Is the Biden administration backing away from its tenuous support for supervised injection sites? The Department of Justice’s latest move regarding Philadelphia’s contentious Safehouse supervised injection site case indicates so — and reelection politics are likely at play.

After more than six months of mediation, the Department of Justice filed a motion last week in federal district court to dismiss a Trump-era lawsuit against the Philadelphia nonprofit, Safehouse, over its plan to open a so-called supervised injection site. The Justice Department and Safehouse had started mediation in early January, and the expectation, based on Department of Justice statements, was that they would come to some sort of agreement that would allow the site to open.

Philadelphia’s crime-ridden Kensington neighborhood, filled with homeless people openly using injectible drugs, is ground zero for the xylazine-fentanyl epidemic. The Justice Department told the Associated Press in February that they were “evaluating” safe injection sites and the “appropriate guardrails” needed.

Early indications were that the negotiations were going well. The Biden administration is the first White House to make “harm reduction” — a pragmatic approach which holds that the most effective way to fight drug addiction is to reduce the harms from use rather than achieve total abstinence — one of its “drug policy priorities” and has doled out millions in grants to reduce the harms from reduction programs.

Both the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Nora Volkow, and President Biden’s drug czar, Rahul Gupta, made statements indicating tacit approval for the sites. The administration has also made no attempts to shut down the two supervised drug consumption sites that opened in New York City in 2021 — the first in the nation.

“They keep talking about guardrails,” executive director of OnPoint, Sam Rivera, who runs New York City’s two supervised injections sites, told the Sun in February of the Safehouse suit. He, too, expected a narrow ruling that would allow the site to open in some capacity. “History shows that most times, when the answer is ‘no,’ it’s ‘no’ pretty fast,” Mr. Rivera said.

If the Justice Department prevails, though, in its motion to dismiss the case, known as United States of America v. Safehouse, that would effectively block Safehouse from opening its supervised injection site. 

Safehouse’s legal woes started when the Trump administration sued the nonprofit in 2019 to block it from opening the site. A federal district court ruled in Safehouse’s favor in 2020, but the Third Circuit overturned the decision in 2021, ruling that the proposed facility would violate federal statute 21 USC § 856 of the Controlled Substances Act, commonly known as the “crack house statute.” Passed during the height of the crack epidemic, the “crack house statute” makes it a crime to operate a facility “for the purpose of unlawfully … using controlled substances.”

The case was then remanded to district court to settle one outstanding counterclaim: Safehouse’s contention that their religious beliefs compel them to open a supervised injection site in order to save lives, and that blocking them from doing so is a violation of their First Amendment rights and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Settlement talks then ensued.

In its motion to dismiss, the Justice Department called Safehouse’s religious argument unsubstantiated, saying the group’s mission is “driven by its concerns about the current opioid crisis” and citing the “secular nature” of the proposal. “Safehouse continually asserts that its true motivation is socio-political, scientific, or philosophical in nature, not religious, and therefore not protected by the RFRA,” the motion reads.

The Justice Department did not return the Sun’s request for comment.  Safehouse is due to respond to the motion by August 15.

Those watching the politics say the Biden administration’s move echoes what California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, did last August, when he vetoed legislation authorizing pilot supervised injection sites to open in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland. With national political ambitions of his own, Mr. Newsom likely realized the optics of these sites were bad: with overdose deaths and homelessness plaguing California cities, he didn’t want to be seen as too radical or condoning drug use in any way.

“It’s absolutely political,” Democratic strategist, Hank Sheinkopf, tells the Sun of the administration’s motion to dismiss. “The rise in deaths from fentanyl and the idea that somehow this is best stopped by safe injections is not something Americans are likely to buy into.”

Philadelphia’s Kensington, for its part, is repeatedly the site of fatal overdoses happening in broad daylight, and the neighborhood has been described by the New York Times as the ‘Wal-Mart of Heroin.’ Xylazine, an animal tranquilizer that knocks users unconscious and gives them scaly black flesh wounds, is now found in more than 80 percent of opioids sold there.

Those who support safe injection sites, though, say the fentanyl crisis, open drug scenes, and widespread homelessness are reasons to open the sites, not oppose them. They say the sites prevent deaths and steer participants to treatment.

“It gets it off the street,” Gary Langis, a harm-reduction pioneer who operated illegal needle exchanges and naloxone distribution in the 1990s and now works at Boston Medical Center, tells the Sun. “I don’t want to see all that stuff. It’s not good for tourism, it’s not good for businesses, it’s not good for my grandkids, it’s not good for society.”

Since the Safehouse suit started four years ago, the push to legalize safe injection sites has grown — and so has the backlash. New York City opened its two city-sanctioned sites in 2021. Rhode Island passed legislation in 2021 legalizing the sites there, with the first one slated to open in Providence early next year. Minnesota passed a bill to legalize safe injection sites in May. 

San Francisco is also planning to open multiple supervised injection sites — rebranded “wellness hubs” — though the drug and homelessness crises there and backlash to harm reduction has delayed these plans. Mayor Breed is likely worried about her reelection prospects as well, and has recently tried rebranding herself as tough on drugs, saying, “compassion is killing people.”

In April, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and National Institutes of Health announced the first federally funded study of supervised injection sites in partnership with NYU and Brown University, using data from OnPoint’s two sites and the one slated to open in Providence.

The Biden administration’s decision to back out of settlement talks does not mean it is now opposing these sites. President Biden has issued no declarative statements either way. What a dismissal of the Safehouse case would do is leave the issue to states and cities. The Justice Department is making no attempts to block them so far.

Mr. Sheinkopf says the Biden administration is making a pragmatic  move. “All moves taken by the government are political by definition,” he says, calling safe injection sites “too radical for most of the Democratic base.”