The Skid Row Care Campus opened this spring, providing essential services like showers, laundry, and medication at a site for people experiencing homelessness. It features clinicians for mental health and addiction treatment, with plans for a methadone clinic. While the area has visible drug use challenges, the campus adopts a harm reduction strategy, distributing clean syringes and naloxone. This approach aims to enhance public health and assist individuals in achieving sobriety and housing stability among a significant homeless population in Los Angeles County.
The Skid Row Care Campus officially opened this spring with ample offerings for people living on the streets of this historically downtrodden neighborhood. Pop-up fruit stands and tent encampments lined the sidewalks, as well as dealers peddling meth and fentanyl in open-air drug markets.
For those working toward sobriety, clinicians are on site to offer mental health and addiction treatment. Skid Row's first methadone clinic is set to open here this year.
The campus provides clean syringes to more safely shoot up, glass pipes for smoking drugs, naloxone to prevent overdoses, and drug test strips to detect fentanyl contamination, among other supplies.
Evidence shows the harm reduction approach can help individuals enter treatment, gain sobriety, and end their homelessness, while addiction experts and county health officials note it has the added benefit of improving public health.
Collection
[
|
...
]