Outside America, there are places where people can go with their drugs and inject them under the supervision of medical caregivers who will revive them if they overdose.

Newtown Police Chief Tom Synan, a member of the Hamilton County Heroin Coalition, supports the idea. So does Dan Meloy, the former Colerain Township public safety director.

At least, in Philadelphia.

"I think we need to be open and to try new alternatives that reduce the impact that this and other drug epidemics have on our community," Synan said. Neither he nor Meloy is advocating for a safe injection site in the Cincinnati region. though.

The two Southwest Ohio leaders are among 64 local, state, and federal criminal justice officials from 27 states and the District of Columbia who signed a legal brief in favor of Safehouse, a privately funded nonprofit that's trying to open the first-in-the-nation supervised drug-consumption site, in Philadelphia.

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U.S. Attorney William McSwain filed a lawsuit in February to stop Safehouse from opening the overdose prevention site, an attempt to curb opioid deaths in the city.

"Normalizing the use of deadly drugs like heroin and fentanyl is not the answer to solving the epidemic," McSwain said at a news conference.

Safehouse lawyers filed the brief Wednesday showing law enforcement support for its proposed overdose prevention site.

The legal brief was coordinated by Fair and Just Prosecution in alliance with the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP), a nonprofit group of police, judges and other criminal justice professionals who support proven solutions to public safety problems.

Neither Synan nor Meloy are certain that safe-injection sites will help allay the opioid epidemic, although no one has died in such locations. And thousands of lives have been saved.

Insite in Vancouver, British Columbia, opened the first supervised injection site in North America in 2003. "There have been millions of visits and thousands of overdoses to Insite since it opened," said Tiffany Akins, a spokeswoman for the site. "And there has never been a death there.

"Supervising people gives us a chance to keep people alive, so that we can connect them to the care and support they need," she said.

Meloy has been at the forefront of other harm-reduction efforts in Hamilton County. He now heads QRT National, a nonprofit that promotes the use of Quick Response Teams that visit surviving overdose victims and guide them into treatment.

He and Synan said their support of supervised drug-consumption sites is about what's best for communities as well as individuals.

"We are talking about public safety. Contact with people (who inject drugs)," Meloy said. "First responders and needle sticks. HIV, hepatitis C. All those things."

Synan and Meloy are speakers for LEAP, which is why they were aware of the brief. The organization has been at the forefront of an effort to move away from the war on drugs in the United States. They say the old approach simply doesn't work.

"We have built more prisons, have more people in prison, because of drug-related incidents," Synan said, "yet have more people using and dying from drugs than ever in our country.

"I believe that overdose prevention sites may be an opportunity to take the burden of the mass number of overdoses off police, EMS, fire and hospitals ... and put it into a system that is designed to handle such incidents, allowing first responders to get back to more enforcement than overdose revival," he said.

Meloy supported other harm-reduction projects in Colerain Township as opioid overdose deaths exploded in the region.

He started the first Quick Response Team, and as his nonprofit takes the effort national, Meloy has talked to, trained and otherwise helped communities across the country start their own teams.

Other Ohioans who signed the brief are Carter Stewart, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, and former Ohio attorney general Jim Petro.

Meloy said the opioid epidemic is nowhere near its end, no one can see an end to it, and people are still dying.

Every day, opioid overdoses alone kill about 130 people, the National Institute on Drug Abuse notes.

That's why, Meloy said, every idea should be considered.

Of supervised consumption sites, he said: "This is a concept that's working elsewhere. If you say no, we will never know if there's a way to learn from it here."

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