Why a Vermont Reporter Visited a Safe-Injection Site in NYC

Greg Gordon Credit: File: José A. Alvarado Jr.

This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2024.

I didn’t really want to go to Harlem, to be honest.

I figured there must be an easier way to write about Vermont’s raging debate over overdose-prevention centers than to go all the way to New York City to visit one.

I could make a few calls to folks at OnPoint NYC to get them to describe the two centers — also known as safe-injection sites — that they run in the city. I could interview a few drug-reform advocates to understand why they felt one should be allowed to open in Vermont, as lawmakers were considering. I could throw in a skeptical quote or two from Gov. Phil Scott, add a dash of fearmongering from law-and-order lawmakers, and Bob’s your uncle!

I could have done that, but it would have been a journalistic cop-out.

There are just two legal safe-injection sites in the nation. The only way to understand and communicate what happens there was to visit one.

So I drove to Connecticut, hopped a Metro-North train to Harlem and spent the day visiting OnPoint’s center in an old brick building on East 126th Street.

It was an unsettling experience — but well worth the trek.

An overdose-prevention center is a place where people who are addicted to illegal, deadly drugs can use them in relative safety. Better to give them a clean, quiet, supportive place to use, the theory goes, than to leave them to smoke or shoot up alone and risk death by overdose.

That risk has soared as street heroin is increasingly mixed with fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid, and xylazine, an animal tranquilizer. That’s why Greg Gordon, one of the guys I met at the center, vowed never to use alone again. Since losing the lower part of his left leg in a subway accident, Gordon used drugs in part because he was haunted by the memory of that experience.

“I’m trying to do the impossible,” Gordon told me. “I want to forget about something I can’t forget about.”

The desperation of that addicted, fearful, wheelchair-bound man stuck with me. If Gordon lived in Burlington, I thought to myself, what would he do? Would he get the treatment he needed from a place like Howard Center? Would he find his way into recovery housing and stay clean?

Or, with no other option, would he continue to use alone? Would he eventually, after multiple efforts by first responders and ER staff to save him from overdosing, die on the street?

After my story ran, lawmakers passed H.72, then overrode the governor’s veto of it, allowing Burlington to open the state’s first overdose-prevention center as a pilot project.

Perhaps it will provide the kind of safe haven that the 236 Vermonters who died of overdoses in 2023 never found.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Longest Haul for a Story”