‘They make sure you don’t die’: Inside NYC’s drug use sites

Two modest rooms in New York City are the first places in the country where local officials are allowing illicit drug use in order to make it less deadly

NEW YORK -- Jose Collado settled in at a clean white table in a sunlit room, sang a few bars and injected himself with heroin.

After years of shooting up on streets and rooftops, he was in one of the first two facilities in the country where local officials are allowing illegal drug use in order to make it less deadly.

Equipped and staffed to reverse overdoses, New York City’s new, privately run “overdose prevention centers” are a bold and contested response to a storm tide of opioid overdose deaths nationwide.

Supporters say the sites — also known as supervised injection sites or supervised consumption spaces — are humane, realistic responses to the deadliest drug crisis in U.S. history. Critics see them as illegal and defeatist answers to the harm that drugs wreak on users and communities.