But since safe consumption sites are still illegal at the state and federal levels, their funding remains a mystery.
That year, San Francisco passed a local policy that would allow the city to move forward with a funding model similar to that in New York.
Still, the nonprofits eager to operate the services said it will be difficult to fund them on their own. The two New York City locations, operated by a non-profit organization called OnPoint NYC, cost about $1.4 million annually, OnPoint executive director Sam Rivera previously explained.
The privately run New York locations offer people with substance use disorders a quiet and sterile indoor space to use drugs in a safer environment and potentially connect to treatment, city officials who visited KQED said. The program boasts that staff have intervened in 819 overdose cases and that there have been zero overdose deaths. Mayor Eric Adams has said he wants more of them.
There are nearly 200 safe use locations around the world including Canada, Australia, Norway, Portugal and Spain and they have been successful in keeping drug users alive and reversing opioid overdoses with a drug called naloxone. Sites also typically allow patients to access a variety of services, such as showers and meals, or enroll in shelters and other healthcare programs.
San Francisco also operated a safe-use site in 2022 as part of Mayor London Breed’s emergency initiative for the Tenderloin neighborhood, where a large portion of San Francisco’s overdoses occurred, according to data from the Office of the Chief Medical (PDF) Examiners .
However, Breed ordered the Department of Health to close the facility after 11 months of operation, and stated at the time that it was never intended to be permanently located in the United Nations Plaza, a busy corridor of shops, residences, government buildings and public events.
Many overdose prevention advocates have criticized the lack of support given to the hundreds of daily visitors to the Tenderloin Center after it abruptly closed. The number of drug overdose deaths rose slightly in the months that followed, according to San Francisco coroner data.
