On a chilly Monday morning in mid-March on Coney Island, down Surf Avenue from the famous Wonder Wheel and Cyclone, a parked Dodge van blasts its heater. Stuffed with all manner of injection-drug paraphernalia — needles of different gauges, cookers, ties, pearl-sized cotton balls, alcohol wipes — as well as plastic bags of nonperishable food items called “pantry” and thousands of condoms and lube packets, it's a clinical stockroom meets therapist's office on wheels. The van has these supplies to make using drugs safer, all for free — though getting high in the van is not permitted.

Ian, 60, sits in the back of the van, rubbing his hands to keep warm. “I used for over 45 years. Last 25 years was basically crack,” he says. He suffered what he calls “three minor strokes” that doctors said should have killed him, but kept getting high. So when someone slid a flier under his door for something called harm reduction — an approach to combating drug use that allows the person to continue to get high, but in a safer way — he was interested. Slowly, he decreased his use from daily, to weekends, to monthly — until he could finally quit. Now he works for FROST'D (Foundation for Research on Sexually Transmitted Diseases) — one of New York City's harm reduction programs and the organization that runs this mobile unit — as a peer educator, a paid, part-time position that serves as a bridge between the staff and the communities they serve.

Next to him, Scott Spiegler, 28, flips through a binder of anonymized client information. Scott is one of FROST'D's outreach workers, and delights in explaining safer sex practices to anyone who enters the van, which is parked here every Monday and Thursday — and regular corners throughout the boroughs other days of the week. Later this afternoon he'll tell one woman, a new client named Brooke, that flavored lube for blow jobs “is like dinner and a movie: You can give head and eat a peach.” When she tells Scott she's never heard of a female condom, he lights up. “I love telling people about the female condom,” he says. “It’s, like, my jump-off.”

Around 11 a.m., the first client of the day shows up. Willy, late forties, knocks on the van's sliding door and hops inside. In limited English, he says he's homeless and has been sleeping a few blocks away on 22nd Street with his wife. Scott offers to connect him with their housing program, but Willy doesn't like shelters. “Too many people stealing,” he says. He's been using heroin for three years (including this morning) and has cirrhosis of the liver.

He's come to the van today just for the pantry — pasta, cans of beans — and he’s already taken home plenty of clean needles. “Do you know about alternating veins?” Scott asks. Willy does, but he says he has trouble finding others. After showing him (with a capped needle) the 15-degree angle he'll want to aim for if he decides to shoot up in his hand, Scott warns him about the powerful, fentanyl-laced heroin that's going around — the type that Philip Seymour Hoffman was initially thought to have used when he overdosed. Willy wants nothing to do with it. “No, no, I don't want to die,” he says with a smile.