IF YOU REACT THIS WAY ABOUT A DOCUMENTARY GEORGE ZIMMERMAN MUST BE GUILTY.

 Original article written September 2nd 2018

If Gov. Jerry Brown goes along, San Francisco plans to establish what could be the nation’s first legal, supervised safe injection site for drug users. But there’s a potentially serious legal obstacle: a 3-decade-old federal law that was directed at shutting down dens of crack cocaine dealers and users.

Legislation on Brown’s desk, passed by bare-majority votes in both houses, would authorize the city to set up one or more sites in a pilot program through January 2022. Drug users would have access to clean needles and syringes, medical care, counseling and social services. Similar programs are operating in 10 nations.

But a day after lawmakers approved AB186 last week, the Trump administration’s deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, in an opinion piece Tuesday in the New York Times, declared injection sites dangerous and illegal and pledged “swift and aggressive action” under a 1986 law known as the Crack House Statute.

“It is a federal felony to maintain any location for the purpose of facilitating illicit drug use,” Rosenstein wrote. He argued that the sites encourage addiction by sending a “powerful message to teenagers that the government thinks illegal drugs can be used safely.”

City officials and other advocates of the sites say their purpose is not to facilitate drug use, but to protect the users from overdoses and other lethal consequences while giving them a chance to get their lives under control and making the streets safer.

“Research has shown these programs reduce overdose mortality, public injection, litter from drug use … while increasing access to treatment, safe-use behaviors, and entrance into detoxification services,” said the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, D-Stockton.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who lost a younger sister to a drug overdose in 2006, says she’s willing to fight the federal government in court to allow the injection sites.

“People are going to shoot up, and we don’t have control over that,” Breed said in July. “There’s a way to get it indoors so it’s not impacting our streets in a negative way. … These places provide a location for people to be when they’re going through what they’re going through.”

California has been down this road before. The state was the first to legalize the medical use of marijuana, in a 1996 initiative, and since then has battled a series of presidential administrations over enforcement of the federal ban on all uses of marijuana.

In 2005, the clash reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where California argued that pot dispensaries were not engaged in interstate commerce when they supplied marijuana that was grown entirely within the state, and thus were not subject to federal regulation. The court disagreed in a 6-3 ruling, leading to federal closures of hundreds of dispensaries in the state under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

The federal sweeps eventually prompted congressional action, in 2015, to prevent further shutdowns.

The federal government couldn’t rely on the same drug bans to go after safe injection sites, though, because — unlike the marijuana dispensaries — the city wouldn’t be supplying any drugs, said Marsha Cohen, a law professor at UC Hastings in San Francisco.

That’s where the Crack House Statute comes in.

The law prohibits anyone from “knowingly” opening, maintaining or managing a “place for the purpose of unlawfully manufacturing, distributing, or using a controlled substance.”

The statute was passed at a time of rising crack cocaine use in inner cities and was directed at private criminal outposts, not public facilities seeking to provide safety for drug users. But a legislative staff analysis of AB128 said the law would “criminalize both the behavior of the clients using the (safe injection) facilities and the owners or operators of the facilities.”

Maximum penalties under the law include 20 years in prison, fines of $500,000 for individuals or $2 million for an organization, and loss of the property.

Brown has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto AB186, or let it become law without his signature. If it becomes law, federal courts will have to decide whether the broadly worded law passed by Congress in 1986 contains an implied exemption for a government-supervised facility whose ultimate goal is to reduce drug addiction.

“There’s no evidence of (congressional) intent that this would apply to legally permitted public health interventions, trying to prevent deaths and serious injuries,” said Lindsay LaSalle, an attorney with the advocacy group Drug Policy Alliance in Oakland.

Legal analysts who support the injection sites took a similar position in an article in the American Journal of Public Health in 2008.

The federal law “was never intended to interfere with a legally authorized public health intervention” under “states’ traditional authority in public health,” said a team of researchers led by Leo Beletsky, who teaches law and health sciences at Northeastern University. “These arguments are reasonable but are by no means certain to convince federal judges.”

Another 2008 legal commentary, by Michael Rayfield in the University of Chicago Law Review, said the law should be interpreted to apply only to a facility that “meaningfully contributes to the drug activity beyond simply providing a secluded location for it to occur.”

The law could be tested elsewhere. Seattle officials are deciding whether to equip a mobile van as a safe injection site. New York City is considering a proposal to operate one or more injection sites as a medical research program, an option that could sidestep the Crack House Statute but would still require approval from federal agencies.

New York would be following in the footsteps of Vancouver, British Columbia, and Sydney, where medical research programs eventually became government-run safe injection sites in two of the 10 nations that have legalized them.

In any event, as UC Hastings’ Cohen noted, U.S. courts have ruled on the application of the 1986 drug law in a variety of settings, but have not been asked to decide whether it applies to government-run injection centers.

“There seems to be considerable room for argument here,” Cohen said. “Not surprising given that none of these (federal) statutes was designed to deal with those who are in good faith trying to deal with the drug scourge.”

Source: San Francisco Chronicle