Has Burlington Tipped Too Far On 'Harm Reduction'?

It's time to get the story behind the story. Interviews with newsmakers, newsbreakers, and Vermonters making a difference. WCAX presents 802 News with Mark Johnson. Here's Mark. Has Burlington's policy on drug usage that emphasizes harm reduction gone too far? In this edition of 802 News, sponsored by Red Hand baking company, I spoke with journalist Michael Jerome Powell, who just published a piece in the Atlantic magazine titled The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs, that includes an assessment of Burlington. The article comes at a moment when Democrats are calling for a crackdown on public drug usage and homeless encampments, including downtown. Progressive Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stannock has pushed back on the Democrats' Burlington Forward Resolution, which is scheduled for City Council debate on Monday. The mayor maintains Democrats want to arrest and imprison their way out of a complex crisis. We begin our discussion with journalist Michael Jerome Powell right after this. Big changes these days at Red Hand Baking Company. They just opened the doors at their new establishment in downtown Montpelier, a move customers have long requested. There's plenty of parking, and the pastries and other delights, like sandwiches and salads, have never been tastier. You can order online or just head in. Red Hand Bread is also available at many other fine grocery stores throughout Vermont. At Red Hand Baking Company, Randy, George, and Eliza Kane focus on quality. stopping soon to their new location on Main Street in the capital city. Your story is entitled The Cities that Said Yes to Drugs. This is about what this concept that's called harm reduction. Can you, first of all, explain what that strategy is and what it's trying to accomplish? Sure. So. It's important to note that like at one level, there's who could disagree with it. I mean, when you go back to its origins, really one of the biggest one during, because it started during the age of AIDS was the AIDS virus, was to offer clean needles. I mean, that was one of the biggest things they did. So. Drug users, IV drug users, heroin, and to a certain extent, Coke and meth, were at that time, folks would share needles all the time. I mean, that was kind of, you're sitting around in a, what's it called, a heroin shooting gallery, which is just a floor through, say, in Brooklyn, but I mean, it was in many cities. And people would share needles. And that's a, that's a unfortunately great way to both get tuberculosis, hepatitis, and most perilously AIDS. So lots and lots of people were dying, lots of IV drug users.

The police at first in many cities were opposed to needle exchanges. It was seen as, you know, we're promoting, somehow promoting drug use. There, I think there was a very good, compassionate humanitarian argument that, no, we're simply trying to keep people from dying of AIDS. And as we know, it's not, you're not just. It's not just me, say, who's shooting it up. It's also my wife, my girlfriend, so that there was this kind of ripple out, deadly ripple out. So that was the original kind of move on harm reduction. And many cities, almost all cities now, have legal needle exchanges, again with an eye towards simply keeping people alive. What happened was sometime around 2000 and growing from there, this notion of harm reduction came to mean many things, which I kind of call radical harm reduction at this point, where you give people not just needles, you give them pipes, you give them all the things they need to use drugs, you... Don't arrest people. It's seen as to arrest someone, a drug dealer, and push them, try to push them into drug treatment as seen as inhumane, this whole notion of you need to meet drug users where they are, which is to say if they want to use drugs. You know, Mazel Tov. Let them, just let them keep using it. And that's led to, I mean, that's, well, it started a number of places. Burlington, actually, was one of the places where it's, you know, took root. But probably later, I mean, it really started in Vancouver and then kind of worked its way down the West Coast. Because you're a very sort of left libertarian kind of political cultures and social cultures. So Seattle. Portland, San Francisco, L.A., also expanded across Canada. And, you know, what you had was at that time an explosion of drug use. Now, in fairness, I would not argue that everyone who became a drug addict at that time, that was because of radical harm reduction. But it certainly sent the message that, you know, we're not going to press you to try to get clean, to try to go into treatment, to do any of that. That, in fact, is seen as something bad. Who are we to say? I mean, this is the argument. Who are we to say that? drug treatment and abstinence or whatever is good for you. You should make that decision on your own. If you decide you want to be a drug addict, again, who are we to say no? We're going to meet you where you are. And that led to my view, and I think to the view of many who have looked at this, to a real disaster, albeit a well-intentioned one. But this whole notion that we're not going to

push anyone into treatment that we're going to we're not going to arrest them we're not going to do in many cases we're going to have what vermont uh... burlington is now talking about which is having a injection center uh... where people can come and use drugs and that started in vancouver and it really became gospel uh... in british columbia see now upwards of 40 injection centers just across that one province. And you have an enormous growth at the same time of drug addiction. Ironically, you've also had, given that injection centers are meant, these are ideas that you... come into a place and you can use your drugs right there. And theoretically, if you overdose, there's going to be trained staff right on right there who will take care of you or they'll call, say, in the case of Vermont, they'll call UVM and they'll send over an ambulance and you'll save lives. There's something to be said for that. I mean, but there's a lot. There's a real downside to that. You also see a big growth in drug use. And with the growth of fentanyl, you know, you have an ever, a much more dangerous sort of opiate now. And so that people are even ODing. There are many more ODs. You also have a problem with these injection centers. And it's certainly been the case in Canada. And we'll see I. strongly suspect you would see it in burlington if they ever manage to cite one is that you have drug dealers come to those things we have two in new york city where i live there are two injection centers for that's two or three square blocks around there it is just filled with dealers filled with dealers filled with users who are doing you know sex acts and other stuff to raise the money to pay for their drugs And it's a real problem. So that, you know, if you're somebody who has to live within that radius, it kind of takes what you're seeing in Burlington or other places and kind of cubes it. You mentioned Vancouver. where you did some research. But you focus in this piece on Seattle and Burlington. Why did you pick those two cities? Sure. I wanted to have two things. I wanted to have cities on kind of opposite ends of the country because I wanted to. basically show, demonstrate that this is a problem that's not just exclusively the, say, the Northwest. And there's a lot of other cities. I mean, Portland, Maine is struck. I mean, you know, Burlington, I'm by no means trying to argue that Burlington has a unique problem. In fact, I kind of kind of the opposite. I want to demonstrate that this is.

a feature of, you know, frankly, very often kind of liberal cities that have a liberal view of, you know, that we should, how we should go about dealing with the drug problem and not leaning on law enforcement. And also, when it came to Burlington, frankly, I mean, I have family up there. I once, you and I worked on the Burlington Free Press back in the 19th century. And... Sat next to one another started on the same day. We did. Yes, that we did. And somehow the paper survived us. Well, the paper hasn't survived, but we have. Well, this is true. Yes, yes, that is very true. So anyway, so I knew a little bit about Burlington. And I had seen, because I come up there every summer, we have an old family cottage north of Burlington. I've seen, and my wife has seen, the change in Burlington over the last, say, 10 years, but then really accelerating about five years ago with the kind of open drug markets that exist. I mean, I remember... My wife, Evelyn, came back from taking our granddaughter to City Hall Park. This is probably about four years ago. And again, we're born and raised New Yorkers. Like to see some drug use is not like, this isn't blowing our mind, but it blew her mind. I mean, she saw. As she said, 15 or 20 dealers, you know, openly, you know, openly doing their deals. She saw people, you know, shooting up. And it's just, you know, I kind of drove home that like, if I have a chance to write on this, I'd like to include Burlington because it's a place. that I've gone to over the many years. So I have a sense of that kind of overtime. Unfortunately, I mean, Burlington's problem, you know, has not gone away. Yeah. I mean, I guess a lot of people would argue, and maybe I would too, that... This is a problem that's afflicted just about every city in America. And we were kind of late in having it come our way. And I'm not sure exactly why, but people will say, you know, it shouldn't be a surprise that it's here. I think that's true. But then I think there's a question of how. how you deal with it. And, you know, and the way, and is the way in which you deal with it helping to reduce the problem or putting fuel on the fire? And I would argue...

I would argue the evidence is the latter. That, you know, Burlington, and again, not just to pick on Burlington, right? This is, as you say, in many cities. I mean, certainly in New York City where I live. But it's striking to me the extent to which the leadership of Burlington seems to view any attempt at kind of forcing people into treatment, into dealing with this, into, I mean, the amount of time that it took just to say people couldn't sleep in City Hall Park were striking to me. And as you know, from living up there, and I certainly hear it. I mean, I hear it from the merchants down there. So he... putting to the side all the other problems. I mean, it's been toxic for a lot of business in downtown Burlington, you know, in this beautiful city has, you know, enough problems. They're not of its making, which is just, you know, how do you get people from going to Williston all the time, but to come to downtown Burlington to kind of go to a traditional city center and a beautiful one. So they have some kind of problems. Certainly not of their own making. But that's kind of it's a, it's a delicate flower, a place like Burlington. And to just sort of say. Oh, yeah, you know what? By the way, there's a really serious fentanyl and heroin problem. And we're going to, we're not going to make any real effort to depress that, to address that other than to say, again, meet people where they are. If they want to use, we're going to give an injection center. If they need food, we're going to put a feeding center right on the edge of City Hall Park. You know, I think it's tragic in that sense. I don't think, I think it's bad for, I mean, my sense is that it's bad for users, certainly. I mean, for addicts. You know, but it's also, and I think this is one of the reasons I wanted to write the piece, is it's bad for. people who live in neighborhoods, particularly in kind of working class, middle class parts of Burlington, where there is a really bad drug problem. And, you know, I remember walking, this was last summer, up one of the streets in the old north end, a pretty street. And I was talking with a resident who was very concerned about, a very liberal politics. And she was... sort of trying to kind of think this through. And she said, well, you know, you don't want to be too harsh. And, you know, and I think was referring to some of the people who were opposed to this as being Nimbis. As I say, she actually had a very complex view on it. I mean, I don't want to mischaracterize it. But as it happens, we just, we had turned the corner and it was like the Howard Center there. And there were two women.

smack in the middle of the sidewalk laid out, you know, just, I mean, barely breathing, right? And I said to her, I said, you know, if I'm, and I'm a pretty liberal guy. I grew up in New York City again. But like, if I live across the street from this, like if I'm that house, you know, one door up and I've got to step out with my kids, like this isn't like. This isn't acceptable. Like, why is that? Why should I have to do that? And it's, you know, it's the same thing you see in Seattle. It's the same thing you see in San Francisco in parts of New York. And I, you know, I think there's a fair argument that this is, it's not helping the users. And it's like it leads to a really unacceptable condition for, you know, often working class neighbors. You know, I'm glad you just mentioned that it's not helpful to the users because I was thinking that, you know, what's the impact of this approach in helping people get into treatment, get off of drugs? And, you know, I mean, I think there's an argument that often it takes an event, a jolt. an arrest for DWI to get somebody into rehab. And what's the evidence to show that this is, this quote unquote, harm reduction is helpful or not helpful in getting people into treatment? Right. I mean, I think there's actually very little, in fact, you know, evidence that it does, that it leads to that. I mean, the numbers are paltry when you look at, say, in Vancouver, and I return to Vancouver because that's sort of the ground zero. That was the original place to try this. But their numbers of people going into drug treatment are paltry. I mean, you know, and. You have, so you have this explosion of use and you have like kind of essentially a flat and small number going into treatment. I was struck at one point when I was looking at Vancouver because it had gotten a lot of very favorable press, not just from the Canadian press, but also from the American press. And when I would look at it, there was this one action moment that really was striking to me. There was a woman. who was a heroin addict, say 2003, I think was the first article. She featured in a whole lot of articles. You know, and she's a mother. She's a, you know, she has a job and she has a, you know, a heroin addiction and isn't it great now that she can go someplace and stay alive? And of course, it's always good to stay alive. I'm in favor of staying alive. She keeps recurring, right? So like 2012, there's an article. I think the last one with her was like 2020. And, you know, so she's sort of a stock character in these articles. And I think, you know, I mean, I've been, you know, I've been around friends who have had drug addiction problems. It ain't pretty.

And to sort of have this to pretend that, oh, well, you know, we're meeting it where she is and she's having this like great life. And like, who are we kidding? I mean, I'm not. And again, I wouldn't argue for. locking her up. I mean, I think we've seen the downside of the draconian war on drugs. But there's a middle ground that's been explored a lot. And I mean, by a growing number of cities, which as you say to people, you know, you need help. We're going to work with you, but you need help. And we're going to try and we're going to measure even if you're going to do an injection center. And I think it's that's, that's. I think it's a questionable strategy, but let's say you're going to do that Burlington does it. Like, it seems to me a very fair measure is what are the percentage of people who go into that place who end up within the next year going into treatment? And that's a real problem for a real challenge for a lot of places. And I think it's, I'll leave it there. You know, I thought one of the most interesting, parts of your piece that was a real education to me was how Vancouver is held out as this model for success. And when you really kind of dug into it, and even to this day, people in Burlington are trumpeting it as, well, we want to model what we're doing based on Vancouver. And what you found in Vancouver didn't really match that rhetoric. No, you go down, in fact, to the dock, the old kind of docks area where the very first of the injection centers were put in Vancouver and is still kind of the, again, kind of the ground zero of it. It's a, I mean, it's a depressing place. I mean, you see that the amount of drug use now, and I just as it happens, in part just for reasons of vacation stuff. I've been in Vancouver four or five times in the last 10 years is you see just this mushrooming of use. And to one of my favorite bookstores there is not far from where the injection center is. And they suffer enormous problems with shoplifting and all kinds of stuff. And it's, I think it's actually a rather difficult. argument to make that this has been a transformative thing either for the people who are the users and certainly for the people, the folks, and again, this is kind of a working class part of Vancouver, who live in that area. You spoke to the mayor, M.M. Mulvaney Stannock. You also talked to the state's attorney, Sarah George. And I think one of the other arguments that's made here in Burlington is that by not prosecuting these cases, that it is less of a burden on the court system. And, you know, you mentioned earlier that just locking people up is probably not the best solution either. What was your takeaway from your conversation with the two of them?

I mean, I thought they were both thoughtful. They, with a few exceptions, they did not just retreat to kind of, you know, stock phrases and that sort of thing. I mean, I think they've clearly thought about it. The mayor notes that she used to live in the old North End and experienced when her child was young, you know, some of the problems with drug abuse and that sort of thing. I don't, I was baffled a bit in talking with Sarah George, the state attorney. I mean, she very much takes a view that, you know, prosecution is not the answer here and that if we. and that it's potentially racist. And I found her, some of her, her strategy, which has been reported. This is not going to be news to anybody in Burlington. But, I mean, one of her, one of the rules she set out for prosecutors, right, is that we're not going to, if police make stops for. no registration for license plates, you know, that are not, either no license plates or, or. license plates that are not affiliated with the person who's driving the car, this sort of thing that she's not, she's directed her prosecutors not to go after those cases. Oh, I know. I'm sorry. If they stop those cars and they find drugs, she's directed her prosecutors not to prosecute those cases on the presumption that it could have been a racist stop. And that seems to me, honestly, kind of an odd thing. First place, if you're, I want to be careful, because I don't want to sound overly judgmental, but if you're running a good shop as a prosecutor and you're dealing with Burlington police, you start to get a sense of, okay, this guy's a cowboy. You know, he seems to come in with one of these every three days. This guy, You know, I mean, whatever. It was, it was a good stop. And so if it's a good stop, why wouldn't you want to then go after the drugs? Because you have a big problem with this. I mean, I know there was. One of the, I didn't put this in my piece, but one of the shopkeepers that's on, looks out, his business looks right out on City Hall Park, he talked about how there was, is a dealer who shows up once a week. Everybody knows the parking place that he has. You're told not to park there. And he shows up and he does his deals and he leaves. Like,

Why wouldn't you want to go after that person? I mean, that's, you know, that isn't not locking up a dealer. I mean, an addict. That's saying you're not going after the dealer. So I found some of that kind of, I mean, that response to return to Sarah George, I don't doubt that she's, I don't doubt her smarts. I don't doubt her. you know, desire to do good, but it does strike me that that's a, for a city that is in a real drug, has a real drug problem. And Burlington has a real drug problem. I mean, it's worse. In fact, it's overdose. rate, fatal overdose rate is about a, I figure what is it, double, I believe that of New York City per capita. Yeah, that's what you wrote. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, that's like, that's not good. That's, again, that goes to, that to my view, defines a policy that is not only hurting working class and, you know, people who live in Burlington and tend to be closer to downtown. It's also objectively bad for the addicts. I thought, you know, one of the things, too, the difference I've thought about this, you know, Burlington has a relatively small geographic area of a downtown. And I think about a place like Seattle that you talked about and how. You know, you can kind of push the addicts into a corner of it. And a lot of people then really don't have to deal with it. But there's really, in Burlington, I don't know, you've got kind of 10 by 8 blocks of the real core of the downtown. And I'm not advocating that you push people away to get rid of the problem. But I think it just accentuates it in a place like Burlington. Would you agree with that? No, I completely agree. I mean, I think in Seattle, I mean, Seattle is a real problem. And there are neighborhoods like Pioneer Square, which is a well-known part of Seattle right near the football stadium, everything. And they have like, 200 drug addicts, essentially drug users, um, sleeping there every night. So that's, that's pretty bad. But you're also, you're also right. I mean, it, it's, In fact, some of the worst hit neighborhoods are kind of out of the center of the, out of the center of the city, and certainly are not in the more, you know, kind of upper middle class neighborhoods. Those are a long way by and large from those neighborhoods. In Burlington, I mean, as you say, it's a small, intimate city. So, and the drug problem is much more, right, it's much more geographically, you know, that's what I'm looking for.

consolidated. Yeah, condensed. Condensed, yes. There is an interesting post, which I don't think I sent you that just came out yesterday or the day before from the owner of Reedy Funeral Home, which has a facility right downtown. This is now the next generation from the folks that were owning it when you and I were at the free press. And, you know, she was talking about... trying to conduct, you know, a service and trying to help families who are dealing with their loved ones who've passed away and walking right outside and there are people openly using drugs. You know, to some extent, people will say, yeah, but there's nowhere else for these addicts to go. And if you're a business owner, well, you know, that's just what you've got to deal with. Is that a fair thing for people to say? I don't think so. I mean, I think that's actually, I think that when that is the response, and I absolutely heard that from some people in Burlington, I think you've just surrendered. I mean, and I don't get it because I return to, who are you helping? You're not helping the addict. I mean, you know, to say an addict has a right to, as. There was a letter like written, what was it, by a number of more left liberal organizations like a year ago, you know, to argue that they have the right to sleep in store fronts and that they have a right to use the bathrooms in storefronts, which mean, you know, you've got to think about that. Let's think about it a second. Like when you're saying, like, you're arguing that somebody. and a fentanyl addict has a right to use your bathroom, you're saying that that person who lets them in, just on a humanitarian terms, there's a not in, there's a not. diminish, you know, a not small chance that that person's going to OD in there. That's why, as I noted in my piece, I mean, Ben and Jerry stopped. They blocked their bathroom. And I remember talking to the manager and he said, you know, my workers, and those are all like late teens, basically, right? Late teens, early 20s, they were finding dead people in there. Like, how's that? Like, I mean, that's horrific, right? It's horrific for them. It's horrific for the person who died. It's horrific for the person who happens to be in Beninjerry's when a dead body is taken out of a bathroom. So I don't, I return to, I guess, a sense of like a well-meaning but false humanitarianism. Like, like who's this helping? And there's actually pretty good data now showing that if you push people into treatment, say, look, I'm going to, you know, we can do one of two things. We could either work on getting you into treatment over the next month, right? Or we're going to have to lock you up.

Not lock you up and throw away the key, not send you to prison. But just, you know, like that there has to be a push. And honestly, I mean, I've gone to AA meetings and, you know, I've certainly talked with many. people who have gotten out of addiction. And, you know, very, very often, I mean, I would say it's a commonplace almost in those interviews is some intervening event happened. Either a family said, you know, you are killing yourself. You have to do something. You know, like that somebody stopped or somebody stopped for a DUI or whatever. And sometimes it isn't the first time, by the way. It's maybe, I mean, life's complicated. Sometimes it's, takes a year. But if the push is towards treatment, there's actually pretty good, there's pretty good data out there that can be quite effective for people. So it helps, in that case, it helps the addict. But again, I would return to what it most assuredly helps is the folks were trying to raise families and keep businesses going and that kind of stuff. Like, why, you know, one of the places I went and did a bunch of interviews was the King Street Youth Center. Wonderful place, right? I mean, and it's done wonderful work over many, many years. I mean, they each morning. do a sweep for needles in front of their place. They have called the director, has any number of times called the police because she's got dealers doing their, they're dealing right in front of their place. I mean, this is for working class kids, many of them and families, many of them, immigrant, some of them just working class people from within. If I have to, if you have to make that kind of tough, even if you want to argue, oh, well, that's, you know, whatever. Meet drug dealers where they are. No, I'm sorry. Mainly you should be meeting those kind of people, be like folks who are working class people trying to make a living, trying to like make a place in this, in that city. You should meet them where they are. And like no one, you know, I mean, I had in the article, I talk about, you know, older sisters who come to walk their younger brothers and sisters home because they're very scared of the drug dealing. I mean, that's just, I don't know. That seems to me not an acceptable state of affairs. You know, there was a line in your story where one of the people you talked to whose last name is Vigo. Mm-hmm. And who is he? He's essentially like the health minister for drug, you know, the drug stuff out in Vancouver.

So he said harm reduction gets people in trouble when it stops being one part of a holistic strategy and it becomes an ideological movement. And I get the sense in Burlington. This has now become political. You know, Monday night there's going to be this resolution where the Democrats and the progressives, which are kind of, you know, always bit at odds. And this has now become this political argument and they want to put forward this resolution. And the head of the Democrats says that one of the motivations is. Compassion does not require us to accept conditions that leave people suffering on our streets and make our cherished public places less safe for everyone. There's nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing our daily status quota persist. I mean, I don't know what my question even is for you, but so how do you take the politics out of this and get people to have a conversation about this that gets to a positive outcome?

Oh, that's easy. It's much easier when you ask the questions. I mean, I think in fairness, you know, I interviewed the head of the city council, Ben Travers, right? And who's the Democrat. And. He talks, I thought, he talked quite eloquently about his own journey on this. I mean, I believe I could be wrong that he had voted yes in one of the earlier motions to have an injection center. But he talked about his own journey on this. And I think that, you know, if I'm. hopeful, it's that I think you're starting to see that journey being replicated in a number of places, including in Vancouver, by the way, that Daniel Vigio is now, I mean, he, you know, Vancouver's or the British Columbia government, I mean, to say that three years ago would have gotten him fired in a hot second. So I think that there's a lot of people who are Well, let me back up. I think it's too easy to frame it, which I think some on the left do as either war on drugs, we can't just lock people up, or we have the status quo, and we have to make our peace with that. That's actually a very, that's a very antiquated duality. There isn't, there are very few people in, certainly in these cities. I mean, the Democrats. in Burlington are a liberal, liberal left lot. They're not, you know, no one is arguing for bringing in the police and throwing them away in the state prison. What they're arguing for is essentially that this thing that we've talked about can't masquerade as progressive, that there's got to be some effort, again, to move people into treatment. And some there's a right of there's a civic right to reclaim your public spaces right a balance the balance so I think that you know I actually take it as a sign of hope that Burlington is having this discussion. I think that's something they weren't going to do a year ago, certainly weren't going to do three years ago. But it's not like Democrats are, you know, these are right-wing people. I just, I think there's a now starting to be, it seems to me, an engagement with this issue that hopefully will not entirely break down along partisan lines. Albeit I could be very naive in saying that. You know, at the same time, the pushback all this week has been pretty strong. Have you followed that at all? No, not really. I mean, I've seen the emails from Travers and then from mayor. Well, that's what I'm referring to. So are you surprised by the pushback from the progressives to this proposal by the Democrats? No. Just because when I was talking with the mayor.

I mean, this was very much her take when I spoke with her. And she was still very much in favor of the injection center, favor of meeting people where they are. In fact, she used that phrase in my interview with her. So no, I mean, she seemed pretty entrenched. Have the rest of the progressives basically taken the same line? Yes. So here's, I guess, the $64,000 or million question. Has there been anywhere that's been successful in finding this balance between the needs of users and the needs of the community? I mean, San Francisco actually of late has had, they have a new mayor, this Dan Lurie. And while it's far from perfect, I mean, San Francisco was a, almost a poster child for urban dysfunction in the last 10 years. And it's a big difference. I mean, there had been a de facto kind of injection zone in downtown San Francisco. That's gone. You've seen drug treatment numbers increase pretty dramatically. You've seen 10 cities taken down. And they've managed to do this. Again, in a way that isn't just, you know, packing somebody off to San Quentin or something like that, but rather with an emphasis on saying, no, we're not going to allow, this is destructive of our city and our neighborhoods to just say that a relatively small group, relative to the larger population of San Francisco of drug users is going to. rule the roost, but we're also, you know, we're not losing sight of our compassion. And we're not, we're not, the effort, the strong effort is to get these folks into treatment. And that's, I mean, it's far from perfect, but there's been, there have been some rather dramatic steps made there. You know, you have other places like Sanford, I'm sorry, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where the mayor has said, I mean, there's a couple neighborhoods, one Kensington, which is if you're in Philadelphia, synonymous with just a city, a neighborhood overrun with drug dealers. And she's sent in police. She's really kind of broken that up at the same time. She too has not pushed the policies of simply arrest people and throw them away. But you know, my own experience with this, I mean, I mean, she's 25 years ago, I did. I spent a month in a heroin shooting gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which at that time was a very rough neighborhood. Now it was a very hip neighborhood, but was not at the time, certainly. And, you know, so this was 20, 30 heroin users who would come there all the time. And I remember the language, and it's haunting and it stayed with me. They would refer to...

their, when they get their, before, the time before they're using as time on the cross, when they're starting to get their Jay Jones moving, when their body, when they're starting to feel the body shakes, they would refer to that as time on the cross. Then they would refer to shooting up as mission time. And certain times of the day, they would just be, everybody would get together and just shoot up. And in fact, I mean, they were fine to deal with. I mean, I felt no danger except that I would always sit in a corner because people would walk around with needles in their arms and I didn't want to get stuck. But then they also, what was most fascinating to me is they would refer to, because most of them were slingers, what meant to say, they would do a little side dealing to basically pay for their habit. And if they got arrested, they would tend to go to Rikers Island for some period of time, a month, two months, and they'd get out again. They called being arrested being saved. He said, oh, I got saved. What do they mean by that? Well, when they went to Rikers, they got three square meals a day. They got treatment. If they had AIDS, many of them had HIV, they would get treatment for that. They would get, you know, kind of like essentially a whole bunch of care. Now, ideally, they also would have been pushed into treatment. But what I drew from the language was that... Nobody wants that life, right? I mean, you want, if you're an addict and I completely get it, you know, you want that fix, you need that fix. That's a painful thing for you. But that's not the life. And I would have long talks with these people. These are, you know, not the life that any of them sought. They just recognized that they were enthrall to drug addiction. And they viewed being arrested, albeit they knew they were going to get out in a couple weeks, as something, again, as, you know, being saved. That's kind of haunted me. And it's, I think it's a, it's one reality of drug addiction that I think a lot of progressives who are caught up in, you know, one particular view of it might do too well to think about a bit and to wrestle with. Those people in City Hall Park, I mean, in Burlington, just to finish, I mean, they don't look happy by and large. I mean, that looks like a pretty miserable existence for them. So I would question that the notion that meeting them where they are continually over months and years accomplishes much. For them as human beings, much less for the larger city. So are you seeing that there's going to be a swing back the other way from harm reduction to more of a different approach that doesn't go back to the days of the war on drugs where you get picked up, people were being picked up if they had a joint? I mean, are you seeing a shift, though, as a result of...

I don't know. It's a good question. I mean, I've certainly seen more ambivalence about it and more kind of thinking that we've got to find a, you know, they always say politics, right, a third way. Well, this would be in public health. I don't really hear. I mean, I think the. talk about a return to the war on drugs. I don't hear anybody really talking about that. Certainly not in these cities, certainly not in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Portland, Portland, Maine, Burlington. No one's talking about that. I mean, it's the conversation in that sense, I think really has shifted and that's been good. I mean, we, you know, I don't think there's anyone who desires to see people sent away for you know, two or three years in prison if they're an addict and really what they need is help with their addiction. The question is, have we... Did we arrive at a solution that was not a solution at all? And I think that's a fair conversation. And then the, you know, the thorny part is trying to figure out, so what is that third way? How do we try to, at the same time, say that City Hall Park in Burlington should not be filled with addicts and users and dealers? But at the same time that we're not sending them off to the state who scrow. That wraps it up for this edition of 802 News, sponsored by Red Hand Bakie Company. Thanks for listening.