At the Sept. 5 Issaquah City Council meeting, council members heard nearly unanimous support for safe injection sites from locals during public comment.
But at the Sept. 18 meeting, those who came to give public comment spoke from the other side of the spectrum.
The decision of whether to allow or ban safe injection sites in King County will be on the special election ballot in February. A safe injection site is a place where users of illicit drugs can access clean needles, as well as information on treatment and rehabilitation. There are also medical professionals on hand in case of overdose.
In anticipation of the February vote, other city councils in the area, such as Bellevue, Renton, Auburn, Federal Way, Kent and, most recently, Sammamish, have voted to ban safe injection sites in their city limits.
At the earlier September Issaquah City Council meeting, the council members decided not to write off the idea of injection sites in Issaquah, but instead to send a bill originally intending to ban injection sites to the Human Services Commission and the Council Services and Safety Committee for further review.
Some of the speakers at that meeting had given emotional comments, describing how they had lost children to overdoses.
Like the speakers at the Sept. 5 meeting, Issaquah resident Cheryl Gilbert had lost a close family member to heroin addiction. She explained at the Sept. 18 meeting how as a child, she knew that her mother was doing cocaine and heroin, despite her mom’s attempts to hide the evidence.
“Drug addicts do indeed have a disease; they need help, resources and compassion. But a safe injection site provides none of these things,” Gilbert stated. “These facilities are enabling drug users, not helping them find a way out.”
When Gilbert was 24, her mother died of a heroin overdose. Gilbert described collecting her mother’s possessions from the coroner’s office and finding only “a bus pass and drug paraphernalia” in the purse.
Unlike the other speakers who had lost loved ones to heroin, however, Gilbert was adamant that a safe injection site would not have helped her mother out; in fact, Gilbert said, it would have hindered her mother, and she would have just continued down the path of addiction.
“I’m here tonight because a safe injection site would not have saved my mother,” Gilbert said. “Yes, she might have received medical intervention on that specific day had she chosen to be supervised … but what then? She would have returned to the streets, returned to her demons and found her next fix.”
Speakers on Sept. 5 had lauded the three safe injection sites in Vancouver, B.C. (two in the Downtown Eastside and one in Surrey) as helping people to recover. However, Issaquah resident Jan Zimmer maintained that the facilities have not done as much good as people think.
“The reason no one dies is because they have medical personnel there … but what they don’t say is that there are people overdosing outside,” Zimmer said. “And overdoses are up 88 percent [in Vancouver], so I don’t consider that a success.”
“Making heroin use safer will only encourage addicts to continue using,” Gilbert said. “Safe injection sites condone and promote drug use by providing addicts a space to perform an illegal and dangerous activity, where we the taxpayers provide them with needles, and, in some places, even cooking supplies for the drugs.”
“I believe it will decrease our quality of life, it will decrease our property values, it will bring crime … and I’m so sad that I have to come and ask the council to pass a ban on injection sites that was on the agenda for the [Sept. 5] meeting,” Zimmer said. “Please ban safe injection sites in the city of Issaquah.”
