US attorney sues to halt opening of supervised drug site in Philadelphia, home to highest opioid death rate of any big US city

The top federal prosecutor in Philadelphia has filed suit to stop a not-for-profit organization from opening a first-in-the-nation supervised drug injection site to address the city’s opioid problem.

The lawsuit pits the US attorney William McSwain’s stance on safe injection sites against those of Philadelphia’s mayor, district attorney and a former Pennsylvania governor. McSwain believes supporters should try to change the laws, not break them.

“Normalizing the use of deadly drugs like heroin and fentanyl is not the answer to solving the epidemic,” McSwain said at a Wednesday news conference, while protesters gathered outside his office on Independence Mall.

They said thousands of people could die of overdoses in Philadelphia in the time it might take to change the law.

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Philadelphia has the highest opioid death rate of any large US city, with more than 1,000 deaths a year. In response, the mayor, Jim Kenney, and others have come to support a not-for-profit group’s plan to open a safe injection site. It is likely to be located in the Kensington neighborhood, north of downtown, where so-called “drug tourists” flock to buy high-grade heroin and city librarians have learned to use Naloxone to respond to bathroom overdoses.

The Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, who has visited a safe injection program in Vancouver, said McSwain is relying on the failed drug policies of the past. He said workers at the site did not administer drugs, but instead nudged users if they fell asleep or had trouble breathing and, as a last resort, administered Naloxone.

“We are not going to prosecute people who are trying to stop people from dying,” Krasner said after McSwain’s announcement. “We had 1,200 people die last year. I think it is inexcusable to play politics with their lives.”

The former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a fellow Democrat, serves on the board of Safehouse, the group working to raise $1.8m to open an injection site this spring. He is willing to be arrested over the issue, given the overdose death of a 30-year-old family friend.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Discarded needles are seen at a heroin encampment in Philadelphia. The city’s mayor supports the plan. Photograph: Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images

Rendell also sanctioned the city’s first needle exchange program as Philadelphia mayor in the 1990s. It has been in place for 26 years without any interference from federal prosecutors, who could weigh drug paraphernelia charges, he said. He has urged McSwain to show the same restraint with Safehouse, to no avail. If McSwain won the court case, Rendell said, the board might challenge any injunction he seeks to shut the program down.

“We [would] probably go ahead ... and see if the federal government wants to arrest nurses, doctors, nuns and a former governor,” Rendell told the Associated Press.

McSwain said he hoped the civil lawsuit – a pre-emptive strike of sorts – would prompt a judge to declare the plan illegal under the 1986 “crack house statute”, which was aimed at people running drug dens. Critics say the statute is being misapplied.

“We are not arresting anyone,” said McSwain, a Trump appointee. “We’re not trying to seize any property or do anything heavy-handed at all. We’re just asking the federal court to look at it.”

Lisa Kelley, a protester and 48-year-old artist, grew up in Kensington, known even then as a drug haven, if on a smaller scale. She believes the Safehouse program would help the neighborhood as well as users.

“I absolutely believe it would help the community,” said Kelley, who lost a friend to an overdose two years ago and has a foster son in recovery. “It would cut down on the needles found on the street, cut down on the number of people using on the street, cut down on the number of kids having to see that when they’re walking to school in the morning.”

