New York City installs free crack pipe dispensers

New York City’s first “public health” vending machine, stocked with free drug paraphernalia and unveiled on a corner of Brooklyn’s drug-infested Brownsville neighborhood on Monday, had already been cleaned out of almost all its contents 24 hours later, the New York Post reported on Tuesday.

Well-stocked with “safer smoking” kits containing free crack pipes, “safer sniffing” equipment, fentanyl testing strips, overdose-reversing Narcan nasal sprays, nicotine gum and condoms on Monday morning, the big blue box contained just one overdose-reversal kit and a pair of testing strips the next day.

The city plans to install three more of the street-corner smoke shops, each costing $11,000, in neighborhoods suffering the most from the opioid overdose crisis. The contents will remain free to anyone who enters their zip code on the keypad, and nonprofit Services for the Underserved will maintain them.

“We are in the midst of an overdose crisis in our city, which is taking a fellow New Yorker from us every three hours and is a major cause of falling life expectancy in NYC,” New York Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan said in a statement announcing the vending machine rollout.