BOSTON — A Boston nonprofit plans to soon test a new way of addressing the city’s heroin epidemic. The idea is simple: Starting this month, along a stretch of road that has come to be called Boston’s “Methadone Mile,” the program will open a room with a nurse, some soft chairs and basic life-saving equipment — a place where heroin users can ride out their high, under medical supervision.
Dr. Jessie Gaeta, chief medical officer at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, which initiated the project, walks the avenue several times a day on her way to and from work. The path takes her past the city’s needle exchange program and a methadone clinic, as well as past one of the city’s busiest emergency rooms, at Boston Medical Center.
“It’s not a place where people would be injecting,” Gaeta said. “But it’s a place where people would come if they’re high and they need a safe place to be that’s not a street corner, and not a bathroom by themselves, where they’re at high risk of dying if they do overdose.”
The use — or lack of use — of these safe rooms in various countries highlights a divide in addiction treatment, said Dr. Barbara Herbert, president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Herbert said many health care providers in the field of addiction medicine have moved away from the “tough love/abstinence-or-nothing” approach and instead now favor options like the “safe-use room.”
“It’s not that we don’t want people to be drug-free,” Herbert said. “But dead people don’t recover.”