NYC Businesses Face Frequent Drug Use in Their Bathrooms: NYU Study

NEW YORK, NY — As a rising epidemic of heroin and opiate abuse sweeps across the country, its effects emerge in every corner of public life. In a recent survey from New York University of business managers in the city, 58 percent of respondents (out of 86) reported encountering drug use in their facility's bathrooms in the past six months.

Using intravenous drugs like heroin in public spaces is a particularly risky use of the drug, so the fact that businesses commonly encounter this practice troubles many public health advocates.

A press release for the new study notes the dangers that accompany this behavior, including "syringe sharing, overdose, abscesses, endocarditis [infection of the heart], rushed injection, incarceration, and the transmission of HIV, hepatitis C (HCV), and hepatitis B (HBV)."

Researchers have found in prior studies that around 60 percent of people who inject drugs had used public bathrooms or similar spaces as injection spots in the city in the previous three months.

Nationally, the overdose rates nearly doubled from 1999 to 2013.

And between 2010 and 2014, overdoses in New York City jumped 43 percent – the majority of which were caused by opioids, and heroin in particular.

The new study found that, for those managers who had discovered drug use in their bathrooms in the previous six months, the incidents occurred on average three times a month. Fourteen percent of these managers called 911 because the drug user they discovered was unconscious or unresponsive.

“These managers, by default, are first-responders in the event of a drug overdose and thus of intrinsic interest during the current epidemic of opioid-related overdoses in the U.S,” Brett Wolfson-Stofko, a post-doctoral fellow at NYU's Rory Meyers College of Nursing and lead author of the study, said in a press release.

More than 30 percent of the managers discovered syringes thrown away in their bathrooms without regard for the risk disposal poses for others. Staff members and patrons may accidentally prick themselves with an improperly discarded needle, which puts them at risk of infection.

Only around 10 percent of managers reported that they had received training to deal with overdoses. Sixty-four percent, however, said they would like such training, which would include recognizing overdoses and administering naloxone, a safe and highly effective treatment for toxic levels of drugs use.

The NYU researchers are looking into ways of providing this training. But they also think there are more preventive measures the city can take to reduce the amount of drug use in business bathrooms.

“While there are a growing number of syringe exchange programs across the U.S. that provide people who inject drugs with sterile injecting equipment, they are not authorized to offer a safe and sanitary space for injection," Wolfson-Stofko said.

"As a result, many tend to inject in public bathrooms.”

He continued: "Supervised injection facilities and drug consumption rooms are practical, cost-effective strategies that would more than likely reduce public injecting and overdose mortality in New York City and assist in linking this population to health services and drug treatment just as they have in other cities throughout the world,” said Wolfson-Stofko.

Needle-exchange programs, in which authorities provide drug users with clean syringes so that they are less likely to spread infections even if they continue using, have proven controversial over the years. Many object to these programs out of concern that they encourage or appear to condone dangerous drug use behaviors.

Nevertheless, needle-exchange programs have gained traction and found much acceptance these days, especially in the public health field, as an effective means of harm reduction.

Could supervised injection facilities find similar acceptance in the future?

"The City Council recently allocated funding to study the science and impact of supervised injection facilities," a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene told Patch.

"Record numbers of New Yorkers are dying from opioid-related overdoses and the de Blasio administration recently funded $5.5M of new initiatives to address this crisis," the department said in a statement. "We look forward to reviewing the Council’s allocation to conduct a study of this issue."

The council will look into the clinical and legal factors that would affect the feasibility and safety of such a program. No more details about the study have been released, and the city is not currently providing any such facilities.

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Photo credit: Sam Howzit via Flickr