Democratic analyst Jason Nichols said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday that supervised injection sites for drug addicts will help reduce overdose deaths and “make things better” for society.
The Denver city council approved a privately funded pilot program Monday to fund drug injection sites after more than 200 overdose deaths occurred in the city during the past year, Fox News reported.
State lawmakers still have to sign off on the measure, but this would be the first U.S. city to have a program of this kind. (RELATED: Drug Company Hiked Opioid Overdose Treatment Prices 600 Percent)
“I think we all across the board know that drugs are a public health problem and not a criminal one. This will be a way to stop overdose-related deaths,” Nichols said.
“These supervised injection sites will also clean up our environment and make it so that there aren’t needles in public bathrooms and in public parks and on the streets.”
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Nichols said the sites will also help with the spike of HIV and hepatitis from needle-sharing and would be a net positive for the city.
“This actually gives us a lot of advantages and will make things better for our society,” he said.
Attorney Jenna Ellis disagreed with Nichols and called his claims “absurd.”
“This isn’t innovative. It’s absurd,” Ellis replied. “We all definitely want to help treat addiction and mental health, but supervising and facilitating drug use is absolutely the inappropriate way. And while we may want to do all of the wonderful things that Jason just stated, but the statistics in Colorado actually show that most crime is drug-related, and since 2012 in Colorado specifically, the crime rate has gone up.”
She also said an injection site would enable drug addicts to continue feeding their addictions and would remove responsibility and liability from the equation.
“There’s absolutely no reason to believe that if we have a safe injection site where there’s not even exemption where kids couldn’t be brought to this site, that this would actually help treat addiction when there is no reciprocal responsibility on the addicts’ part to actually take advantage of any of those programs,” Ellis said. “They can just go and shoot up without having any criminal responsibility or liability.”
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