Republicans responded to a Biden administration harm reduction initiative with a huge blast on the racist dog whistle, and as a result, the program may be gutted. Legislation now being considered in Congress would prevent the harm reduction initiative from doing the important, lifesaving work of providing clean syringes to drug users to slow the spread of diseases like HIV and hepatitis C.
In two months, a New York City overdose prevention center averted 134 overdoses. Such centers also prevent the spread of disease by offering clean syringes and other assistance in staying safe. Nationwide, more than 100,000 people died of overdoses in the 12 months ending April 2021, so you’d think that the government would want to get involved in any program with a proven record of success. At least, you’d think that if you didn’t pay attention to Republicans these days.
Republicans responded to the Biden administration’s announcement of $30 million in grants for harm reduction programs by screaming about the government supposedly giving out crack pipes to addicts. The Biden administration has said it was not going to fund pipes for smoking drugs, and there’s no evidence that it was, but even if that was the plan—which actually would have been a solid, evidence-based policy!—it’s beside the point. The vast majority of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. these days are from fentanyl, with less than half as many cocaine overdoses, many of which also involve fentanyl. And crack is a small fraction of cocaine use.
Crack was simply not going to be the focus of the harm reduction program. But crack is associated in the public imagination with urban Black drug users, so it was a much scarier thing for Republicans to scream about than the reality. It’s pretty hard to fearmonger over the statement, “the Biden administration is going to avert overdoses with naloxone and prevent the spread of HIV and hepatitis C with clean syringes,” but, “the Biden administration is going to hand out free crack pipes”? That brings up a very specific racial panic from the 1980s and 1990s.
The dishonest Republican response to the program could have a direct legislative effect, because Sen. Joe Manchin has joined with Sen. Marco Rubio to advance a bill barring federal funding for any drug paraphernalia, including those clean syringes. Manchin’s move comes despite his praise in 2016 of an initiative that included funding for the operation of needle exchange programs, though not the syringes themselves. He now wants to subject the $30 million in harm reduction grants, which comes from the American Rescue Plan, to that restriction as well.
“Manchin was never going to save us, but now it looks like he is going to bury us,” Joe Solomon, a founder of an organization that ran a syringe exchange in Charleston, West Virginia, until it was barred from doing so, told The New York Times.
As we know, Manchin is a total sucker for even the most ridiculous claims about drug use, as well as for weak, one-sided bipartisanship. But to be fair to him, he’s incurious and blinkered by privilege, and the media encourages his political pathologies—as Paul Waldman describes using this very issue as his case study: