Newmarket Square businesses will soon begin a campaign to urge the mayor to get Long Island open again - or find another place where addicts can get treatment and counseling away from their streets and the drug dealers who prey on them.

"Can we afford to (rebuild the bridge)?" Sue Sullivan of the Newmarket Business Association asked this morning. "I don't think we can afford not to."

At a meeting of the Southampton/Mass. Ave./Newmarket Safety Task Force, Sullivan and business owners told police and addiction-treatment providers that even aside from the disruptions to their businesses, the explosion in numbers of addicts wandering the streets outside nearby treatment centers is taking a toll on the psyches of business owners and workers: Sullivan said it's hard to watch people they can do nothing to help.

"It's inhumane how everyone is on the street here," where pushers practically leap on them as soon as they get out of methadone clinics and they put themselves at risk from getting hit by a car or worse, she said. On Long Island, at least, people would be away from dealers and other risks as they get treatment, she said.

Because of the number of treatment centers in the area, Newmarket Square - where the South End, Roxbury and Dorchester meet - has become Ground Zero in the city's opioid crisis, increasingly referred to as Methadone mile.

The task force's meetings over the past few months have been dominated by discussions about what to do about addicts and the problems they cause - from needles left in the local school playground to constant near crashes on the roads many stumble into.

BPD Sgt. Samil Silta, who oversees community services at B-2, said he recently compiled a list of things the city could do to make the area safer by encouraging addicts not to stick around after they get their methadone doses in the morning - from installing brighter street lights to planting large thorn bushes where people now congregate along Melnea Cass Boulevard to removing one particular guardrail on Melnea Cass that has become a popular place for people to practice karate. Five-day patrols by the BPD bicycle squad will soon go to seven days a week, he added.

But steps like that are really only of incremental value, because addicts will continue to come to the area. Arrests, when possible - heroin addicts often consume their drugs immediately on purchase, so they have none on them when questioned by police - are just not solving the problem, he said. In fact, he said, some addicts are now deliberately consuming higher doses of drugs, because they know if they go too far, first responders can bring them back with Narcan, he said. He added that even an ongoing program to get area businesses to install surveillance cameras tied to the BPD "intelligence center" might actually prove counterproductive - addicts might actually cluster under them knowing it increases their odds of getting the lifesaving drug when they overdose.

Business owners and state Sen. Linda Dorcena Forry said the area's treatment programs may need to step up their street work to try to get addicts to stop sticking around. Dorcena Forry said it shouldn't have to fall on the sheriff's department to send out crews to remove needles from the playground. Silta said the clinics should emulate the Pine Street Inn, which has outreach workers in vests patrolling Harrison Avenue ensuring clients are not loitering or are getting help.

Officials at several Newmarket-area treatment programs said they are willing to consider increasing their presence on the street, but said federal privacy laws limit what they can do out in the street, in a way that they wouldn't limit Pine Street Inn street workers. One said it would be illegal for a street worker to approach a clinic patient in the street and talk to him if that would let somebody else know the person was a patient.

The Boston Public Health Commission, meanwhile, plans to start training four outreach workers to walk the streets of Newmarket during the day and try to get addicts - many of whom also have mental-health issues - immediate help. Training begins Monday and the commission hopes to have the workers on the streets the next week.

Clinic workers expressed frustration at a statewide system in which it can take four months for somebody who wants to end an addiction cycle from getting into a bed at a treatment center.

Norma Reppucci, vice president of operations at Community Substance Abuse Centers, said it was even misleading to refer to the "Methadone Mile," because "it is not, it's the social-service mile." At her program, addicts get counseling to go with their medication. She added one possible answer to the neighborhood issue might be as simple as putting a T bus stop right outside her facility's doors: Patients could then get on a bus right away and go back to their homes.