Conservative City Council Candidates Exploit Ignorance To Spread Fear Of Safe-Consumption Sites
As city council races heat up, so have the debates around safe-consumption sites here in Seattle, with conservative candidates like Ari Hoffman making it a central part of their campaigns. Hoffman even made the trip up to Vancouver this past week to see their safe-consumption system in action. Upon returning to Seattle, he posted a photo to his campaign’s Facebook page with the caption, “I went to 2 injection sites in Vancouver, and all I got was Narcan and a crack pipe.” It is unclear what Hoffman expected to find on his trip, but his photo illustrates how little he knows about safe-consumption sites, their mission, and the role they play in the overall system of addiction treatment and harm reduction. In the comment section to his post, he also posted several links to an abstract of a recent study from Texas A&M, which he believes supports his position that safe-consumption sites exacerbate the opioid problem and lead to higher crime and mortality rates. Reading deeper into the study, however, reveals quite a bit of evidence of Narcan’s effectiveness, particularly in our region of the country. Since this sort of rhetoric will likely accelerate as we get further into campaign season, I think it’s worth debunking all this stuff now.
First let’s talk about Ari Hoffman’s photograph from his trip to Vancouver. Obviously intended as a gotcha-moment, it ultimately illustrates how misunderstood these sites are, and how ready candidates are to exploit those misunderstandings. Narcan is a drug used to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. It is one of the most useful tools available to workers at these sites, giving them a much greater chance of saving someone’s life from an overdose that would have otherwise killed them. And the crack pipe? Pipes are made of glass and are easily broken, resulting in an increase in the spread of disease when people use those broken pipes. Providing a new one reduces the rate of disease, not just for people who use the safe-consumption sites, but for the community as a whole. That Ari Hoffman received these things from the sites he visited doesn’t point to a problem, it is shows these programs are working exactly as intended.
Now let’s talk about this study Hoffman has been excitedly sharing all over social media. It is a serious study, done by reputable researchers at Texas A&M and UW-Madison, and the abstract Hoffman posts points to some shocking and counter-intuitive results… Among them, that Narcan use in the Midwest is associated with a 14% increase in opioid mortality rate, and an average increase in opioid-related theft, and opioid-related emergency room visits. These results should raise some eyebrows no matter your politics, but things seem less dire when we read past the abstract and get to the actual study. In it, the authors point out that the Midwest has less access to addiction treatment and services, and that it is only in the absence of those services that Narcan leads to higher mortality rates. Suddenly the results aren’t so counterintuitive… People who are alive commit theft at a much higher rate than people who are dead, and putting seat belts in a car doesn’t make them any safer if you don’t also include brakes.
As it turns out, the study Hoffman posted clearly shows that we are actually uniquely suited to reap the benefits of a drug like Narcan, and by extension safe-consumption sites, not only because we have a history of progressive addiction services that people can access, but because the kinds of opioids available here respond much more reliably to Narcan (black tar heroin, popular on the west coast, is less easily tainted with fentanyl, against which Narcan is largely ineffective). It is also important to point out that, while the study appears to be a serious one, it is unpublished, has not been peer reviewed, and the data has not been made available to outside researchers. But if we take the authors at their word, this study doesn’t just support the use of Narcan in the Northwest, it also supports an increase in resources for wrap-around services and addiction treatment, and anything else we can do to make those services widely accessible to as many people as possible.
I can’t say if Hoffman read the entire study and decided to share the abstract hoping his followers wouldn’t dig any deeper, or if he simply failed to read past the first paragraph. I can say that Hoffman has mislead his followers on many recent occasions, exploiting their fear to drum up support for his campaign. Most recently he posted a years-old National Geographic reality show and presented it as an up-to-date accounting of Seattle’s drug crisis, and just a few weeks before that he pushed a hoax about a homeless drug addict beheading people, helping that story reach thousands of people despite being a fabrication. That he’s now taking aim at evidenced-based, life-saving approaches, and exploiting his followers’ ignorance on the subject, makes him a danger to the community and certainly unfit to exercise any sort of control over addiction or harm-reduction programs.
UPDATE 4.18.19 — Ari Hoffman just posted a video from the same trip, showing Oppenheimer Park, which he says is across the street from a safe-consumption site. He tries to make the case that the safe-injection site was to blame for the tents in the park. What he doesn’t mention is that the safe-consumption site is a women-only space, and that Oppenheimer Park has looked exactly like that for years.
