2026-08-07T06:00:00-0400 / 哥伦比亚广播公司新闻
在曼哈顿北部一处色彩斑斓的建筑背后的一间后屋里，吸毒者正在吸食快克可卡因，附近的隔间则供海洛因使用者绑扎止血带，并用全新的消毒针头自行注射。
这一切都是纽约市批准的一项为期5年的试点计划的一部分，但未获得联邦政府认可——后者长期以来的反“ crack屋”法律将容留吸毒的场所定为刑事犯罪。
支持者表示，受监督的吸毒场所减少了过量服药致死事件和街头吸毒现象，并可为全美其他地区提供范本。但批评者称，这些中心会吸引重度吸毒者和毒贩，让当地社区感到更不安全。
“孩子们早上走进学校时看到这种场面，真的很吓人，”附近一所学校的一名不愿具名的教育工作者说道，他们未获授权向媒体发言。
纽约市共有两家此类场所，名为过量用药预防中心（OPCs）。通过监督成瘾性非法药物的使用，该中心的支持者表示，这些场所消除了就医障碍，并能帮助人们戒除毒瘾或转向风险更低的行为方式。
在接受哥伦比亚广播公司新闻的最新采访时，OnPoint NYC执行董事萨姆·里维拉表示，其团队已成功干预超过2100起过量用药事件，无一人死亡。自2021年该中心开放以来，已有超过7000名注册用户使用其服务，累计达25万次。
“有25万人次在我们这里接受监督下的用药，而不是在公园、街头、游乐场或卫生间里，”里维拉说道。
里维拉带哥伦比亚广播公司新闻参观了OnPoint在东哈莱姆区的场所，该社区的吸毒问题已持续数十年。
除了吸烟室和注射隔间外，OnPoint还提供基础医疗、成瘾药物治疗、艺术疗法、睡眠室和洗衣服务等，以及按摩、针灸、芳香疗法等福利项目，不久还将增设美发服务。
这些便利设施看起来更像是高端健康中心的配置，而不是一个人们可以在按摩床几步之外注射海洛因的地方。但里维拉表示，这些健康疗法都有其意义。
“这些就是药物。它们能减少吸毒行为，让人们置身于一个关爱他们的环境中，”他在接受哥伦比亚广播公司新闻采访时说道。“我们的许多服务对象从未体验过这样的环境。”
![OnPoint NYC Executive Director Sam Rivera at the organization’s facility in East Harlem. CBS News]
在按摩室里，一名已成为兼职员工的OnPoint参与者说道：“我第一次尝试了针灸，我的背终于感觉好多了。我之前不相信，但它真的有效。”
然而，在OnPoint的围墙之外，一些居民表示他们对该场所给社区带来的影响感到不满。
“给我多少钱我都不会再走那条街了，”大哈莱姆联盟联合创始人赛德里亚·阿斯贝里-克里斯菲尔德说道。“毒贩甚至不用主动找客户。毒品就在所有人眼皮底下交易。这简直是当众打脸。”
哥伦比亚广播公司新闻遇到了本地媒体组织Uptown Collective的创始人莱德·布莱克，他住在华盛顿高地另一家OnPoint场所几个街区之外的地方。
“我有三个女儿。她们已经不小了，但还是孩子，她们不该面对这种事，”他说道。“你不会希望市中心的孩子们看到这些。那为什么让我们这里的孩子看到就没问题？”
政治争议
在一则竞选广告中，纽约州总检察长候选人萨里塔·科马蒂雷迪——一名前联邦检察官，以共和党人身份参选——将OnPoint作为糟糕政策的例子。
“问题在于，这些场所接纳吸毒者，给他们致命的毒品，然后再把他们扔回街头和地铁里。这根本不是解决方案，”科马蒂雷迪告诉哥伦比亚广播公司新闻。“我认为这是不道德的，是残忍的，而且绝对是违法的。”（OnPoint设有区域，供使用者在药物作用期间留在室内接受监护。）
她指出，东哈莱姆区的场所正对着一家幼儿发展中心，距离一所涵盖幼儿园到12年级的学校仅两个街区。
去年，纽约州共和党众议员妮可·马利奥塔基斯援引联邦禁止非法毒品的法律，公开要求时任司法部长帕姆·邦迪关闭该场所。
“他们是在助长成瘾，而不是真正为人们提供戒毒所需的治疗，”马利奥塔基斯告诉哥伦比亚广播公司新闻。“他们还让毒贩知道他们的客户在哪里。”
伤害减少策略
上世纪70年代，随着美国吸毒问题日益严重，一场运动兴起，最终演变为如今所谓的“伤害减少”政策，其核心原则是在戒毒治疗中摒弃任何评判或强制手段。
提供清洁针头、检测可能导致猝死的污染物的毒品检测，似乎是应对难以戒除的成瘾问题、挽救生命、减少传染病的人道方式。
尽管这些政策背后充满善意，但近年来它们无法应对美国日益严重的成瘾危机或愈发致命的毒品供应。联邦数据显示，2002年至2022年间，美国药物过量致死率翻了两番，此前这一问题主要由处方阿片类药物引发，后来演变为全面的阿片类药物泛滥。
根据美国疾病控制与预防中心的数据，过量用药致死人数在2022年达到近10.8万的峰值，随后开始下降。
在馆内监督吸毒的过量用药预防中心是伤害减少策略的延伸。虽然大多数美国人对此仍不熟悉，但这类中心在国际上已存在20年，一份报告显示全球已有超过100家此类场所，其中许多分布在欧洲各地。
加拿大温哥华的该类中心可能是最知名的，自2003年起投入运营。温哥华的过量用药致死率一直稳步上升，直到2022年达到峰值。
市政支持
上任仅两个月后，纽约市市长佐赫兰·曼达尼参观了OnPoint，以表示对该项目的支持。
“本周末，OnPoint NYC的团队24小时开放，让弱势的纽约市民有一个安全的去处，”曼达尼于3月在X平台上发帖说道，并附上了他与里维拉和其他工作人员的合影。
![New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted this photo on March 2, 2026, of his visit to OnPoint NYC. X/@NYCMayor]
OnPoint的年度运营资金约为1900万美元，来自城市、州和私人资金的混合，其中包括部分阿片类药物和解资金。纽约市通过总额约1700万美元的多年期合同提供了大部分资金。然而，该市的规定禁止使用这些资金直接用于监督吸毒行为，因此该组织不得不依靠其他来源来承担这项工作。
OnPoint曾获得美国药物滥用和精神健康服务管理局（SAMHSA）的超过200万美元拨款，但在2025年7月特朗普总统发布行政命令，明确禁止联邦纳税人资金用于“药物注射场所”或“非法吸毒场所”后，这笔拨款被取消。
尽管许多市政官员、公共卫生从业者和研究该项目的研究人员都认为过量用药预防中心有效且必要，但它们在美国的未来仍远未确定。
在西雅图、波特兰、旧金山和芝加哥开设类似场所的尝试均以失败告终。（这些城市设有其他伤害减少项目，例如针头交换计划和针对吸毒者的社会服务。）自2021年OnPoint开放以来，只有罗德岛州得以推进监督吸毒消费项目。
里维拉表示，他仍希望扩大该项目，并拥有一批支持该想法的市政官员。
过量用药预防中心对致死率的影响
美国国立卫生研究院下属的国家药物滥用研究所指出，在20年的国际运营经验后，“目前尚不清楚此类场所是否总体上降低了过量用药致死率”。
现有研究往往显示，此类场所附近的致死率有所下降，但在更大的人口范围内难以察觉。2021年的一项针对现有国际研究的系统综述得出结论，过量用药预防中心“可能有助于减少过量用药的发病率”，而另一项针对不列颠哥伦比亚省加拿大项目的研究则“没有证据表明它们降低了当地住院率或死亡率”。
纽约市的监督吸毒试点已运行近5年，足以开始得出关于其影响的结论。
在过去两年中，全市过量用药致死率自2023年创下历史最高纪录以来一直在迅速下降，这与全国趋势一致。纽约市卫生局并未直接点名OnPoint，但在一份宣传伤害减少项目的新闻稿中，将这一变化归功于“纽约市多年来对循证过量用药预防策略的投入增加”。
美国国立卫生研究院目前正在资助一个研究团队，评估美国的三家监督注射场所：OnPoint NYC的两家场所和罗德岛州普罗维登斯市较新的Project Weber/RENEW项目。这项多年研究仍在进行中，虽然尚未就死亡率得出结论，但其中一位主要作者在接受哥伦比亚广播公司新闻采访时表示，他认为过量用药预防中心对公共健康产生了积极影响。
查尔斯·费恩·莱曼却从同样的数据中看到了净负面影响。他是曼哈顿政策研究所的高级研究员，这是一家保守派智库，一直直言不讳地批评曼达尼的政策。
“有大量证据表明，此类干预措施通常对过量用药致死率没有明显影响，”莱曼告诉哥伦比亚广播公司新闻。“用于帮助物质使用障碍患者的资源是固定的。如果你把钱花在不起作用的干预措施上，比如监督消费场所……你就没有把钱花在成瘾药物治疗和循证治疗上。”
关于犯罪的证据
哥伦比亚广播公司新闻对现有犯罪数据的分析显示，OnPoint运营的两个社区呈现出两种截然不同的情况。
自2021年OnPoint开放以来，华盛顿高地场所所在的第34警区的重罪投诉一直在稳步上升。该警区涵盖多个城市街区，因此重罪投诉的增加不能直接归咎于OnPoint。在此期间，全市范围内的投诉也大多有所增加，但增速低于第34警区。
在东哈莱姆场所所在的第25警区，重罪投诉在2019年后上升，并在2023年达到峰值。到2025年，重罪投诉大幅下降，但仍比疫情前水平高出10%。该市其他地区的情况更糟，去年的重罪投诉基本维持在2024年的水平。
哥伦比亚广播公司新闻对纽约市警察局的911呼叫数据的审查显示，从OnPoint地址拨打的电话大多是救护车服务；需要警方响应的呼叫相对较少。
今年到目前为止，东哈莱姆场所接到了124个呼叫，华盛顿高地场所接到了84个。
2023年的一项研究发现，此类场所附近的“犯罪或混乱情况”没有显著变化，其中包括非法侵入的911呼叫和311投诉。
《实验犯罪学杂志》的另一项研究发现，华盛顿高地场所附近的财产犯罪显著增加，该地区最近新开了一家塔吉特百货商店。该研究的作者推断，将安全注射场所设在易于顺手牵羊的商店附近，创造了容易发生盗窃的环境。值得注意的是，该研究未发现东哈莱姆场所附近有类似的增长，也未发现任何一处场所的暴力犯罪有所增加。
“我们的主要结论是，你的选址至关重要，”该研究的合著者约翰·霍尔说道，他是一名退休的纽约警察局警官，目前在英国剑桥大学犯罪学研究所攻读博士学位。
美国国立卫生研究院研究的初步结果显示，这些场所对当地商业活动和社区内与毒品相关的犯罪活动基本没有影响。
布兰登·马歇尔是美国国立卫生研究院评估过量用药预防中心团队的研究人员之一，他表示：“过量用药预防中心可以发挥多种作用。它们可以减少公开吸毒行为，减少911呼叫。它们可以帮助人们获得医疗保健和治疗。它们不是解决社区所有社会问题的万能药。”
当美国国立卫生研究院的多年评估结果出炉时，它可能会推动关于监督吸毒消费的辩论——也可能不会。
约翰·霍普金斯大学的生物伦理学家特拉维斯·里德尔认为，对OnPoint这类场所的支持永远不会仅仅由实证数据决定。
“我实际上认为，这不是任何人坚持自己观点的原因，”他说道。“他们对我们应该真正帮助人们做什么或不做什么有自己的看法，然后他们会找到最能支持自己观点的证据。”
里德尔表示，他清楚自己的立场。“过量用药预防中心做的是：‘欢迎来到这里，我会守护你，让你今天不会死去，你值得这样做。你配得上这一切，因为你是一个人，拥有尊严。’我认为这是一件非常美好的事情。”
社区活动家布莱克表示，他希望研究OnPoint的大学研究人员能设身处地体验一天。
“为什么这应该只以成瘾者为中心？”布莱克说道。“我希望它能以社区为中心。”
——杰米·科伦布拉特和马克斯·摩尔为本报道提供了采访支持。
These NYC centers allow heroin and crack use in-house. Nearly 5 years in, is it helping?
2026-08-07T06:00:00-0400 / CBS News
In a back room behind a colorful facade in northern Manhattan, drug users are smoking crack while nearby cubicles stand ready for heroin users to wrap tourniquets around their arms and inject themselves with new, sterilized needles.
It’s all part of a 5-year-old experiment sanctioned by the city of New York, but not by the federal government, which has long-standing anti-“crack house” laws criminalizing facilities that allow for drug use.
Supporters say the supervised drug-use sites reduce overdose deaths and street drug use, and serve as a model for the rest of the country. But critics say the centers are magnets for hard drug users and dealers, leaving the local community feeling less safe.
“It’s scary for the kids walking into school in the morning, seeing people in that state,” said an educator at a nearby school who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
New York City has two facilities like this, known as overdose prevention centers, or OPCs. By supervising the use of addictive, illegal drugs, proponents say the sites remove barriers to healthcare and can lead to people getting off drugs or transitioning to less risky behaviors.
In a recent interview with CBS News, OnPoint NYC Executive Director Sam Rivera said his team has intervened in more than 2,100 overdoses with no fatalities, and has more than 7,000 registered participants who have used the facility’s services 250,000 times since it opened in 2021.
“250,000 times people used inside with us, not in the parks, not in the street, not in the playgrounds, not in bathrooms,” said Rivera.
Rivera gave CBS News a tour of OnPoint’s facility in East Harlem, a neighborhood where problems with drug use have persisted for decades.
In addition to the smoking room and injection cubicles, OnPoint offers services such as primary medical care, addiction medication, art therapy, sleep rooms and laundry, as well as perks like massage, acupuncture, aromatherapy and, soon, hair styling.
They are amenities that might seem more at home in an upscale wellness center than a place where people can inject heroin just a few steps from the massage tables. But Rivera said the wellness therapies serve a purpose.
“Those things are medicine. Those things are reducing drug use, introducing people into an environment that loves them,” he told CBS News. “Many of our folks haven’t experienced that.”
OnPoint NYC Executive Director Sam Rivera at the organization’s facility in East Harlem. CBS News
In the massage room, an OnPoint participant-turned-part-time employee said, “I did the acupuncture, for the first time my back feels better. I didn’t believe it but it really works.”
Outside of OnPoint’s walls, however, some residents say they’re not happy about what it means for their neighborhood.
“You couldn’t pay me to walk down that street anymore,” said Syderia Asberry-Chresfield, co-founder of the Greater Harlem Coalition. “The dealers don’t even have to look for clients. Drugs are being sold in front of everyone’s faces. It’s a slap in the face.”
CBS News met Led Black, founder of the local media organization Uptown Collective, who lives a few blocks away from another OnPoint location in Washington Heights.
“I have three daughters. They’re not little, but they’re still young, they still shouldn’t have to deal with this,” he said. “You don’t want the kids downtown to see it. Why is it OK for the kids up here to see it?”
Political controversy
In a campaign ad, New York state attorney general candidate Saritha Komatireddy, a former federal prosecutor running as a Republican, singled out OnPoint as an example of bad policy.
“The problem here is these sites take people in, they give them deadly drugs, and then they turn them right back out on the street and into the subways. That’s not a solution,” Komatireddy told CBS News. “I think it’s unethical. I think it’s cruel, and it’s definitely illegal.” (OnPoint has a space for users to stay indoors and be monitored while they are under the influence of drugs.)
She notes that the East Harlem location is directly across the street from an early childhood development center and two blocks down from a school with students in kindergarten through grade 12.
Last year, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a New York Republican, publicly asked then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to shut down the facility, citing federal law prohibiting illegal drugs.
“They’re enabling addiction instead of actually getting people the treatment they need to get off drugs,” Malliotakis told CBS News. “They’re also letting dealers know where their clients are.”
Harm reduction
In the 1970s, amid rising drug use in America, a movement began that would evolve into what’s known today as “harm reduction” policy, with a core principle of removing any judgment or coercion from drug treatment.
Providing clean needles and testing drugs for contaminants that can cause sudden death seemed like the humane way to address painful-to-kick addictions, keep people alive, and reduce infectious diseases.
Despite the compassion behind the policies, they were no match for the nation’s growing addiction crisis or increasingly lethal drug supply in recent years. Federal data show the rate of drug overdose deaths quadrupled in the U.S. between 2002 and 2022, a problem largely driven by prescription opioid pills before ballooning into a full-blown opioid epidemic.
Overdose deaths climbed to a peak of almost 108,000 in 2022 before starting to decline, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Overdose prevention centers that supervise drug use in-house are an extension of the harm reduction approach. While still unfamiliar to most Americans, they’ve existed internationally for two decades, with one report finding more than 100 such facilities worldwide, including many across Europe.
The one in Vancouver, Canada, is probably the most well known and has been in operation since 2003. Vancouver saw a steady rise in overdose deaths until a peak in 2022.
Support from the city
Just two months after taking office, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani visited OnPoint to show support for the program.
“This weekend, the team at OnPoint NYC kept their doors open 24/7 so vulnerable New Yorkers had somewhere safe to go,” Mamdani posted on X in March, alongside photos of himself with Rivera and other staff.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted this photo on March 2, 2026, of his visit to OnPoint NYC. X/@NYCMayor
OnPoint operates with about $19 million in annual funding from a mixture of city, state and private funds, including some opioid settlement money. The city of New York funds a lot of it through multi-year contracts worth about $17 million in total. However, city rules prohibit using any of those funds for the direct supervision of drug use, so the organization has to rely on other sources for that work.
OnPoint once had more than $2 million in grants from SAMHSA, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which it lost after President Trump issued an executive order in July 2025 explicitly barring federal taxpayer dollars from funding “drug injection sites” or “illicit drug use.”
Despite the belief among many city officials, public health practitioners and researchers studying the programs that overdose prevention facilities are effective and necessary, their future in America is far from certain.
Efforts to open similar facilities in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Chicago have all failed. (Those cities have other harm reduction programs, such as needle exchange programs and social services for drug users.) Only Rhode Island has been able to move forward providing supervised drug consumption since OnPoint opened in 2021.
Rivera said he still wants to expand and has a community of city officials who support the notion.
OPC impact on overdose deaths
The NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse writes that after 20 years of international experience, “it is unclear whether such facilities reduce overdose death rates overall.”
Existing studies tend to show some reduced death rates near the facilities that become hard to detect in larger populations. One systematic study from 2021 of existing international research concluded that OPCs “may help reduce overdose morbidity” while another study of Canadian programs across British Columbia found “no evidence that they reduce local hospitalization or mortality rates.”
New York City’s experiment with supervised drug use has been running for nearly five years — enough to start drawing conclusions about its impact.
Over the past two years, overdose deaths citywide have been decreasing rapidly from the highest recorded year ever in 2023, which tracks with the national trend. The city’s Department of Health did not name OnPoint directly, but in a press release touting harm-reduction programs, it credited the change to “several years of increased investment in evidence-based overdose prevention strategies in NYC.”
The NIH is now funding a team of researchers to evaluate America’s three supervised injection sites: the two OnPoint NYC facilities and a newer one in Providence, Rhode Island, called Project Weber/RENEW. The multi-year study is still ongoing, and while they have not drawn conclusions on mortality rates, one of the lead authors said in an interview with CBS News that he believes overdose prevention centers have had a positive effect on public health.
Charles Fain Lehman looks at the very same data and sees a net negative. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank that has been a vocal critic of Mamdani’s policies.
“There is a lot of evidence that interventions of this type generally do not have an appreciable effect on overdose deaths,” Lehman told CBS News. “There’s a fixed pool of resources available for helping people who are dealing with substance use disorder. If you’re spending the dollars on an intervention that doesn’t work, like supervised consumption sites … you’re not spending dollars on addiction medication and evidence-based treatment.”
The evidence on crime
A CBS News analysis of available crime data told two different stories between the two neighborhoods where OnPoint operates.
Felony crime complaints have risen steadily in the 34th Precinct, where the Washington Heights facility is located, since OnPoint opened in 2021. The precinct includes multiple city blocks, so the increase in felony crime complaints cannot be tied directly to OnPoint. Citywide complaints have also increased over most of that time, but more slowly than in the 34th.
In the 25th Precinct, where the East Harlem facility is located, felony complaints rose after 2019 and peaked in 2023. By 2025, felony complaints fell substantially but remained 10% above their pre-pandemic levels. The rest of the city fared worse, with felony complaints remaining near 2024 levels last year.
A CBS News review of 911 call data from the New York City Police Department showed most of the calls made from the OnPoint addresses were for ambulance services; relatively few calls required police response.
So far this year there have been 124 calls from the East Harlem location and 84 calls from the Washington Heights address.
A study in 2023 found no significant changes near the sites in “crime or disorder,” which included 911 calls for trespass and 311 complaints.
Another study in the Journal for Experimental Criminology found a significant increase in property crimes near the Washington Heights location, where a Target store had recently opened. The study authors reasoned that placing the safe injection facility so near a location with easily shoplifted products created an environment ripe for theft. Notably, the study found no similar increase near the East Harlem facility and no increase in violent crimes in either location.
“This is our major conclusion, is that your location matters,” said the study’s co-author John Hall, a retired NYPD officer who is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University in England.
The NIH study’s initial findings show that the sites seem to have a largely neutral effect on local business activity and drug-related criminal activity in their neighborhoods.
Brandon Marshall, one of the researchers on the NIH team evaluating America’s overdose prevention centers, said, “OPCs can do many things. They can reduce public drug use, they can reduce 911 calls. They can help people access healthcare and treatment. They are not a panacea to all social problems in a neighborhood.”
When the multi-year evaluation comes in from the NIH, it may move the debate about supervised drug consumption forward — or it may not.
Johns Hopkins bioethicist Travis Rieder argues that support for places like OnPoint will never be decided solely by the empirical data.
“I don’t actually think it’s why anyone believes what they believe,” he said. “They have a view about what we should actually be helping people to do or not do, and then they find the evidence that best supports their view.”
Rieder said he knows where he stands. “Here’s what an overdose prevention site does: It says, ‘You are welcome here, and I will watch over you so that you don’t die today, and you’re worth that. You deserve that because you’re a human being and you have dignity.’ And I think that’s a really beautiful thing.”
Black, the community activist, says he wants the researchers at universities studying OnPoint to spend a day in his shoes.
“Why should it be an addict-focused approach?” Black said. “I wish it were a community- focused approach.”
–Jamie Korenblat and Max Moore contributed reporting.