It’s OK to shoot heroin, according to a city Department of Health ad, as long as you follow some handy-dandy guidelines.
Like “avoid using alone and take turns.” And “start with a small dose and go slowly.”
Crazier still, these ads run alongside other messages inveighing straphangers to mask and encouraging them to sit silently, eyes front.
Subway chatter: Too dangerous, must slow the spread. A needle in the arm: Go, you!
Indeed, the ad’s “headline” shouts: “Don’t be ashamed you are using, be empowered that you are using safely.”
But there’s no way to use heroin safely (like there’s no way to drink and drive safely). Especially if you actually pay attention to the numbers on New York City’s overdose deaths.
These are up 78% — 78%! — from pre-pandemic levels, taking 1,233 lives over the first half of 2021 (this year’s numbers will likely be as bad or worse).
That’s due largely to fentanyl, the deadly synthetic found in some 80% of all heroin the NYPD tested in 2020.
Yes, the ad warns of how dangerous fentanyl is and advises use of fentanyl test strips. But encouraging heroin use — as this ad does, with its hideous message of addiction positivity — means driving up fentanyl deaths, pure and simple.
Drug overdoses killed 29,000 Americans aged 15-34 in 2020, more than nine times the year’s toll from COVID in that cohort. This is a crisis, caused by identifiable material factors — including the joblessness and isolation inflicted by lockdowns in the name of fighting the virus.
It’s not some quirky, gritty feature of urban life we should smilingly shrug at before throwing up our hands, as that ad does.
Remember: City health czar Ashwin Vasan, with literally zero data backing him up, won’t let little kids go to school unmasked. Yet his department winks at shooting up, as long as you do it “safely” and without shame. Could the priorities be more perverse?
