Harm reduction CEO says new Phoenix parks ordinance will lead to more overdoses, deaths

The Phoenix City Council approved a controversial new law that puts new restrictions in place about providing medical care in public parks — and harm reduction groups are not happy about it.

They are the force behind recent drops in overdose rates in Arizona. Now they say they won’t be able to do their life-saving work for homeless individuals in the place where they are most likely to be found: City parks.

The ordinance prohibits any group from sponsoring or advertising medical treatment in parks unless authorized by the city. And it bars groups from using parks for needle exchange programs as well as handing out harm reduction kits, which aim to protect drug users and prevent overdoses.

Parks staff say it’s necessary to stop kids from finding needles in the parks and ensure everyone can enjoy them.

Scott Greenwood guest says it’s only going to make the problem worse. Greenwood is the CEO Sonoran Prevention Works, a harm reduction organization that’s been behind the flood of Naloxone that has helped reduce overdoses in our state in recent years. He is also a constitutional lawyer of more than 30 years, and he told The Show this law is unconstitutional.

Full conversation

SCOTT GREENWOOD: It violates the First Amendment. I mean, this ordinance is really at the intersection of the two areas in my career that I emphasize as a constitutional lawyer. It’s both law enforcement practices and First Amendment activity. So this is really sort of the perfect storm. And so I knew that I had to testify, even if we had plenty of other people from the harm reduction community available.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so let’s back up for a minute and talk about the broader context here. This is coming at a moment in which we’ve had a lot of good news on this front.

Organizations like yours have been kind of flooding the zone with naloxone, this drug that can reverse an overdose as it’s happening and save a lot of lives. And we’ve seen overdose death rates go way, way down and reversals go up. Right?

GREENWOOD: Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that brought me to Sonoran Prevention Works in the first place were these remarkable metrics. The numbers are just extraordinary. So we have more reversals in Arizona than we have deaths at this point in time. That is not possible without a sort of a whole of government approach and a whole approach of partner organizations in the nonprofit world.

GILGER: Right. So you’re concerned, though, that policies like this ordinance might reverse that trend. Tell us why.

GREENWOOD: Well, they may start out from a good premise that everybody should enjoy the parks, and nobody wants to change that. But you don’t have to over regulate things that are not serious problems in order to achieve that.

And what the ordinance does is it regulates speech as if it were conduct. So it treats providing information and resources that can be used to mitigate and lessen risk, it treats that as if it’s medical treatment, and it is not.

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GILGER: Right. So it prohibits people from, as you’re saying, providing medical treatment in a public park, but also promoting advertising, sponsoring that kind of thing in a park. I mean, is the idea here to prohibit syringes, needle exchanges, things like that?

GREENWOOD: So the sponsors of the legislation and the proponents of it speak in exactly those terms. Public safety, making the parks welcoming, friendly, making certain that vulnerable young kids are not exposed to seeing things that their parents might not want them to see.

So I understand those concerns, but the response from the city is to regulate conduct that isn’t problematic in order to prevent conduct that they see as definitely problematic. What our organization does and what our partner organizations do, they’re not providing medical treatment. They are not facilitating anybody’s use of any substance in the park. They’re providing resources — whether that’s information or physical resource — to manage that risk.

GILGER: Is that like the harm reduction kits, which are also prohibited from being given out in parks here?

GREENWOOD: They’re absolutely prohibited under the new ordinance. So just this weekend, Sunday, after church services, in my own congregation, my congregation put together what we call at SPW sick kits. Those include electrolytes, some sanitizer, some ibuprofen. And those sick kits are harm reduction kits. They are useful for people who are experiencing nausea or some other distress because of how they may be consuming substances.

The ordinance makes it OK for me to tell people about those supplies but not provide them. Really, we can’t provide ibuprofen to people in a sealed packet?

GILGER: But other harm reduction kits will include other things, right?

GREENWOOD: They can include lots of other things.

GILGER: So would there be like a clean syringe in another harm reduction kit or something like that? Naloxone, etc.?

GREENWOOD: Yes, there could be. So, for example, we have naloxone kits. Those naloxone kits have two specific syringes and two doses of naloxone and instructions. Other types of kits might include a different type of syringe, clean syringes that are specifically legal under state law in Arizona as part of the state’s legalization of syringe service programs just a few years ago.

GILGER: Right. Which made a big difference, that we should say this ordinance does not apply to administering naloxone. The city also passed an ordinance that will criminalize people from using park equipment for anything other than its, “intended purpose.” Does this feel just directed at people who are unhoused?

GREENWOOD: It’s absolutely, unfortunately directed at some of the most vulnerable people in society: the unhoused. And as a result of a Supreme Court decision just a year plus ago, it has become legal for cities to regulate houselessness in a way that they didn’t previously have.

So, for example, that was the green light to remove “The Zone” in downtown Phoenix. And the people who are unhoused, they didn’t disappear, they were just displaced. And as a result of that type of enforcement activity, many unhoused people are now residing in the only places that really had been available to them: public parks and other areas where they can sleep.

GILGER: Yeah. So this is an effort, you feel like at least, by the city to move them out of public parks. Where will they go?

GREENWOOD: Well, that’s the question. Part of the very core of harm reduction is meeting people where they are. And we know empirically that we’re going to find more unhoused people in public parks. If they are not there, there’s still some other place. If they are not there, they are harder to reach. If they are harder to reach, they are less likely to receive information and resources that they need.

If they do not receive those resources, they are more likely to suffer adverse consequences, including overdose and death. That’s what the city has just enacted.

GILGER: So you think this could actually make it worse. More people will be dying as opposed to getting this help?

GREENWOOD: So let me put it this way. There will be fewer calls for service for people reporting activity that they find distasteful in the parks, and more reports that require EMT or ambulance runs to people who have overdosed because they did not receive the services.

And unfortunately, more people dying — whether they die in the park because they’ve overdosed there or adjacent to it or in some other location or in my front lawn.