Article author:
AP communication
Don Thompson
California Sacramento (AP) — Thursday's California State Legislature is a controversial bill allowing Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco to set up locations. Approved Where opioid users can legally inject medicines in a monitored environment.
The move is the result of more than a year of legislative consideration, with supporters saying it will save lives and critics say it will enable drug addiction.
With Congressional approval, the bill will be returned to the State Senate in August for final review after parliamentarians have returned from a month-long summer vacation. Senator approved a slightly different version over a year ago and couldn't afford to vote.
The idea is to provide a place for injections to people who use the drug anyway, but it helps if trained staff are suffering from accidental overdose. can do.
This move occurs amid a national opioid crisis and a surge in deaths from overdose, especially if users accidentally take a drug that spikes fentanyl.
In December, New York City launched the first two officially recognized overdose prevention sites in the United States to intervene in more than 150 overdose, but the federal government operates it. There is no approval. Rhode Island has approved testing such centers for two years.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice under the Biden administration allows a place with a "proper guardrail" that is a turnaround from the Trump administration that won a proceeding to block a safe consumption area in Philadelphia. Suggested that there is a possibility.
The bill passed Congress with 42-28 votes, one more than necessary.
But sometimes there was bipartisan opposition in personal debate. Two members, Carlos Villapudua and Freddy Rodriguez, revealed that their brothers each died of substance abuse complications, and they were one of the Democrats who opposed the proposal.
"This isn't one thing to stop the fentanyl or opioid epidemic in our state, but it will help. It will help and save lives," he said. Former San Francisco overseer Matt Haney, who represented the Tenderloin district in his possession and submitted a bill in parliament, said.
However, some members of each party said the site only made things worse, as lawmakers quoted duel statistics from places in other countries.
"Hey, we're going to help you manage your drug addiction," says Republican lawmakers. Kelly Seyarto said.
There are records that in 2020, about 700 San Franciscans died from accidental drug overdose. San Francisco Mayor London Breed said these deaths "much more than the number of individuals who died of COVID-19" in 2020, when 261 deaths from the coronavirus were recorded. She quoted a surge in drug overdose in her state of emergency in the Tenderloin district.
Last year, opioid deaths were accelerating to 1,000 in Los Angeles County, but not all such deaths were due to injections.
According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of deaths from drug overdose exceeded 100,000 between April 2020 and April 2021 across the country, including about 10,000 Californians. I did.
