New York averages eight drug-overdose deaths every day, and City Hall’s response is free crack pipes.
The pipes are being distributed from no-charge-to-addicts vending machines plunked down in already drug-plagued city neighborhoods.
And the machines have been placed near previously established, government-sponsored drug shooting galleries — oops, make that “safe-injection” sites — which are the last big anti-overdose idea.
That obviously didn’t work; overdose fatalities are up 78% since 2019. So who’s the genius who thinks free drug paraphernalia — apparently syringes are soon to be added — will make it all better?
That would be City Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner Ashwin Vasan, who calls the initiative “an important arrow in our quiver . . . that says to New Yorkers ‘Hey we are going to bring the tools that saves lives to you.’ ”
An arrow? Poison dart seems more like it.
Really — how does a free crack pipe become a “tool that saves lives?” How about a device that helps addicts destroy themselves, courtesy of the taxpaying public?
So whatever happened to the War on Drugs, anyway? It seems as if the white flags have been flying for some time now.
The evidence is everywhere, and it includes the estimated 3,000 New Yorkers expected to OD this year — almost exactly the number who died at Ground Zero 22 years ago this September.
There is, of course, an important difference here: 9/11’s victims were wholly innocent — and, not to put too harsh a point on it, most drug fatalities are the product of slow-motion suicide.
Thus this question: Doesn’t City Hall’s vending machine brainstorm — and its “safe injection” sites — amount to a de facto assisted-suicide scheme, disguised as a harm-reduction program?
Isn’t the program an abdication of government’s duty to combat mortal threats — or, short of that, a morally deficient compromise with otherwise avoidable death?
To be sure, a respectable libertarian case can be made that personal drug use is no legitimate concern of government.
And that argument was a big part of the case for marijuana legalization in New York.
Still, legal weed followed a general softening of the state’s criminal codes — and the consequences of that misjudgment are both obvious and ongoing.
Certainly New York has lost its appetite for stringent drug enforcement — as well as its memory of how earlier drug epidemics were more or less successfully resolved.
That is to say, with stringent law enforcement.
Both the heroin plague of the late ’60s and the crack wars of the late ’80s were met with tough new laws and muscular enforcement — and while it took time, each drug wave eventually receded.
Yes, the so-called Rockefeller drug laws, and Rudy Giuliani’s policing tactics, produce liberal night sweats to this day.
But isn’t it worth considering the consequences of failing to fight drug plagues? It’s easy to count victims — but how many innocents were spared when order was restored? Don’t they count?
There will never be an end to it. People are addictable animals, and always will be.
So addictive substances will always be both available — and agents of profound personal tragedy.
But that’s no legitimate rationale for surrender. And it’s certainly no justification for enabling addicts — not unless the point is to create more addicts.
Of course there are no neat solutions.
But that’s no reason to embrace stupid policies — and it’s hard to imagine anything more stupid than free crack pipes.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
