Some residents in Santa Monica, an idyllic beach town in Southern California, are pushing for an outdoor county-operated program, which distributes clean syringes weekly to homeless drug users near the city’s parks, to be moved indoors to a county-owned facility.
The “overdose prevention program”—which is overseen by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s Division of Substance Abuse Prevention and Control—currently distributes syringes, first aid kits, opioid overdose reversal medication, and hygiene kits every Friday at three city parks, according to a spokesperson for the department.
Members of the Santa Monica Coalition, a group of retail and commercial tenants, residents, and property owners, are looking to put an end to the syringe distribution, which they say has been operating without public knowledge since 2019….