THE NEW YORK TIMES – Louise Vincent, a heroin addict who overcame multiple overdoses, the amputation of her leg and her daughter’s death from opioids to help lead a movement promoting expanded access to needle exchanges, naloxone and other methods of reducing harm to drug users, died on Aug. 31 at her home in Greensboro, N.C. She was 49.
Her death was confirmed by her mother, Sarah Beale, who said Ms. Vincent had been suffering from a blood disorder and chronic health problems from injecting fentanyl laced with Xylazine, a horse tranquilizer, years earlier.
The daughter of an English professor and a teacher, Ms. Vincent received a master’s degree in public health in 2013 while battling addiction. That year she helped start the North Carolina Survivors Union, among the first organizations in the country to offer safety rails for addicts like her who were struggling to quit.
“We have one acceptable narrative about recovery that doesn’t fit everyone,” she was quoted as saying in Scalawag, an online magazine that covers marginalized communities in the South. “This idea of getting clean, staying clean, being 100 percent abstinent. You’re either all the way sick or all the way well. There’s no middle ground.”
Ms. Vincent was angered — and motivated — by the rehabilitation community’s intolerance of users who fall off the wagon.
“It’s like, ‘Hi, my name is Louise. I can’t stop using drugs, so I need your program,’” she told The Greensboro News & Record in 2021. “‘Oh, you’re going to kick me out because I can’t stop using drugs? Funny. I just told you that was my problem.’”
With nowhere to go, those users continue exposing themselves to hepatitis, H.I.V. and other diseases spread by dirty needles, along with increasingly dubious supplies of drugs laced with dangerous additives …
“Harm Reduction” Is No Solution
Advocates hail a new study on New York City’s safe-injection sites, but the results don’t live up to the billing.
Eye on the News / Health Care, Public Safety, Howard Husock, Nov 16 2023
City Journal – Advocates of so-called safe-injection sites are seizing on a new study that finds crime has apparently not increased in East Harlem and Washington Heights neighborhoods featuring overdose-prevention centers.
The decline in arrests is welcome news, of course, but not necessarily proof that crime has lessened; the study found a rise in 311 calls about drug activity, for example. What’s more, the fact that arrests have gone down doesn’t prove that the safe-injection sites, which remain illegal under federal law, are the cause.
This first serious study of “harm reduction” experiments falls short for other reasons. It does not address key questions about the long-term effects of these sites on addicts, on overdose deaths, and on social norms. Until we know more, we should remain skeptical that they are good for neighborhoods or the city.
OnPoint NYC, which operates the facilities, claims to have prevented some 1,100 overdose deaths since it opened its doors in November 2021.
But administering naloxone to an addict whose heroin has been spiked with fentanyl does not tell us anything about the fate of that addict over time—“longitudinally,” as the social scientists say.
Do these addicts go on to seek treatment? Do they recover? Do they get jobs? Or do they just die somewhere else?
Unless the harm-reduction crowd can find ways to answer these questions, we will have no clear idea about the value of the sites …
