NYC DSA Medics

the science is clear: needle exchanges, safe injection sites, better access to medication for addiction, and other harm reduction measures lower mortality and improve outcomes.

but to treat a disease without addressing its material conditions does not eradicate the disease—it perpetuates its endemic nature.

like infectious disease, overdose overwhelmingly afflicts the poor, the unhoused, the incarcerated, people of color, the marginalized—those who live without a buffer or safety net, whose existence is circumscribed by social abandon and social control.

like infectious disease, the crisis was not recognized until it reached the comfortable homes of the white middle class.

and like infectious disease, it will not be solved by treating only the most immediately vulnerable. we need radical change.

tomorrow we rally to demand action on the city’s promised safe injection sites—theyre dragging their feet.

but we must recognize that access to safer use is only the beginning: SIFs are necessary: but alone they wont solve the problem.

the problem is structural, and requires structural solutions. along with harm-reducing measures, we must demand healthcare without a profit motive, patient involvement in their own care—

as well as decriminalization, total decarceration, safe housing, education, and healthy food as fundamental rights; and an end to segregation, deprivation, and disposession, to poverty and the wage system.

capitalism itself is the fundamental cause, the vector of disease. the same brutal system that requires and feeds on extraction, marginalization, racialization, and oppression to uplift a wealthy few creates the conditions for disease among the people.