When Vancouver unveiled its plan in 2001, those controversial ideas were already about 15 years old in the European context. Vancouver’s drug strategy had many similarities to the Ithaca plan, MacPherson said, including the controversial ones - heroin-assisted treatment and supervised injection sites. Ithaca revealing its municipal drug plan this week was a déjà vu moment for Donald MacPherson, director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition and author of Vancouver’s Four Pillars Drug Strategy. There were 14 drug-related deaths in 2014, and five reported in 2004, according to the Tompkins County Health Department. In Tompkins County, overdose deaths have about tripled in less than 10 years. Heroin overdose deaths increased nearly six-fold between 20, from 1,779 to 10,574, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. National overdose deaths from heroin and opioids have been climbing. “They’re things that have been tackled and recommended and presented before, all over the world. Many of the elements of The Ithaca Plan are not new, sayegh said. With a similar idea, for the Municipal Drug Policy Committee to create The Ithaca Plan, nearly 100 people participated in eight focus groups, including law enforcement personnel physicians, nurses and pharmacists people who use drugs young people people of color parents business owners and people in recovery. Out of a milieu of activity in Frankfurt and all over Europe, a four pillars approach - focusing on prevention, treatment, harm reduction and enforcement - was developed, sayegh said. The mayor formed the the Monday’s Round, a committee that brought some traditionally adversarial groups together to work on drug policy. In Frankfurt, Germany, in 1988, the city took a new approach to coming up with a solution for the growing drug problem. “If you start to look at the history of what’s going on with municipal drug strategies around the world, you find that there’s something about creating a municipal drug strategy that’s actually not new at all,” sayegh said. “Cities and countries around the world, particularly in the Western world, Europe and Canada and Australia, have been doing this for some time.” At that time, he said, people felt like officials at the state and federal level were not doing enough, “so it fell upon the cities to take action.” While that problem might sound familiar in the United States today, sayegh was referring to Germany in the late 1980s. Local leaders, members of the committee and drug policy advocates gathered to share the need for a municipal drug plan and explain how such strategies have worked across Canada, Europe and Australia. The night before The Ithaca Plan was unveiled, the back theater of Cinemapolis in Ithaca was packed with community members who came to hear about Ithaca’s new strategy for a growing epidemic and also hear the context of the plan. Though creating a municipal drug strategy and employing some of the more controversial elements of the plan are new for the United States, municipal plans and strategies - like creating a supervised injection facility - have been tried with success for decades in other parts of the globe. The release of The Ithaca Plan, the city’s new municipal drug policy strategy, attracted national headlines for some of its “outrageous” concepts. It’s garnered praise, criticism, lots of questions and even spurred some on Fox News to call for a recall election of city Mayor Svante Myrick.
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