The battle over a harm reduction center in Eureka, California reflects battles being fought across America about how to treat, rehabilitate and care for people who use drugs.

Harm reduction for drug users, which includes everything from distributing clean needles to HIV testing to supervised injection sites, has shown to be one of the most effective strategies for slowing the spread of disease and lowering overdose rates. In some parts of California, however, the approach remains misunderstood and controversial. This week our three-part series, “Moving the Needle,” looks at the obstacles faced by harm reduction organizations in rural Northern California. 

Yesterday Judith Lewis Mernit reported from Ukiah, where people who use drugs find acceptance and community without stigma or shame. Today Mernit describes how a model harm reduction center divides the city of Eureka — but also saves lives.

Wednesday: Safe injection facilities are at the front line of a health-care revolution for drug users — and of a potential showdown with the Trump administration.

Wednesday morning, 10 a.m., Eureka California.

Mikey, a man in his 30s with smooth tanned skin, light-blue eyes and brown curls tumbling out of his baseball cap, stands in a cramped and busy kitchen, 20 slices of bread laid out before him. “I’m making bologna sandwiches,” he tells me when I ask. “As many as I can get out of two loaves of bread.”

As the kitchen manager at the Humboldt Area Center for Harm Reduction, or HACHR, Mikey prepares meals every day for people who come by here for supplies — alcohol wipes with which to prepare an injection site, sterile water in which to dissolve powder, clean needles to prevent blood-borne disease. He asks that I not use his last name, or his face in a picture; he’s too worried about reprisals from people who don’t approve of what he does. When I ask him whether he’ll let me quote him in this story, he consents only because he’ll do whatever it takes to defend the place where he’s found friends, work and acceptance. Like most of the people who visit this house, Mikey is dependent on drugs.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a drug fiend,” he admits. During the day he uses heroin to control his panic disorder. “The doctors won’t give me ‘benzos,’” a class of sedatives that includes Xanax, Klonopin and Valium. “They say they don’t trust me with them.” At night, he sometimes injects methamphetamine to stay awake on Eureka’s streets, so he doesn’t get robbed or beat up.

Mikey works swiftly, constructing his sandwiches and piling them into a cooler for an outreach trip to the nearby city of Arcata. Within the hour, he’s ready to go.

“This is the best job I’ve had in the world,” he says. “I don’t want it to go away.”

“I grocery shop like I’m Jackie Onassis. If anyone sees me wearing sunglasses indoors they’ll say, ‘See? We told you she uses drugs.’”

When I visited HACHR in June of this year, the fear that it might go away was perilously real. Three months earlier, Eureka’s city council had passed an ordinance requiring agencies that distribute clean needles file quarterly reports and steer people into treatment — a practice HACHR volunteers consciously avoid. (“If you push people too hard, they don’t come back,” HACHR board member Rachel Waldman told the council.) Discussions had unfurled on Facebook and NextDoor, in which people threatened to come for HACHR staff with “torches and pitchforks.”

HACHR’s founder and executive director, Brandie Wilson.

Worried that the council would rescind the ordinance that allows HACHR to operate in the city, Brandie Wilson, HACHR’s founder and executive director, had applied for authorization from the state of California, which would override local control. In public comments regarding the application submitted to the California Department of Public Health, one Eureka resident accused HACHR of actions “bordering on terrorist activity” and “helping children to shoot up.” Another called the agency “a radical militia group.”

The animosity peaked on June 5, when protesters associated with the anti-HACHR group Take Back Eureka faced off against HACHR supporters on the steps of Eureka’s City Hall. Two weeks later, two city councilmembers, Heidi Messner and Kim Bergel, showed up at a HACHR board meeting, announcing that they felt compelled to address the community’s concerns. From both sides’ accounts, the meeting turned hostile, and in the aftermath, Wilson reported that someone had keyed her car, that stalkers were videotaping HACHR’s activities through the windows and that more than one threat had been made on her life.

“Everyone’s out there believing that only bad people do drugs. When in reality, everyone uses drugs. Everyone.”

“I grocery shop like I’m Jackie Onassis,” she told me. “I cover my head and wear big sunglasses.” She realized the disguise could backfire: “If anyone recognizes me and sees me wearing sunglasses indoors they’ll say, ‘See? We told you she uses drugs.’”

Wilson and her staff reported the alleged keying incident and threats to the police, but Eureka’s Chief of Police, Steve Watson, dismissed them as below the threshold of legal action. Comments posted on social media, he said, “fall under the protection of the First Amendment.” He did not condone the threats, but neither was he unsympathetic. “As a law enforcement leader I’m unwilling to sacrifice the community’s sense of safety on the altar of a syringe exchange program,” he told me. “Parents should be able to take their children to our parks without living in fear of being stuck by a discarded needle.”

As to whether HACHR would be held responsible for such an incident — and for the needles that people say clog public toilets and accumulate in Eureka’s gutters — Watson demurs. Those needles could come from a lot of places, including Humboldt County’s own syringe exchange program or any of the local pharmacies, which in accordance with a 2015 state law, are allowed to sell syringes on demand. “The issue is more whether having this kind of syringe exchange program is right for a community like Eureka,” he says. Enlisting people like Mikey as volunteers, he says, makes it seem like drug use is okay. “But it’s not,” he insists. “Illegal drug use is never okay.”

The battle over HACHR is roughly the same as the battles being fought all over the country about how to treat, rehabilitate and care for people who use drugs. The nationwide crisis believed to have begun with loosely regulated access to prescription opioids has now become a nationwide crisis of injection drug use — along with blood-borne diseases and deadly infections from paraphernalia shared and misused. In Charleston, West Virginia, a program that provided clean syringes in addition to counseling and medical services was shut down after the police chief imposed onerous restrictions, such as ID checks and a strict one-to-one exchange. (A wide body of decades-old research shows that a more permissive “needs-based” exchange saves more lives.) In Grand Traverse County, Michigan, where injection drug use fueled an epidemic of hepatitis C — a chronic form of the disease that spreads almost exclusively among people who share needles — county health officials sustain a clean needle program over the ongoing protests of the county sheriff.

People who use drugs also die from infections caused by unsterilized needles and dirty water, wounds that turn septic and can’t be reversed.

The Orange County Needle Exchange Program in Santa Ana, California, lasted only from February, 2016 until December, 2017 before city officials pulled its permit on the grounds that not only was syringe distribution increasing the number of dirty needles found on the streets, but also facilitating drug use among Orange County’s swelling ranks of the unsheltered. (Neither claim has empirical evidence to support it.)

Like the Charleston program in its heyday, HACHR is more than a syringe exchange. It’s a place where people who use drugs also find community, treatment for their psychic and physical wounds, and advice to help them stay alive and disease-free while they continue to use drugs. Since 2017, when Wilson settled her crew into a 19-room Victorian house in downtown Eureka, it has functioned as an all-purpose gathering place for a few days a week, welcoming people who use drugs, be they opiates or stimulants or both. “We even have a nap room for people who are in chaos from lack of sleep,” Wilson says.

Wilson also relies on people who use HACHR’s services – “consumers,” she calls them — to staff the facility. “Drug users are front and center here,” Wilson tells me. “They make decisions, they help people connect with services. They’re the reason we can even function.” The people who mend the roof, who facilitate the art days, who offer workshops in medicinal teas — almost all of them use drugs once in a while, weekly or every day. Wilson demands only that they not use drugs on the premises and treat each other with respect.

This, more than anything, is what confuses HACHR’s detractors. “HACHR is the only [county needle exchange program] that has [current drug] users as a part of their team, in charge of needle exchange,” says Heidi Messner, who represents Eureka’s Ward 2 on the city council. “The term ‘best practices’ is being thrown around [by HACHR staff] but it’s a lie,” she says. “‘Best practices’ is when [people] who were users and are now clean work with users. To take that term and use it in a completely different context frustrates people.”

Messner also objects that Wilson isn’t pushing her consumers into treatment. “If [treatment] was part of the model, it [would probably] look different to people,” Messner says. “If the model is just, ‘Let’s corral people and keep them safe while moving toward their own destruction,’ that’s a challenge for people. Do we make sure they don’t trip over anything, make sure they don’t fall and get hurt on their way to jumping off a cliff?”

Wilson has little patience for that kind of talk. “That’s why we’re dying,” she says. “Everyone’s out there believing that only bad people do drugs, that if you use drugs you’re not a part of society or you’re not a part of the community. When in reality, everyone uses drugs. Everyone.”

Humboldt County, where 135,000 people are spread out across 4,000 square miles, has in recent years become notorious for its large number of homeless people, and people who inject drugs. It is also known for its drug-related deaths, and not just from opioids: Of the 49 people in the county who died from a drug overdose in 2017, according to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, close to a third of them overdosed on stimulants, primarily methamphetamine. Some of those drug supplies may have been tainted with other substances, such as fentanyl, a cheap but potent opioid first developed for use in patients undergoing cardiac surgery. The quality of street drugs is difficult to control.

People who use drugs also die from infections caused by unsterilized needles and dirty water, wounds that turn septic and can’t be reversed. They contract diseases from sharing pipes with raw and chapped lips. They often don’t know they’re infected, and consequently don’t seek care. The Humboldt County Department of Public Health estimates that nearly one in every 18 residents in the county are currently living with hepatitis C. The rate of new infections in the county is currently three times the state average.

Wilson is 44, although she looks younger, in part because of the way she wears her dark blond hair: in a wavy bob with a shock of magenta painted into it. She argues with a passion that endears her to many but which others find off-putting — especially those who have a less generous opinion of people who use drugs. She founded HACHR in 2014, in response to what she saw as a crushing need for health services in Eureka’s homeless encampments in Cooper Gulch Park and the Palco Marsh, which upwards of 200 people once occupied in tents or ramshackle shelters adjacent to Humboldt Bay. In 2015, her organization subsisted on a single $20,000 grant, from the Humboldt Patient Resource Center.

“We didn’t have a vehicle,” she says. “We’d go down there with a wagon — one of those fold-up ones you get at Costco — and give out wound-care kits, hygiene kits and referrals.” In 2016, the same year the Eureka Police Department began evicting the marsh residents to transform the area into a city park, the city passed a resolution authorizing HACHR’s syringe-exchange program. By then, HACHR had incorporated, secured nonprofit tax status and assembled a board of directors. Cobbling together grants and individual donations, Wilson raised enough to fund an operating budget of $100,000 without any taxpayer funds from the city.

The next year, Open Door Community Health Centers, a nonprofit that operates several rural Northern California clinics, offered as a headquarters the big Victorian house on Third Street, which had variously been a trap house, a vacant eyesore and a treatment clinic, for rent at $1 a month. Wilson insists on keeping every surface clean as a surgical table, often furiously wielding a bottle of bleach solution to wipe down counters herself. (When I complain the spray is making me cough, she tells me to open a window). Bright educational posters and memorials to fallen friends cover the walls.

The California Department of Public Health donates supplies, including syringes and naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of opioids and can halt an overdose in progress. Other supplies, such as tourniquets and condoms, HACHR buys, and volunteers neatly sort into compartmentalized boxes.

Last year, HACHR volunteers and staff counted 2,674 encounters with drug users, slightly more than three times as many as they saw the year before, when they were still an itinerant service. Because there are no ID requirements or other tracking information that might deter a potential consumer, that number includes people who accessed services more than once. The syringe-exchange program began as a “needs-based” effort — if you came in the door, you could get as many clean needles as you asked for. Because there are many places in the hills above Eureka where there is almost no access to doctors, let alone clean needles, there were times when a single person would walk away with 300 needles. “This is a vast rural community that we serve,” says Jessica Smith, HACHR’s program coordinator. “Sometimes we hadn’t seen someone for months. Sometimes someone would be collecting for their entire community.”

After the city council passed the March ordinance, HACHR switched to a one-to-one trade, to the extent that it’s feasible: The federal Occupational Health and Safety Act prohibits the opening of sealed sharps containers to count their contents, so HACHR staff has to count based on estimates of how many sharps fit in a given container. (Eco-Med, the company that processes discarded needles, later verifies the count by weight.) In 2017, 688,390 of the 735,823 needles HACHR distributed came back — a 93.5 percent return rate.

HACHR is something of a pay-it-forward enterprise for Wilson, who grew up in Terra Bella, a small rural California town in the Sierra Foothills, and early on developed her own problems with drug and alcohol abuse, cycling in and out of drug courts and 12-step programs punctuated by stints in jail. “The [drug court] system was set up to fail,” she says. “Any small thing would put you back in jail.”

After California voters passed Proposition 36 in 2000, redirecting drug offenders into treatment, Wilson struggled with rehabilitation programs that failed to address the mindset of the smart young rebel atheist she was. “Everything was about God,” she says. “And I didn’t believe in God.” Then she met a woman she calls Nickie C., at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. (The abbreviated last name is in accordance with N.A. traditions.) “Her husband, Bob, had been in prison for 16 years on a drug charge,” she says. “He got out of prison, and got a Ph.D.” The couple helped her understand that recovery wasn’t about steps, but about guiding principles for how to live. “They taught me that there’s a lot of space in between chaotic drug use and abstinence,” she says.

Most of all, they encouraged her to go to back to school. She began in a certificate program for drug and alcohol counseling at Porterville College, but in her first job at a drug court-authorized counseling facility, one of her clients, a mother of three, was sent back to jail after a urine test came back positive for cannabis. “Being a drug court counselor sucks if you don’t believe in the drug war, if you don’t believe in incarceration,” Wilson says. So with Nickie and Bob “cheerleading” for her, she enrolled in Humboldt State University — first as a psychology major, but quickly switched to sociology. She graduated with a master’s in 2011. “Sociology is all about the ‘isms’ that drive the fight in me,” she says. “It helped me understand that it wasn’t just me being bad. It was a system that was corrupt and fucked. I was responding appropriately.”

There is such a thing as a functioning drug user,” says Christina Donnell, a jocular redhead who facilitates art days at the center on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Donnell was once an injection drug user herself, but hasn’t used in months. “I just segued out,” she says. As she started taking on more responsibility at HACHR, working as a volunteer, she started to crave more mental clarity, and her drug use tapered off. “I don’t like to use the word ‘clean,’” she says, “because that implies I’ll never get high again, and that’s not true. I might use drugs again from time to time. They just don’t control my life.”

Donnell’s story is not uncommon. Jessica Smith watched her own mother segue out, after 16 years of using heroin. “She fell in love and got married to another drug user who was on the outs with his family,” Smith says. When the two of them took a trip back east to mend the husband’s relationships, they both stopped using drugs and never went back.

No treatment plan, 12-step program or incarceration could have accomplished that, Smith says. “You’re not ready until you’re ready.”

Some people might never be ready, in which case intervention takes the form of support for integrating into society, of becoming that functioning drug user Donnell refers to. Community helps; so, in some cases, does a dog. Smith has been trying to help Mikey get Rebel classified as a service dog so he can take him on the bus with him; Rebel “alerts” on Mikey when he has a seizure. “You have a right under the ADA to keep him with you,” she instructs. “You just have to tell people what he does.”

Mikey went to city hall to get Rebel a license, but he wasn’t yet neutered, so they turned him down. He comes back visibly defeated. “I was so excited to make him official,” he says. “That was such a letdown.”

But he’s still proud that he comported himself with dignity in the face of resistance. “There was another time in his life when I would have started yelling at people,” he says. “But now I’m representing this place. I don’t want to give it a bad name. So I was calm.”

“Mikey wants to go to culinary school,” Smith says. “We’re trying to help him with that.”

Early one Thursday afternoon, seven people crowded into HACHR’s small, barely furnished kitchen. The room still smelled of fried onions and tomato sauce from the spaghetti lunch Mikey made earlier in the day. Jessica Smith had laid out a blanket of paper large enough to nearly cover the table. On it were the names and office phone numbers of city council members and other elected officials who were publicly contemplating whether to rescind the 2016 ordinance authorizing HACHR’s existence.

“If you call Natalie, remember to just thank her,” Wilson shouted out to the room, referring to City Councilmember Natalie Arroyo, who stood up for HACHR when no one else did. (She was rewarded, Wilson and Watson both claim, with a syringe dropped on her front porch.)

Across the table from Smith sat Jessica Fox, a county mental health case worker who spends two hours a week at HACHR. “I help people connect to services,” she explained. “If they want to get into detox, I can help with that. If they just want to see a therapist I can help with them that. Just trying to connect people, helping people navigate the right path — instead of just making people go around in circles until they get arrested or die.”

“That is our city’s plan,” interjected Wilson. “The genocidal plan.”

The group was obviously on edge. When a tiny chime rang indicating an open door or window somewhere, Kenneth Boyd, the peer leader of HACHR’s cleanup crew, ran up the stairs in a panic. “It was just the wind,” he said when he returned. “Somebody didn’t close the door too tight.”

Boyd settled back in his position at the head of the table, where he’d been holding forth about how he got his nickname, Sidetrack. (In 1984 he went on a grocery run for his friends, he says, and didn’t come back for five days.) “Everyone here is pretty nervous,” he told me. “That’s what happens when you’re getting kicked all the time.”

On July 17, Jessica Smith and Rachel Waldman, HACHR’s board treasurer, stood at a podium before four of Eureka’s five city council members to present the organization’s first two-year report, an exercise required of syringe-exchange programs by state law. Projected on a screen above them was a slogan familiar to advocates for people with disabilities: “Nothing about us without us.”

“Everything in our program is informed by the people that we serve,” Smith explained. “We have a very in-depth peer program.”

Messner had trouble with this concept. “When you’re using that term ‘peer,’ are you referring to current addicts? [Because] the definition I’m familiar with is someone who’s successfully overcome some of the unhealthy habits that are involved in drug use.”

“Maybe what they’ve overcome are unsafe injection practices,” Smith said. Maybe they used to get a lot of abscesses and now they know how not to do that.”

Messner seemed unconvinced, so Smith kept on. “We’ve had peer leaders move on to have jobs and cars and insurance and all kinds of things they didn’t have before.” To “come into a role and have purpose and meaning,” she explained, can save your life.

Other councilmembers asked questions, too. “Does HACHR provide drugs to people?” asked Councilmember Kim Bergel.

“Absolutely not!” Smith answered. Councilmember Austin Allison, clearly sympathetic, asked the women to explain why harm reduction costs society less than treating people in the hospital for disease. “Preventing one case of HIV could save $450,000” in public health costs, Waldman said.

In the end, instead of revoking the organization’s authorization to operate, the council voted to establish an advisory board to address problems related to syringe distribution, including the city’s litter problem. One of the most persuasive arguments came from Kim Bergel, who in June had been inclined to shut HACHR down. “Any new business is going to have growing pains,” she said. HACHR staff has learned a lot in its first two years; rescinding the ordinance would put the city back at square one.

“We won the battle,” Wilson tells me when I see her next, in August. She confirms that, after a long heart-to-heart, Bergel had come around, and was now lauding HACHR for winning an award from the California Hepatitis Alliance for its work in community organizing.

Neither Bergel nor Wilson will divulge exactly what happened in their talk. Bergel will only say that she was tired of the divisiveness in the community. “I decided to look at my part in that,” she says. “And that led me to ask different questions.” Now she’s lobbying for a consumer to sit on the advisory board. “I mean, that’s who we’re talking about, right?”

On October 8, the California Department of Public Health announced, after a long delay, that HACHR had met the requirements for state authorization to operate as a syringe exchange in Eureka and Arcata, plus at four more outreach locations around the county. And Wilson has big hopes for the future. She plans soon to start up a foot-care clinic — feet and toes are common sites of infection for unsheltered people who inject drugs. She also wants to find a way to offer in-house treatment for hepatitis C, which is now curable in most cases. She’s counting on the state’s imprimatur to help her in the next local battle, which will no doubt come: In November, the city will vote on a new slate of councilmembers. Bergel’s seat is at risk, and at least three candidates, Michelle Constantine, Jeannie Breslin, John Fullerton and Bergel’s challenger, Joe Bonino, have promised to come down hard on Eureka’s public drug use and stray needles. All three have been explicit about who they hold responsible.

“The thing that hurts me the most is the lack of empathy people have,” Wilson says. “That people aren’t worth their care unless they stop using drugs.” If some people in the community want HACHR shut down, she says, it’s not because of the needles. “It’s because we’re demanding space in the system. We’re demanding civil rights for drug users.”

It might be starting to work. “Maybe the anger and outrage,” she says, “means that we’re successful.”

Judith Lewis Mernit’s reporting on harm reduction in rural California was supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2018 Impact Fund.

Copyright Capital & Main

Co-published by Newsweek

Between 1999 and 2016, deaths from opioid analgesics in the U.S. quintupled. When the pills ran out, cheap heroin flooded in.

Harm reduction for drug users, which includes everything from distributing clean needles to HIV testing to supervised injection sites, has shown to be one of the most effective strategies for slowing the spread of disease and lowering overdose rates. In some parts of California, however, the approach remains misunderstood and controversial. This week our three-part series, “Moving the Needle,” looks at the obstacles faced by harm reduction organizations in rural Northern California. Today Judith Lewis Mernit begins by reporting from the Mendocino County AIDS/Viral Hepatitis Network in Ukiah, where people who use drugs find acceptance and community without stigma or shame. Mernit’s reporting has been supported by a grant from the the University of Southern California Health Journalism Impact Fund.

Tuesday: A model harm reduction center in Humboldt County divides the city of Eureka — but also saves lives.

Wednesday: Safe injection facilities are at the front line of a health-care revolution for drug users — and of a potential showdown with the Trump administration.

Carol Chrysler is doing her best to fulfill the requests of a man sitting across from her in the cramped room of a tiny house in Ukiah, California. Chrysler, 33, is a volunteer with the Mendocino County AIDS/Viral Hepatitis Network; the man, 31, has driven 45 miles south in search of clean needles of many different gauges and lengths. “I’m a 10-pack per use guy,” he tells her, anxiously bouncing one knee. “I need 31s, 29s, 28s, 27s, half-inch, quarter inch, three-eighths.”

“I don’t have any 28s,” she informs him.

“Do you have 29s? 27s?”

“I do,” she says.

“Because I do a lot of rotation. You wouldn’t necessarily know, but I’ve been 13 years at this.”

The man, whose name I promised not to ask when he allowed me to sit in on his visit, tells me that he injects methamphetamine to endure months alone in the outback cultivating cannabis, at a grow site near the town of Laytonville. “It’s what happens when you live alone for 10 months out of the year,” he says. “I can make it about seven.” He found out about MCVHN — which locals pronounce “Macavin” — five days ago, after his last reused needle proved too dull to safely pierce his skin. He’s finding the Ukiah services a considerable step down, he adds, from the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance in Seattle, where he last lived.

“There you would show up and it was like hitting the cafeteria line,” he says. “Crack pipes, crack [pipe] condoms, cookers, everything.”

Overdose deaths skyrocketed once people figured out that dissolving and injecting newly marketed opioids for chronic pain delivered a more satisfying high than the pills did.

Chrysler politely tells him that MCVHN doesn’t do cookers. “But you’re not the first person to ask me this week,” she says, “so I’ll bring it up.”

After some back and forth, Chrysler agrees to give the man two 10-packs of syringes, in two different sizes. He rejects a dose of naloxone, a drug that binds to the brain’s opioid receptors and can arrest an opioid overdose. (Meth is sometimes spiked with fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid.) He promises that when he returns to resupply, he’ll take a test for hepatitis C, a chronic form of the disease prevalent among people who share needles.

“Next time you come in ask for Wendy,” Chrysler says. “She’ll do a test for you.”

People might find it outrageous that someone can walk in off the street and access the paraphernalia they need to inject their drugs.

Chrysler does not ask the man if he’s interested in treatment. She does not lecture him about the toll methamphetamine might be taking on his mind and body. A former methamphetamine user herself — she’s been eight months clean — Chrysler knows that if she tries that, the man might never come back. And most of all, she wants him to come back.

“Thank you, hon, see you next time,” she says as the man takes the package of supplies and hurries out. “Stay safe!”

Chrysler is a “peer leader” in the field of harm reduction, a practice that seeks not to shame people who use drugs into giving them up, but simply to provide them with the tools and support to improve their health. She started using methamphetamine as a teenager, and still understands the value of a thin, short needle when you’re injecting a second dose with shaky hands, just as she understands why it’s important to get tested for blood-borne illnesses. She is firm; she sets boundaries. But she doesn’t judge. She has been there too recently herself.

To people outside the harm reduction field, the notion that someone can walk in off the street and access, for free and without identification, the paraphernalia they need to inject their drugs might seem outrageous, maybe even criminal. “People will say, ‘You mean you give someone a new needle, and they go an inject drugs with that needle?’” said Alessandra Ross, an injection drug use specialist with the California Department of Public Health, speaking to public health professionals at a September conference on rural opioid use. “That can be a challenge for people.”

Public attitudes about offering drug users assistance without asking for sobriety haven’t changed much — even if it prevents the spread of a blood-borne disease.

But the consequences of not rising to that challenge have too recently been driven home in rural communities all over the country. Once people figured out that dissolving, cooking and injecting extended-release formulations of newly marketed opioids for chronic pain — oxycodone and oxymorphone — delivered a cheaper and more satisfying high than the pills did, overdose deaths skyrocketed: Between 1999 and 2016, the incidence of death from opioid analgesics in the U.S. quintupled. When the pills ran out, cheap heroin flooded in. And where needles were scarce, disease raged unchecked: In rural Scott County, Indiana, more than 200 people became infected with the same strain of HIV between 2011 and 2015, when then-Indiana Governor Mike Pence lifted the state’s ban on syringe-exchange services in the most affected counties. Had the state acted five years earlier, a recent Yale University study found, HIV might never have spread beyond the first 10 people who contracted it.

MCVHN executive director Libby Guthrie.

Harm reduction for drug users is nothing new. Even in rural America, clean-needle distribution has been going on at least since the late 1980s, when the HIV epidemic showed that it respected no urban boundaries. Libby Guthrie, MCVHN’s executive director, started out in 1987 working on HIV prevention among injection drug users in the San Francisco Bay Area, but in 1990 moved to North Carolina, where HIV was rampant throughout the 1990s and all but ignored. “I watched several people die every month in [the HIV support group I led],” she recalls, “and watched other people not talk about why they died.”

Back then, syringe-exchanges operated underground, or, in California, with emergency waivers from county officials. That wasn’t possible everywhere: Dallas Blanchard, who runs a needle exchange on Saturday afternoons in Fresno, California, remembers trying to distribute clean needles in Kern County a decade ago. “If you got caught, you’d do 10 days in jail for every syringe,” he says. But the law has progressed: Since 2012, it’s been legal to possess and distribute syringes. As of 2015, you can even buy them in a pharmacy, although in a syringe purchase trial conducted among pharmacies in Fresno and Kern counties, led by West Virginia University Professor Robin Pollini, only 21 percent of attempts succeeded.

What hasn’t changed much are public attitudes about offering drug users assistance without asking for sobriety, even if it means preventing the spread of a blood-borne disease. A recent survey conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that only 39 percent of adults in the U.S. would accept a legal syringe exchange in their communities, and only 29 percent approved of safe consumption facilities, where people can inject drugs in a protected environment, in the presence of trained medical personnel.

Twenty-six counties and cities in California have some sort of syringe-exchange program, which leaves virtually the entire eastern side of the state without any such services at all. Although Blanchard says he delivers syringes over the Kern-Fresno County line once a week, and also to an outreach stop in Tulare County, neither Kern nor Tulare has a clean needle program for injection drug users, despite nontrivial rates of overdose and disease. One rural California county, Plumas, has successfully reduced its overdose-death rate — once highest in the state — with a harm reduction program that has the support of law enforcement and local officials. But in other rural counties that do have services — Fresno, Humboldt and Mendocino in particular — local opposition has remained so fierce that service providers have turned to the state for authorization, so local authorities can’t shut them down.

Money is also an issue. As the budget for health and social services in California has tightened over the past decade, harm reduction agencies have seen their resources dwindle from scarce to almost nothing. Guthrie remembers when, in the early 2000s, with funding from the state Office of AIDS, she could afford four paid, full-time outreach workers who made regular treks to the tiny northern hamlets of Laytonville and Leggett, and even Covelo, where a confederation of six Native American tribes inhabit the remote Round Valley, a one-and-a-half hour drive from Ukiah. This was important: One of the premises of harm reduction is that offering clean needles is a first point of contact with drug users who might need other health services, counseling or disease testing.

“Every day of the week,” she says, “[the outreach workers] were out doing their thing, getting fresh supplies, testing people and making referrals — ‘Do you need testing? Do you need medical care? Housing?’ They were coming face to face with people and giving them syringes once a week and coming and picking them up.”

“Their perception of an addict is that I’m a bad person. But I’m not. I have integrity. I care about other people more than I care about myself.”

Then came the Great Recession and California’s budget crisis. Facing a $40 billion budget shortfall, California in 2010 eliminated all $33 million from the Office of AIDS’s prevention budget, which had supplemented $9 million from the Centers for Disease Control. The agency was forced to spread its federal funds among 19 “high-burden” jurisdictions, most of them coastal and urban. Mendocino, Humboldt, Lake and 39 other mostly rural counties were completely left out.

“We went from riches to rags overnight,” Guthrie says. “It was like, ‘Boom! You’re done.’ I said, no, we’re not. We have people in need and we have this syringe exchange, and it’s one of the only ways to engage people who are using drugs in the county.” She has kept MCVHN running with a network of volunteers to disseminate what they can. But she admits it’s not ideal. Mendocino County covers 3,800 square miles, much of it rugged and difficult to access. “We can no longer go out and do trainings for HIV and hep C testing, we can no longer do referrals and linkages. We’ve lost that face-to-face contact with people.” Because volunteer delegates — usually people who currently use drugs themselves — collect for their friends and communities in the far reaches of the county, she says, “65 percent of our exchangers we never get to see.”

In some ways, the attention being paid to opioid dependency in the U.S. has been a boon for places like MCVHN, which had been addressing the needs of injection drug users long before substance use disorders became a national focus. When California, in June of 2018, issued a statewide standing order for naloxone, allowing community organizations to obtain and distribute the overdose-reversal drug without a physician’s guidance, the county health department turned to Guthrie for help. “We were the only agency in the county that had any experience with it,” she says.The response to the opioid crisis “means I don’t have to invite myself to the Opioid Safety Committee meetings anymore,” Guthrie says. “We’re no longer those people down the street enabling drug addicts.” With the help of a new county public health director, Barbara Howe, Guthrie is in the process of securing funding for two outreach workers for the first time in 13 years. A new police chief, Justin Wyatt, has even stepped up to serve on the county’s Homeless Action Services Group, which among other things addresses drug misuse issues among people who live without shelter.

“I’ve been six days clean and I’ve already made up my mind I’m going to go out and get loaded today. I’m dopesick.”

But “we’re still the red-headed stepchild,” says Guthrie. “Not everyone embraces what we do.” Not everyone understands, in other words, that an overdose prevention kit and revised prescribing protocols aren’t the answer to everyone’s struggle with substance use.

At MCVHN, I meet Sean Jardstrom, who’s been using methamphetamine for 34 years — since he was 14 — and injecting for 15 of them. As dogs large and small — a poodle named Snickers, a border collie, Finn — circle in and out of the room, he tells me that he’s just left his fourth attempt at rehab. “I’ve been six days clean,” he told me, “and I’ve already made up my mind I’m going to go out and get loaded today. I’m dopesick.”

Jardstrom, who is gruff-voiced and tall, dressed in cargo pants and a Yosemite National Park T-shirt, doesn’t necessarily need free needles from MCVHN. Though he’s homeless, he has enough money from his disability payments to buy them at Walgreens. He’s managed to remain both HIV- and hep C-negative, and knows enough now to stay that way. What he comes to MCVHN to find, he says, is a community of people who accept him for what he is — people he considers his adopted family, people who don’t judge him.

“I’m scared that I’m going to die an addict,” he says. “But I can’t see how I won’t.” His family — mom, stepdad, a brother and a sister —refuse to speak to him until he gets clean. “Their perception of an addict is that I’m a bad person. But I’m not. I have integrity. I care about other people more than I care about myself.”

Jardstrom and I talk for a long time, until he gets restless and has to do something else. At one point, talking about his father, the only member of his family who stood by Jardstrom until he died in 2008, he starts to cry. “He never gave up on me,” he says. “He was the only one.” I want to help him. I know I can’t. I am grateful he has found his way here.

Judith Lewis Mernit’s reporting on harm reduction in rural California was supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2018 Impact Fund.

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The clear message to women is: You can vote — but you still can’t be heard.

Women make up half the human race but the lived reality of women’s lives often feels completely invisible in American society. When Judge Brett Kavanaugh claimed unequivocally at last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that he hadn’t molested Dr. Christine Ford, he may have stated what he felt is true. His abuse of her, or any other woman that he may have violated, isn’t “imprinted on his hippocampus,” as it was on Dr. Ford’s, because it was insignificant to him. And that reality, on display and validated by members of the highest level of our government, is what was so painful to be reminded of last week. Even the compromise FBI investigation of Kavanaugh apparently involves the silencing of voices with something important to say.

The clear message to women is: You can vote — but you still can’t be heard.

When I became a feminist in the 1970s, having my consciousness raised about sexism and the structural disempowerment of women was a mixed bag. I started to see and deeply feel the many large and small ways women are disrespected, degraded, ignored and patronized all around me. Reading a popular magazine, watching television, attending a party, listening to pop music all became assaults on my sense of self as a thinking, effective member of this society. It was hard to bear and difficult to avoid becoming an angry, raging “femi-Nazi,” as the political right likes to call outspoken feminists. How could it be that more men, living with and beside women, having been birthed and raised by them, don’t see those assaults too and stand up against them? Or stop committing them?

On the contrary, as we’ve learned from the controversy surrounding Brett Kavanaugh, in the 1980s — well after the birth of second-wave feminism — serial gang rape, sex with blacked-out, intoxicated women, the waving of genitals in “party” settings apparently emerged in the social settings of some of the most privileged, educated and religious young American Brahmins. These behaviors have little to do with sex and a lot to do with exerting power and control over women, and sometimes other men too.

The hurt many women are feeling after the Kavanaugh hearing goes well beyond the confirmation process of this man for the Supreme Court. The courageousness of Dr. Ford and the brutish response by Kavanaugh and some Republican senators dramatically opened a window on the invisibility and powerlessness of women and girls to this day. We’ve known it in our bones from our own experience, but now degrading women’s lives may be given official government approval.

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The phenomenon of hostile landscaping in Los Angeles has further marginalized a swelling unhoused population.

Last May, in Los Angeles’ coastal Venice neighborhood, Adam Smith noticed a series of planter boxes in the middle of a familiar sidewalk. Affixed near the intersection of Third and Sunset avenues, mere blocks from a Google campus and a suite of oceanside cafes, the standalone planters ran roughly the length of a wall delineating a parking lot behind a luxury condo complex.

Previously, Smith told Capital & Main, a group of six to 10 homeless people had regularly slept in tents on that block, favoring it for its relatively plentiful street light. A volunteer for the Culver-Palms Burrito Project, which prepares and serves the titular food to the unhoused of West Los Angeles, he’d become acquainted with individuals living there over the course of several years.

Once the planters were installed, however, the sidewalk was clear. “That next day, after I saw [the planter boxes] for the first time, I went there to look around because I figured they were sleeping somewhere else,” Smith said. “I found people up around the corner, just, like, a block away.”

Companies are privatizing public space to create more “landscape” for their businesses.

Throughout Los Angeles, landscaping is put to aggressive use, functioning as a weapon of anti-homelessness under the guise of beautification. Just as both public and private architectural design throttle space available to the unhoused internationally — via, among other examples, spikes on ledges and bars on benches to discourage sitting and lying down — and cities such as San Francisco arrange boulders to deter homeless encampments, the phenomenon of hostile landscaping in Los Angeles has further marginalized a swelling unhoused population.

Where the sidewalk ends: Unidentified man, downtown Los Angeles. (Photo: Marco Amador)

Nearly 20 miles from Venice, a Los Feliz traffic median at the intersection of Vermont and Prospect avenues, and Hollywood Blvd., has regularly seen encampments arranged on its concrete ground, abutting a raised patch of desert landscaping and sycamore trees.

Christened “Vermont Triangle,” the median’s first redesign occurred in 2008, when the now-defunct Community Redevelopment Agency spearheaded a project to “improv[e] the pedestrian amenities” and “enhanc[e] the physical appearance of the existing median park.” According to the Los Angeles Times, this yielded seating areas, lampposts to echo those at nearby Barnsdall Art Park, and the sycamores. Eventually, unhoused people began to pitch tents, availing themselves of the median’s modest stretches of open public space.

Now, due to pressure from local business owners, Vermont Triangle is in flux. City Councilmember David Ryu’s office, the Times noted, plans to invest $18,000 in another redesign, following a 2013 re-landscape. The 2013 update was financed in part by the Hollywood Hotel and Kaiser Permanente, according to Jeff Zarrinnam, who serves on the board of governors of the East Hollywood Business Improvement District. (Ryu’s office couldn’t be reached for comment.) Current proposals range from adding art installations and neighborhood signs, which Zarrinnam said the Los Feliz Neighborhood Council and East Hollywood Neighborhood Council have floated, to putting in planters.

Zarrinnam said he supports “bridge housing,” a term the municipal government, neighborhood councils and local businesses use to favorably denote temporary homeless shelters and transitional housing. Yet reports indicate that the current state of temporary housing for many homeless people in Los Angeles County — who, as of May, numbered approximately 53,000 — is nothing short of abysmal. A recent investigation by radio station KPCC found infestations, harassment and medical negligence, among other scourges at various facilities throughout Los Angeles County, including those funded by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which conducts the county’s annual homeless census.

Sidewalk in Los Angeles’ North Sea district. (Photo: Marco Amador)

Steve Diaz, an organizer for Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) who works with unhoused populations in downtown and South L.A., calls hostile landscaping of public space “the next level of criminalization” of homelessness. He alluded to an industrial neighborhood overlapping Skid Row, whose business owners call “The North Sea”: a cluster of converted seafood warehouses and factories painted the same hues of oceanic blue — complete with landscaped sidewalks.

“They started breaking the concrete and taking away from the sidewalk to place different types of flowers, whatever garden they were putting in,” Diaz said. “You have a major street [on] Skid Row that, at one point, was home to a lot of homeless folks now being gated off, and then the concrete being broken to start using these gardening pockets within the space to eliminate sidewalk access.” (Miguel Nelson, a North Sea business owner involved in the area’s marketing efforts, declined to respond publicly.)

As private property owners adopt guerrilla tactics to thwart homeless encampments, legal issues arise. Skid Row activist General Jeff Page has observed that, while property owners are permitted to control up to three feet of sidewalk extending from their buildings, “The North Sea is taking upwards of five to 10 feet of sidewalk, allowing only for ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance and zero space for homeless tents and/or encampments.” (The Los Angeles Department of Public Works stated that the North Sea sidewalk landscaping is currently under investigation and thus couldn’t comment further on the matter.)

What’s more, business owners in South L.A. have illegally installed fences around their property, which, according to Diaz, will eventually give way to sidewalk landscaping. Relatedly, Adam Smith has been corresponding with city officials to ascertain the permit status of the Venice planters. The West L.A. office of the Bureau of Engineering, which issues revocable permits, told Capital & Main that it did not have a permit on file for the planters. Without one, according to the bureau, “no portion of the public right-of-way, including sidewalk, is allowed for private use.”

Nevertheless, the planters remain and, according to Smith, have multiplied. Additional boxes, he said, are now ensconced in the sidewalk around the corner, to where the previously ousted people had first moved.

“For some people, [landscaping] sounds like a great idea,” Diaz said. “But you’re literally privatizing public space to create more ‘landscape’ for your business.”

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California has been more expensive than most of the country for a long time, but the gap became a chasm beginning in the 1970s.

John Holguin should be in a celebratory mood. He is just about to close escrow on his first house. But like too many Californians, he’s feeling a sense of diminished possibilities.

Holguin, 48, works for the Santa Cruz County Department of Public Works, striping roads and maintaining the county’s bridges and storm drains. His wife is a school receptionist, and their combined annual income of $82,000 places them squarely in Santa Cruz County’s middle class.

Yet Holguin had to withdraw from his retirement fund to afford his piece of the California Dream: a house in Watsonville, an agricultural community that has seen home prices shoot up as Bay Area tech workers and investors snatch up homes in the region.

His $3,200 monthly mortgage payment will eat up 75 percent of his take-home pay, he says. When he does retire, eight years later than planned, he and his wife will probably head for Arizona, where some of his high school classmates have already settled.

Activists and civic leaders are recognizing the extent of California’s housing crisis. They are organizing around changes to housing codes, rent control, and local and state bond measures.

Holguin’s two kids, junior college students, will help with the mortgage on the new home, but he does not expect them to remain in the state. “They know if they want to buy something, if they want to succeed, it’s not going to be here in California,” he says.

California’s housing shortage has made it difficult to be middle class and harder to be poor. But there are signs in Holguin’s home county, and elsewhere in the state, that activists and civic leaders are recognizing the extent of the crisis. They are organizing around changes to housing codes, rent control, and local and state bond measures.

At a June 12 Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Zach Friend suggested that residents may have “reached a real tipping point” in their willingness to support new affordable housing. He was responding to almost a dozen community, business and nonprofit leaders who spoke in support of the board’s unanimous vote that day to direct staff to prepare revisions to the county housing code to ease the way for more affordable housing development.

“It’s one thing to say that you are in favor of affordable housing,” but when a project is proposed in your neighborhood, “you can find a lot of reasons as to why you don’t support it.”

But it may take time to fix a problem that has been decades in the making, and it will certainly take political will to build and maintain affordable housing in sought-after coastal regions. Santa Cruz activists hope that Friend and other supervisors will vote this summer to place a bond measure of up to $250 million on the November ballot that could fund affordable rental housing, support first-time homebuyers, and provide housing for the homelessness.

Funding and policy changes are only the beginning. City and county officials must greenlight projects, sometimes over neighborhood opposition.

“It’s one thing to say that you are in favor of affordable housing,” Friend noted at the June 12 meeting, but when “a project actually comes forward, especially one in your neighborhood, you can find a lot of reasons as to why you don’t support it.”

California has been more expensive than most of the country for a long time. But the gap widened beginning in the 1970s when home prices grew from 30 percent above national levels to more than 80 percent higher by the end of the decade. Now the median-priced California home costs more than twice the median-priced U.S. home, according to Zillow.

Research suggests that the public “feels the pain” but is “not really enamored by some of the most obvious solutions,” says Jim Mayer of California Forward, a nonprofit organization that focuses on fiscal and government reform. “They’re really not supportive of a whole lot more homes if they think it is going to lead to more traffic and congestion, and more crime, and impact the schools.”

California would need as many as 100,000 more housing units a year than it is currently building to meet the demands of its growing population, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Meanwhile, some of John Holguin’s co-workers rise in the dark to commute from Los Banos, a small bedroom community some 80 miles east. Others stay with family in Santa Cruz during the week, only to travel 150 miles home to Sacramento on the weekend. (Holguin’s 17-mile commute from Watsonville along Highway 1 will take as long as 45 minutes because of traffic.) “Only in California do we have watersheds and commute sheds,” says Mayer.

“My parents bought their first place at 25, and I’m 48,” Holguin notes. “To me it seemed like they had it easier back then.” He’s right about his parents’ generation of homebuyers. Back in 1975, the median home price in the state was $193,774 (in 2017 dollars). Last year, according to the California Realtors Association, it was $537,860 — nearly three times that much.

Of course, Santa Cruz is a particularly pricey slice of the California real estate market. Its sun, surf and scenery draw tourists, as well as tech industry workers from “over the hill” in Silicon Valley, who have money to spend. The median price for a single family home in Santa Cruz County shot up to $935,100 in March, a record high, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.

Santa Cruz County is home to lower-wage agricultural and service industries, making affordability a particular challenge for those who work there. Also, local redevelopment agencies, one of the few funding sources for affordable housing available to local governments, were eliminated in 2012, contributing to the housing shortage across the state.

Small-town Santa Cruz also faces pressure from its University of California campus, whose chancellor announced plans last fall to increase its student body by as many as 10,000 students by 2040. In a sign of voter frustration, the city of Santa Cruz approved a non-binding measure opposing the university’s growth plans by a margin of 76-23 percent.

And then there is the resistance on the part of some residents to accommodate growth. Some simply want to “preserve the open space and restrain the growth” as much as possible, says Don Lane, one of the leaders of Affordable Housing Santa Cruz County, a local coalition that is advocating for a housing bond measure to be placed on the November ballot. “But you’ve just got all this high-priced housing, and it’s still crowded, and traffic is still getting worse.”

Lane, a former mayor of the city of Santa Cruz, says denser “infill” housing in commercial corridors will lead to a more efficient and effective use of space without compromising the region’s preservationist traditions.

The plight of Santa Cruz’s middle-income residents is not as dire as that of its poor, of which there are many. The county has among the highest poverty rates in the state. Farmworkers live in overcrowded and sometimes dangerous conditions. At the June 12 board meeting, Ann López, the director of the Center for Farmworker Families, relayed an instance of 16 people living together in a home of less than 1,000 square feet.

Matthew Nathanson, a public health nurse with the county, was motivated to advocate for an affordable housing ballot measure after witnessing the clients he serves “falling into homelessness” because of their inability to afford rent. The median rent for a two-bedroom home in Santa Cruz was $2,450 a month in May, a 4.7 percent increase from a year ago, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.

Nathanson, who is also a regional vice president with Service Employees International Union Local 521, says that housing has become a central issue for city and county workers like Holguin, who are becoming increasingly difficult to recruit. Road workers who are on call during the rainy season need to live “within a reasonable distance” of their jobs, he adds. And pay increases won at the bargaining table risk being “all wiped out” by the cost of housing.

The measure, which would require a two-thirds vote of the public, would be paid for by commercial and residential property owners, according to Lane. The original proposal was for $250 million, but he says the bond measure is now “looking more like $150 million” and could benefit between 1,500 and 2,000 households.

The campaign was inspired by the success of housing measures in Alameda and Santa Clara counties, he says. Another $4 billion housing measure will be on the state ballot this November.

Still, once the funding is in place, the projects will need to get approved by local governments and built. The bond measure proposed for November is only one piece of the puzzle, according to Nathanson.

“It took us a long time to get into this situation,” he says. “I think there is a shift going on, but it’s going to be a struggle.”

Research assistance provided by Jake Conran.

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