drug overdoses in 2020, a record. Those deaths “far exceed the number of people who died from COVID-19” in 2020, when there were 261 deaths from the coronavirus, San Francisco Mayor London Breed said. He cited skyrocketing drug overdose rates in his emergency declaration in the Tenderloin neighborhood.
Los Angeles County was on track to have 1,000 opioid deaths last year, though not all of those deaths came from injections.
Nationwide, drug overdose deaths exceeded 100,000 from April 2020 to April 2021, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including some 10,000 Californians.