Harm Reduction team at presser, clockwise from top left: Health Director Maritza Bond, SWAN’s Beatrice Codianni, Yale’s Rick Altice, Communisty Services Administrator Mehul Dalal, new coordinator Christine Rodriguez, Dionna King of Vital Strategies.
A new coordinator has come to town to help take New Haven’s overdose-prevention work to a new level.
Her name is Christine Rodriguez. She works with a global Bloomberg Philanthropies-affiliated nonprofit called Vital Strategies Inc., which helps communities address substance-abuse crises through “harm reduction” strategies like distributing Narcan kits and clean needles, and viewing drug addiction as a public-health issue rather than a criminal-justice issue.
New Haven has been pioneering that approach since a man named Jon Parker began distributing clean needles on the streets during the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s, and then-Mayor John Daniels embraced a first-in-the-nation government-run version of the program in the early 1990s.
Courtney Luciana Photo
SWAN’s Sandy Lomonico in the group’s mobile van at Dixwell Plaza, helping people struggling with substance abuse.
Amid the current opioid crisis, groups like New Haven’s SWAN have been building on that work by handing out Narcan kits and needles at events like this recent one in Dixwell Plaza and this event on the Green. Yale’s Community Health Care Van has similarly brought harm-reduction and prevention to neighborhood streets along with other forms of preventive care during the pandemic. (Read about that here.)
Rodriguez will work full-time for the city coordinating the work of groups like those as well as city government-run efforts through a new Harm Reduction Task Force, operated under the aegis of the city’s Community Services Administration. Vital Strategies will pay her salary and offer the city other support as well.
At a Zoomed press conference Tuesday about Rodriguez’s hiring and the new task force, Mayor Justin Elicker said that drug overdoses have increased this year even above last year’s high rate. Most of the overdoses involve synthetic opioids.
“People who use drugs have been and always will be part of our community. Condemning or ignoring the probelm is not going to make it go away. It’s important to meet people where they’re at,” said Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal. “Overdose is a signal to the problem. It is not necessarily the problem itself.”