“People don’t consider, holistically, what it takes for people to be stable,” Tokuhisa told Filter. “Anyone can be homeless. All it takes is a lack of resources, and you’re one step from this situation.”

Tokuhisa wants to be a software engineer. But it’s nearly impossible for him to turn that dream into a reality while navigating the chaos of the New York City shelter system. He can’t attend boot camps because of changes to his shelter location with no notice. He can no longer teach himself to code because the laptop he’d been gifted was stolen while he was in shared accommodations. And now, he has to worry about being forced out of the hotel he’s lived in for months, with less than the legally required 48-hour notice. 

New York leadership is claiming success in the fight against COVID, reopening to the state to residents and tourists alike. As a result, thousands of unhoused New Yorkers who’d been placed in hotels to help keep COVID transmission down are now being forced out—rapidly emptying their rooms to make room for tourists (whether or not any arrive).

People who had been living in hotels are being forced to await their transfers for hours in the hot sun without water or bathroom facilities. Many are are being forced into shelters that do not meet their mobility needs.

In July, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that 8,000 unhoused people who’d been living in more than 60 hotels would be transferred into congregate shelters, which frequently sleep dozens of people per room. He claimed that shelters are the best places for people without housing to get support. The people themselves, however, disagree. In response, they began a month-long call for action: #JulyHomelessRights.

Maria Walles previously experienced homelessness in NYC and lost her husband while they were living on the city’s streets and in its parks. She’s now active with Picture the Homeless, a grassroots organization founded and led by those with lived experience, and is one of the creators of #JulyHomelessRights.

“It’s sad the way people are being treated right now. This is an emergency. we’re in a pandemic.”

As part of #JulyHomelessRights, hundreds have marched to Gracie Mansion, refused to leave hotels, stormed lobbies, held interfaith events and taken part in various online actions.

“The system does a lot to you,” Walles told Filter. “They want the city to open up, but the people who are in hotels, how do they feel? Being in a hotel for 16 months has helped some people out.” Many had their own rooms and bathrooms, and gained stability that allowed them to consistently attend school or go to work.

“It’s sad the way people are being treated right now,” Walles said. “This is an emergency. We’re in a pandemic right now. Delta is here.”

Vaccination rates among unhoused New Yorkers are overall lower than the general city population, and the COVID death rates are much higher. Moving people from shelter to hotel to shelter creates further instability—encouraging greater spread of the virus. 

“It’s dangerous, irresponsible and callous to not move people into housing and into a congregate shelter,” Amy Blumsack, director of organizing and policy of the Community Action Program at Neighbors Together, told Filter. “Especially with options available.”

Advocates are calling for a transition from hotels to housing. This means faster implementation of Intro. 146, passed in early June, which would increase the value of the main housing vouchers in the city for people to rent accommodation and get off the streets. The current voucher value is just $1,265 per month for a single occupant, or $1,580 per month for a family of four—inadequate to meet the median rent of any neighborhood in the city.

“The city has until December to implement the increased rate, but they can implement it sooner if they so choose,” Blumsack said. “If you move it faster, then people don’t need to get into congregate shelter.”

A court case lodged in mid-July by the Legal Aid Society and Jenner & Block, LLP temporarily stopped transfers out of hotels, arguing that the move back to congregate shelters is happening without sufficient notice or due consideration for disabled people. Although the case succeeded in halting evictions for about a week and ensuring more notice and specific individual needs for transfers, no permanent measures to move people into housing have yet been taken.

Activists plan to continue the events and actions demanding an end to the transfers and street sweeps and a move to permanent housing. 

“We’re going to keep the fight going even after this month is over,” Walles said.

Photograph of Gracie Mansion via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 1.0

The post Homeless New Yorkers Fight for Their Rights as Hotel Evictions Continue appeared first on Filter.

Data from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) released late last week showed that police made 163 arrests and handed out 3,687 summons for marijuana possession in the city’s final quarter of prohibition. And as has long been the trend both locally and nationally, those enforcement actions disproportionately impacted people of color.

Of the 3,687 possession-related summons issued from January through the end of March, for example, 2,374 were issued to Black people, 1,089 were for Hispanic people and just 102 were for white people. When it comes to arrests, 78 targeted Black people, 70 involved Hispanic people and just six white people were arrested for cannabis.

That’s despite the fact that rates of consumption are comparable across those races.

Put another way, Black and Hispanic people accounted for 94 percent of the total marijuana summonses and 91 percent of cannabis arrests in New York City last quarter—a rate that is greatly disproportionate to the racial makeup of the city’s population.

An analysis of earlier arrest and summons data from last year showed notable fluctuations quarter-over-quarter, but the numbers for the first quarter of 2020 are fairly consistent with the new figures from this year’s first quarter. From January through March of 2020, there were 3,623 summons issued and 132 arrests over marijuana. That is marginally lower than the new first quarter of 2021 data.

But what has been broadly consistent, and a major reason that lawmakers and advocates pushed for reform in the first place, is the racial disparities in those cases. For each quarter of 2020, Black and Latinx people accounted for more than 90 percent of all cannabis arrests and summonses, as explained by the Legal Aid Society.

If the new legalization law is being effectively implemented—and NYPD officers are following updated guidance that was issued after the reform bill was signed on March 31—those numbers should dramatically decline when data for the current quarter are released.

The majority of arrests took place in two of the city’s five boroughs: The Bronx and Brooklyn.

The legalization measure signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) immediately legalized possession of up to three ounces of cannabis or 24 grams of marijuana concentrates for adults 21 and older.

The age category with the most arrests and summons last quarter was people between 25 and 34. So while the retail sales component of the law has yet to be implemented, it stands to reason that the type of offenses covered in these quarterly reports will significantly decrease in the current quarter and in the future.

That said, while smoking of marijuana in public is now generally allowed, there are still places where it will remain prohibited such as parks and other areas where smoking tobacco is banned. Plus, people can still be cited for possessing more than three ounces of cannabis, and sales remain illegal. So there will likely be some level of enforcement action despite the policy change, and advocates will be closely monitoring to see to what extent profound racial disparities persist.

For both marijuana arrests and summonses, the new data show that the majority of those took place in two of the city’s five boroughs: The Bronx and Brooklyn.

Not only will the state now save money by no longer having law enforcement pursue most adults over marijuana, but it also stands to generate a significant windfall in tax revenue once the retail market opens and matures. The state comptroller projected in a recent analysis that New York will eventually generate $245 million in annual cannabis revenue.

But the findings about last quarter’s arrests and summonses is reminiscent of another batch of data that came out of New Jersey’s largest city shortly after voters approved legalization via referendum last year.

The Newark Police Department made a total of 57 marijuana-related arrests in the first 20 days of 2021, compared to 63 arrests made for the same period in 2020. That’s despite the fact that state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal (D) issued guidance in November telling prosecutors not to take on low-level cannabis cases as lawmakers worked on legislation for a regulated market that has since been signed into law.

Photograph of New York City Police Department car via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0

This story was originally published by Marijuana Moment, which tracks the politics and policy of cannabis and drugs. Follow Marijuana Moment on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for its newsletter.

The post Ninety-One Percent of Recent NYPD Marijuana Arrests Were of Black or Hispanic People appeared first on Filter.

Coworkers eventually helped me contact author Van Asher, who gave me a color copy. Asher, 51, is currently the harm reduction coordinator at Housing Works’ Cylar House. For decades he’s been on the frontlines of harm reduction work around Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the neighborhood where I live and where I first started learning about harm reduction a few years ago through the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center.

With St. Ann’s Corner of Harm Reduction, Asher has made 1,500 copies of The Young Injectables since it came out in 2019. It’s illustrated by his frequent collaborator U.A. Morrison, one of the original guitarists in NYC punk band Murphy’s Law who now lives down in Brazil. Asher’s own artwork is prolific, ranging from professionally cut video to Scotch-taped zines of HIV and hep C info for SSP participants.

A personal favorite of mine is a postcard circa 2000 of a Barbie doll injecting her arm captioned “This Woman is a Role Model / She’s Using a Sterile Syringe.” If you turn it over, it reads: “There has never been one documented case of HIV from a sterile syringe / If you inject, please contact your nearest needle exchange,” followed by the contact info for the handful of SSPs that existed around the city at the time. He’s produced some 150,000 copies.

The Young Injectables has been reprinted in full below, along with excerpts from his stories as we took a long walk around the neighborhood and he talked about the ways it—and harm reduction—has changed.

Asher: I moved into this neighborhood in 1989 and moved out in ’06. I lived down the block [from what’s now Housing Works] when I was a squatter in the early ’90s. It was a time when the building didn’t have running water, and it was a time when people didn’t have personal computers. So we found someone with a printer and printed a fake work permit, and then we rented a jackhammer and dug into the street and tapped into the city water main and illegally routed water to the building. It was that kind of radical work. It was a different world.

When they started building [Cylar House] and I found out that it was residential AIDS housing, and I was working in the field already, I went to a house meeting at the squat and said, “Hey guys, don’t steal building supplies from the corner of 9th and D, it’s gonna be residential AIDS housing. They’re gonna be our allies. But, they’re building a co-op between 10th and 11th, let’s fucking steal their shit for sure because they’re gonna be the next wave of gentrification that’s gonna get us evicted.” And that’s basically what happened.

Harm reduction was very different back then. The Lower East Side exchange was on Avenue C between 3rd and 4th, in a bodega that used to be a coke spot that had gotten busted and then rented out. We took over another bodega that sold coke that got busted in 1992—that was the first exchange in the US to have a storefront. The first federal study came out of there, to show that it worked—which is something that we already knew, because they’d done it in Europe.

We were doing 1 million syringes a year. It was a small staff initially. The first staff person who was paid was Henry Vera, the case manager. There was Mark Geese, who recently passed away. Alan Clear, who was the ED. Raquel Algarin joined shortly after; she passed away two years ago. Mark Gilliam, Dan Raymond. Vicki Jacobson and Linda Williams were acupuncturists.

We did a lot of stuff that wouldn’t fly today. I remember we did a fundraiser and raffled me off. I went on a date with the person and then they wanted to go out with me again, and I was like, “You didn’t buy the boyfriend experience, you bought a date, but thank you.” We did a safer injection training where someone cleaned a set of works and drew up a shot of heroin and then injected and talked through the process and it was like, that was harm reduction. That wouldn’t happen today. People would freak out.

I suspect that street-based sex work is starting to pick up around here [since COVID]. I want to start doing nighttime sex-worker outreach again and just see what’s going on. In the mid-90s there were established strolls back here. There used to be strolls on Pitt St and between 11th and 12th on 3rd Ave. I did outreach all the way down to East River up to 23rd St, but that was different up there because that was a pimp stroll, so it wasn’t safe for me to be out there because now I’m encroaching on someone’s territory.

But three nights a week I’d go out from 10 pm to 2 am and wander about looking for people, on my motorcycle alone or with my dog. I’m still in touch with quite a few of the women I did outreach to. We never know the full impact that we have doing outreach. There are so many stories that we never hear. I wish we would lose the term “harm reduction” and just call it common sense.

On New Year’s Eve 2000 we stayed open from 2 pm to 2 pm. I bought cases of Cold Duck champagne and we had a syringe and champagne party and a Cheech & Chong movie marathon. I got pizza and plastic champagne flutes and we put syringes in them and were handing out syringes and champagne. The AIDS Institute, the state department of health, yelled at me because, “You’re enabling people!” And I said, y’know what, if I ever go to an AA meeting and someone’s like, “I used to put needles in my neck and then this guy handed me a flute of champagne on New Year’s and then I realized I had a problem,” I’ll apologize. What I’m doing is treating people like decent human beings and providing safety. 

I’d get fired today for doing something like that.

All photographs courtesy of Van Asher

The post Read “The Young Injectables,” a Harm Reduction Comic Book appeared first on Filter.