Seattle activist plans mobile drug haven to encourage safe use
By Rick Anderson
In booming Seattle, where daydreams typically take the shape of mega-mansions and supersize yachts, street activist Shilo Murphy has managed to lower his expectations.
The techies at Amazon, Microsoft and other millionaire-minting factories can have their Lexuses and Lamborghinis. He'd be happy with a used van filled with heroin addicts, needles loaded and ready to fire.
Traveling neighborhood to neighborhood, with a nurse attendant aboard, the drug mobile would be the equivalent of a narcotics shooting gallery delivered to your doorstep. Let Jeff Bezos' Amazon drones top that.
"It's going to happen," Murphy, 40, insisted, sitting at his desk in the basement of a church in Seattle's University District, across the street from an entrance to the University of Washington. "We're in the design stage. Maybe in a few months we'll be rolling." On cluttered shelves and in boxes stacked around him are some of the tools of his trade: new meth pipes, alcohol swabs and needles, needles, needles, all to be handed out free and, in some cases, against state law.
Inspired by Insite, a government-supported supervised drug facility in Vancouver, Canada, where addicts go to safely shoot up and obtain support services, Murphy and others planned to open a similar operation
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Thumbnail: Public domain image, Debora Cartagena