A recovery-focused system for addressing our addiction crisis means allocating sufficient funding to ensure access to evidence-based intervention, treatment, and recovery programs. Funding drug consumption sites puts the cart before the horse—at a time when treatment and recovery services are not resourced to anywhere-near adequate levels— and shifts our focus away from a recovery-oriented policy that enables more people to get off drugs and reshape their lives. Furthermore, these sites are almost always unfairly situated in economically depressed areas, often communities of color, and further attract open-air drug selling, drug use, and increased crime.

We also urge the Biden administration to seek the involvement of a broader group of experts and advocates than the handful of voices pursuing drug consumption sites. Their advocacy is biased and distorted, with their final goal being the legalization of all drugs. The president should recognize that there are multiple ways to implement sanctioned drug consumption sites, but the current policy, as proposed, sadly has little to do with the well-controlled version that has worked in Europe to reduce overdose, increase treatment, and the shutting down of open-air drug scenes.

Legalizing supervised consumption site without proper guardrails and societal infrastructure will harm drug users and nearby communities. Examples can be seen from San Francisco, New York City and in cities in Canada. When San Francisco opened a supervised drug site inside the now-shuttered “Tenderloin Linkage Center,” in January 2022, drug dealers — almost all of them working for the dangerous Sinaloa cartel — set up shop directly across the street. And all around them, and the Center, were hundreds of people smoking fentanyl, meth, and other hard drugs. The same thing happened around a drug site in the historically African American community of Harlem. “The clinics and consumption sites have had the unintentional side effect of bringing dealers around,” a Harlem resident told The City last month.

The same chaos has plagued drug sites across Canada. A few years ago, one such site in Alberta was closed due to its record of failure and its disruption of the neighborhood around it.

We hear a lot about how these sites regularly revive people in an overdose situation, but what happens to them when they leave these sites? How have these sites impact nearby communities? No data has been presented on this key outcome.

We are sympathetic to harm reduction interventions if implemented in a well-controlled manner as a component of a continuum of treatment and recovery services that guides most people into treatment. Only when this spectrum of services are established would installing supervised consumption capacities be an effective service. We have no assurances this would happen if the Biden administration offers a sweeping endorsement of this reckless policy proposed by the drug legalization advocates. We urge them to first focus on funding the severely under-resourced, but more effective intervention, treatment, and recovery systems.