United States. According to the National Drug Early Warning System
(2019), University of Maryland, funded by National Institute on Drug
Abuse, to reduce drug-related harm, several states such as California,
Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington are
considering establishing SIS’s. Fortunately, the regulation of SIS’s in the
U.S. has started to change since Gerald McHugh, U.S. District Judge,
ruled that supervised injection sites do not violate the law (Allyn, 2019).
At the community level, the public support of these programs needs
to be promoted. In Philadelphia, one of the pioneer cities, which
advocates to establish the first SIS in the U.S., a poll showed that only
half of the respondents support SIS’s (Eichel, 2019). A nationwide
survey conducted by the researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health suggested that more Americans support SSPs
(39%) than SIS’s (29%), but most people still viewed both programs
negatively, and people who have a negative perspective of these two
programs generally also have a negative attitude on PWID (McGinty et
al., 2018). The reasons why those people have a negative attitude toward
SSPs and SIS’s may vary. Some people may blame SSPs and SIS’s for
encouraging illicit drug use. Some people may not know enough
information about how these programs work to help PWID and the
whole communities, so when they hear the words “needle,” “syringe,” or
“injection” they have a negative response directly. Some people may
have heard about the programs, and they acknowledge the effectiveness