To the Editor:

It's not easy to understand heroin addicts. They eschew replacement drugs like methadone and Suboxone that reduce sickness and cravings so they can shoot up and experience that momentary rush and ephemeral bliss. Many of them know that they are chasing that "first high," that first time that opened the door to heaven and hell.

Shooting up is an extraordinary experience, but as much as they try, addicts will not get that first high again. For these people, life holds little meaning or joy outside of getting high. Their addiction gives them a reason to exist, a focus and its rewards.

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To the Editor:

Re "Use of Heroin in Public View Across the U.S." (front page, March 7):

Until they are ready for treatment and have access to it, people with an addiction to heroin will find a place to inject, whether it's in a fast-food restaurant bathroom, a church basement, a public bus or an abandoned building. Making restrooms inaccessible will only push the problem elsewhere.

Nurse-supervised safe injection sites like Insite in Vancouver, Canada, have been demonstrated to save lives and provide a pathway toward recovery. We need to follow suit.

Brookline, Mass.

The writer is a doctor of internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and on the faculty of Harvard Medical School.

[end]

In the first 10 days of March, heroin and other opiates are believed to have claimed as many as 10 lives in Buffalo. But that's only a portion. Since the beginning of the year, city detectives have determined at least 25 individuals died from overdoses.

"We are at epidemic levels and there is no end in sight," Buffalo Police Commissioner Daniel Derenda said Thursday. "Sadly, it is probably going to get much worse before it gets better."

But the epidemic goes beyond Buffalo.

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Addicts' Families Form Web of Support

Families of heroin and other opiate addicts started meeting last year in Amherst and the Town of Tonawanda to offer each other support.

Some 500 people last week packed Buffalo's North Park Theatre for a town hall-style meeting on the deadly epidemic.

And as many as 200 people are expected to attend a meeting in a Depew church Wednesday in search of answers.

All of this represents a grassroots response to the epidemic killing hundreds of local residents and a belief that government alone cannot solve the problem.

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After federal prosecutors declined this week to file criminal charges against a white New York City police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager in the Bronx four years ago, the Police Department's long-delayed internal case against him will proceed.

The mother of the teenager, Ramarley Graham, stood at City Hall on Thursday and called on Officer Richard Haste, who shot her son, to be fired along with other officers of the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit involved in the episode.

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To the Editor:

Re "Governors Will Create Plan to Curb Opioid Use" (news article, Feb. 22):

The alarming rise in prescription drug abuse, particularly opioid abuse, is attracting increased attention from public officials and dominated discussions at the recent National Governors Association meeting. The epidemic in drug overdose deaths has led to calls for new treatment protocols, limits on prescriptions and expansion of treatment services.

Also needed is a significant expansion of prevention efforts. Over 30 years of rigorous scientific research has identified a growing number of prevention approaches that are effective, produce lasting results and can save taxpayers a good deal of money.

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To the Editor:

Re "Governors Join the War Against Opioids" (editorial, Feb. 25):

Everyone is talking about opioid prescribing best practices: the National Governors Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and dozens of national and state public and private organizations. But I haven't heard any talk about the need for improved security in retail dispensing standards.

It has been over 45 years since Washington last took action with the Poison Prevention Packaging Act of 1970, which mandated child-resistant standards for dispensing prescription medication. This is unforgivable.

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The Feb. 23 editorial, "Revisit medical marijuana," should've held Gov. Andrew Cuomo and federal lawmakers more accountable for perpetuating irrational policies toward cannabis plants.

Many advocates who worked so hard to pass the 2014 Compassionate Care Act blame Mr. Cuomo alone for strictly limiting public access to medical cannabis.

The governor means well to prohibit marijuana smoking for medical purposes, which is legal in other states. Lighting any dried plant material on fire and inhaling the smoke risks damage to lung tissue, so recommending it would violate an oath taken by medical professionals to do no harm.

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New York's medicinal cannabis program was drafted and designed primarily to be politically expedient, not to adequately serve the state's patient population ("Revisit medical marijuana," Feb. 23).

Specifically, the program fails to acknowledge chronic pain or neuropathy as a qualifying condition, despite the reality that there exist numerous U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved clinical trials finding the plant to be safe and efficacious as an analgesic agent. A review published earlier this year in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia assessing the clinical use of cannabinoids for pain in more than 1,300 subjects concludes, "The recent literature indicates that currently available cannabinoids are modestly effective analgesics that provide a safe, reasonable therapeutic option for managing chronic non-cancer-related pain."

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Program's Expansion Targets Opioid Overdoses

Over the weekend, three people died in Buffalo from opiate overdoses.

On Monday, a woman barely survived an overdose.

With the death toll increasing by the day, Buffalo Police on Monday announced that they are co-sponsoring with the Erie County Health Department more free classes throughout the city to train citizens in how to use Narcan, the opiate antidote.

"We are concerned about the health and safety of city residents," Deputy Police Commissioner Kimberly L. Beaty said. "Opioids do not discriminate. That is why we are making this extra effort with the classes."

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The national media, yea, the international media is abuzz about the proposed legal heroin injection facility that is included in the "Ithaca Plan" released by the Municipal Drug Policy Committee (MDPC) put into motion by Mayor Svante Myrick. The focus is on the "shooting gallery" because, as U.S. law stands now, it would be illegal to set up such a place without the declaration of an emergency by the governor or the President.

Isn't it just like the national and international media to make a big deal about something that has so much prurient interest and yet is really just a small part of a much broader, more ambitious, more practical campaign?

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A Four-Pillar Plan

The supervised injection facility for heroin users proposed as part of Ithaca's new municipal drug policy garnered lots of media attention, but not much in the way of praise from local law enforcement leaders.

Tompkins County Sheriff Kenneth Lansing said his department was not consulted in the development of the drug plan.

"We all know that people that are doing things they shouldn't be doing are paranoid, and I'm just not sure how safe they're going to feel going to a facility that's going to allow them to do this," Lansing said about the injection facility. "There are hurdles with the legality to look at. Nothing against the mayor; I think he's doing a hell of a job, no doubt about it, and the plan has some great ideas. I just can't accept [the injection facility], and I can't support it."

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On Feb. 23, the night before Mayor Svante Myrick officially announced the city's new drug plan, there was a panel discussion on the history of municipal drug policy. Ithaca resident Herebeorht Howland-Bolton, 26, surprised the audience of about 150 people gathered at Cinemapolis when he spoke up during the question-and-answer period. He told the audience he had overdosed just four hours earlier in his apartment on the Commons. His girlfriend, Janice, 20, who asked that her last name not be printed in this article, found him unresponsive on the floor and called 911.

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To the Editor:

Re "Why Are White Death Rates Rising?" (Op-Ed, Feb. 22):

Andrew J. Cherlin does not answer a central question about the fall in whites' life expectancy that is driven largely by opioid overdose: Why are whites turning to opioids (rather than other things)? Our research demonstrates the development of a two-tier system of drug policy and clinical practice built on racial stereotypes about who is predisposed to abuse opioids that gave whites the dubious "privilege" of unparalleled access to opioids and that ultimately led to higher death rates.

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State governments are at the front lines of the country's epidemic of drug overdose deaths. That's why it is important that the National Governors Association says it will come up with protocols for dispensing prescription painkillers that are among the biggest sources of addiction and abuse in the country.

The protocols, or guidelines, would restrict how and under what circumstances doctors could prescribe a category of pain drugs known as opioids. They might, for example, impose limits on how many pills doctors could prescribe to patients who have had minor surgery or dental procedures.

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Albany, N.Y. (AP) - The mayor of Ithaca wants his city in upstate New York to host the nation's first supervised injection facility, enabling heroin users to shoot illegal drugs into their bodies under the care of a nurse without getting arrested by police.

Canada, Europe and Australia are working to reduce overdose deaths with these facilities, but in the United States, even the idea of creating a supervised injection site faces significant legal and political challenges.

That has to change and quickly, said Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick.

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Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick wants the city to be the first in the U.S. to offer a supervised injection facility, where heroin users would be able to shoot up under the care of a nurse. The facility is one piece of a comprehensive new approach he wants Ithaca to take against the scourge of addiction.

A comprehensive approach following the four pillars of treatment, harm reduction, public safety and prevention will be announced officially Wednesday, when Myrick and the Municipal Drug Policy Committee unveils "The Ithaca Plan: A Public Health and Safety Approach to Drugs and Drug Policy."

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In New Approach, City Plans to Treat Addiction As Public Health Issue.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - The mayor of Ithaca wants his city in upstate New York to host the nation's first supervised injection facility, enabling heroin users to shoot illegal drugs into their bodies under the care of a nurse without getting arrested by police.

The son of an addict who abandoned his family, Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick is only 28 years old, but knows intimately how destructive drugs can be. As he worked his way from a homeless shelter into the Ivy League at Cornell University and then became Ithaca's youngest mayor four years ago, Mr. Myrick encountered countless people who never got the help they needed.

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Should incriminating evidence be used against a defendant if it was discovered in the course of an illegal police stop?

That was the question before the Supreme Court on Monday, the first day of oral arguments since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The court has been weakening the Fourth Amendment's defense against illegal searches for years. Monday's case gives the justices an opportunity to restore some of its power.

The case, Utah v. Strieff, started in 2006, when the Salt Lake City police got an anonymous tip reporting drug activity at a house. An officer monitored the house for several days and became suspicious at the number of people he saw entering and leaving. When one of those people, Edward Strieff, left to walk to a nearby convenience store, the officer stopped him and asked for his identification.

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Rolling Papers

It's not exactly "Spotlight," but it is about journalists.

"Rolling Papers," a documentary, chronicles the response of The Denver Post to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado: The news organization appointed a marijuana editor, Ricardo Baca. The film follows him and several of his writers throughout 2014 as they define their new beat.

The novelty of watching reporters get high so they can write reviews of the newly legal products gets old quickly, but that's really just a sideshow in this film by Mitch Dickman. Of more interest are the substantive subjects Mr. Baca and his crew look into, like false claims by dealers about potency. Especially compelling is the phenomenon of parents who bring seriously ill children to Colorado in the belief that marijuana is the cure for what ails them.

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