Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, emerging evidence about overdose prevention centers where people go to use

drugs more safely. Brandon Del Pozo is an assistant professor of medicine at the Warren

Alpert Medical School at Brown. He's a lead author of a recent paper in the medical journal

JAMA Network Open about what happened to crime in the areas around two overdose prevention centers in

New York. He explains the study and its results to Dr. Josh Dartsdeen. Let's listen.

Dr. Brandon Delpozo, it's great to have you on public health on call. We're going to talk about

your new paper, which examined whether overdose prevention sites in New York were associated

with more serious crime. First, can you remind us what are overdose prevention sites in New

York City? Josh, it's great to see you again and thanks for having me on the podcast.

Overdose prevention centers are places where people can use illicit drugs,

typically under supervision. If they overdose or have a negative effect, people are on hand to

help them. Some might know them as safer consumption sites or safe for injection sites,

but in New York, they're called OPCs. And there are not many OPCs in the United States right now. It's not true.

Well, not many that we know of. There were a few that were operating clandestinely.

They've been common in Europe and Canada for some time now. But these were the first two

government-sanctioned, known overdose prevention centers in the U.S.

They opened in November of 2021.

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