As NYC overdose deaths climb, Mayor Adams is hoping to meet them with increased public spending on initiatives and programs to mitigate the crisis, proposing spending of $50 million annually for the next four years out of the millions that the city has received so far from city and state settlements with opioid manufacturers, sellers and marketers. This money can be a godsend for a population struggling mightily with this scourge — more than 3,000 deaths annually by 2022 — but it must be well spent. One thing we do know is that these resources are used most effectively when it encompasses a range of approaches to mitigating this epidemic — research, medication-assisted treatment, wraparound social services and, yes, harm reduction initiatives including testing drugs and providing overdose prevention center services. As we have said many times before, all the treatment, recovery and support programs in the world won’t have a lick of impact if the people they’re aiming to serve are dead. There are a thousand reasons for people to be skeptical or fearful of safe injection sites, as they’re also sometimes called. It is undeniable that these centers are a significant legal question mark, largely due to the federal law that still makes it unlawful to provide space for the utilization of illegal substances, regardless of the intent behind it. People also have an inherent squeamishness about a location designed to attract drug abusers and often fret about feared correspondent increases in crime or disorder. So far, those concerns have not borne out pretty much anywhere such a site has opened, globally; the users that congregate there were often out in the community anyway, except they’d be in parks or train stations or under bridges, where they could still overdose and probably die. Overdose prevention centers, meanwhile, have a 100% success rate at their core purpose of keeping people under supervision alive such that they can find their way towards recovery. The city government already became a national pioneer in providing official sanction to two OPCs run by the nonprofit OnPoint in Upper Manhattan in late 2021. Now it can further cement this leadership by providing funding. People who are dependent on drugs cannot be incentivized away from using them. That’s just the nature of addiction. Some people will inevitably claim this being is “coddling” drug users or condoning drug use, but we imagine these are folks who have not had to face the horrors of a loved one who’s developed an addiction. While the city is at it, it should be sure to provide a full accounting of where the money goes. So far, tens of millions have been spent with only hazy descriptions of what’s been bought or supported. This is a deadly serious issue that is literally killing New Yorkers every day, and we simply can’t accept the honor system here. Having some public record and public oversight of the spending is the only way to ensure that it is being done in the way most conducive to fomenting life and health.