Recently, people in Vermont have been talking about launching a Safe Injection Facility (SIF) to address drug harms arising with the opioid epidemic. With more deaths than ever, trying new approaches make sense — especially “new” approaches like SIFs that have two decades of solid international evidence of efficacy behind them. Several cities are actively considering the same intervention.
One of the biggest barriers is uncertainty about how federal drug control authorities will react. Although there are reasonable arguments that SIFs for public health do not violate the Controlled Substances Act, and the national opioid task force has broadly called for extraordinary action, there has been no explicit support from the Trump administration and no effort to carve out space in the law from Congress. Read More