Adams Pushes to Force Drug Users Off New York City's Streets

New York Times

7 hours ago

Mayor Eric Adams of New York City on Thursday returned to his roots as a law-and-order campaigner, vowing to seek the state's permission to forcibly remove drug users from the city's streets without their consent.
The mayor also called for allowing hospital workers to mandate treatment with court approval. Both proposals were immediately condemned by organizations that work with the homeless.
Mr. Adams announced the plan at an event hosted by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, a sign of the mayor's push to attract right-leaning and centrist voters to his long-shot third-party candidacy for re-election in November.
'The evidence is right there in front of us,' the mayor said in his speech at a Midtown Manhattan hotel. 'People openly using illegal drugs on the streets and in our parks, passed out in doorways and sidewalks, encampments littering with syringes and vials and unsanitary conditions that are a threat to public health and public order. This cannot be allowed to continue.'
According to the mayor's office, 37 other states already allow the involuntary commitment of people with substance abuse disorders.
But the research on mandated treatment suggests that it is often ineffective, and his proposal was met with immediate condemnation from experts in homelessness, with several saying the plan evoked the Trump administration's show of force in Washington, D.C.
In July, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal authorities to determine if they could prioritize grants to cities that 'enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use.' Earlier this week, shortly before commandeering the Washington police force and mobilizing National Guard troops to fight crime there, he posted to social media that 'The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY.'
The mayor's proposal also called for a new drop-in center in a Bronx neighborhood where The New York Post has been documenting complaints about public drug abuse; a pilot program to reward people with substance abuse disorders who keep to their treatment plans, a practice known as 'contingency management'; and funding to provide cellphones to participants in the city's Relay program, which provides support to people who have been taken to emergency rooms for overdoses. The goal is to facilitate follow-up calls.
Jasmine Budnella, the drug policy director at Vocal-NY, a group that organizes low-income New Yorkers, said that the involuntary removal of drug users and the mandated treatment were 'horrific' proposals, but praised other elements of Mr. Adams's plan. 'The rest of it continues to build off of the public health data insight that his administration has really been using around the overdose crisis,' she said.
The mayor's proposal would require the approval of the State Legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul. The leaders of the Senate and Assembly did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked about the mayor's proposal during an unrelated event on Thursday, Ms. Hochul touted her role in an earlier amendment to the law to allow for more involuntary commitment, calling herself a 'champion' of expanding such treatment, but said she had yet to be briefed on the mayor's proposal.
The proposal might also depend on Mr. Adams winning re-election after he opted out of the Democratic primary for mayor, his chances tarnished by the Trump administration's abandonment of the federal corruption charges against him.
A recent Siena Research Institute survey with a limited sample size put his support at 7 percent and placed him in fourth place behind Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate; Andrew M. Cuomo, the former governor also running as an independent; and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican founder of the Guardian Angels.
Brian Stettin, the mayor's senior adviser on severe mental illness, described the pushback from groups supporting homeless New Yorkers as predictable, even as he acknowledged that the data from other states with involuntary treatment laws was 'not great.'
'We think there are opportunities to do it better than other states have,' Mr. Stettin said, noting that the city's proposal would only use mandated treatment in 'a very limited and judicious set of circumstances,' primarily in cases in which the person has repeatedly refused voluntary treatment.
'Everybody recognizes voluntary substance abuse treatment is always going to be more effective,' Mr. Stettin said.
Indeed, involuntary treatment has been found to sometimes exacerbate substance abuse disorders, according to research cited in a 2024 report from the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit opposed to forced treatment.
The report found that the risk of relapse can be especially high for patients subjected to mandated treatment. The report also raised concerns over racial disparities in forced commitment, noting that Black people were overrepresented in such treatment cases. The nonprofit promotes contingency management therapy as a more effective approach for treating addiction.
Steven Banks, the city's former social services commissioner and the former head of the Legal Aid Society, argued that treatment without the necessary investments in housing and services 'leads to nowhere.'
'Just like with the recent Trump executive order, this plan isn't going to address the needs of New Yorkers who are concerned about what's going on in public spaces or of people on the streets or subways, because it will just be another revolving door of streets and subways to hospitals and back again,' Mr. Banks said.
Mr. Stettin sought to make clear that the new proposal was 'in no way' a response to the president's executive order, which he said was limited to laws already on the books, not prospective legislation.
According to the city's health department, someone dies of an overdose in New York every four hours, and fentanyl is the most common substance resulting in such deaths. In the past few years, overdose deaths in the city have been rising — there were over 3,000 annually in 2023 and 2022, compared with around 2,700 in 2021 and 2,100 in 2020.
The mayor's proposal seeks to build on legislative changes enacted this year that expanded the city's ability to involuntarily remove people from the streets whose mental illness rendered them 'unable or unwilling to provide for their own essential needs such as food, clothing, necessary medical care, personal safety or shelter.'
Some studies have found that contingency management therapy, which is also included in Mr. Adams's plan, can yield more successful results than other treatments for certain types of addiction.
Dave Giffen, the executive director of Coalition for the Homeless, said that while 'any resources that are put into the treatments that are known to work are welcome,' they also seem like efforts to 'soften the blow' of the rest of the proposal.
'I just have to say, given the context of the horrifying things that we're seeing unfolding in D.C. right now, it just sends a chill up my spine,' Mr. Giffen said.