Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick ’09 will discuss and take questions about the Ithaca Plan: A Public Health and Safety Approach to Drugs and Drug Policy – which includes the introduction of a supervised heroin injection facility – Thursday, Sept. 29, at noon in the Willard Straight Hall Memorial Room. Discussion of several components of the Ithaca Plan will be facilitated by Timothy Marchell, director of Cornell’s Skorton Center for Health Initiatives.

At a Cornell student-led forum in April, Myrick praised the promise of the Ithaca Plan, whose executive summary reads, in part:

“Despite Ithaca’s many strengths, it has been hit hard by problems related to drug use, drug addiction, and the broader war on drugs. As overdose deaths rise throughout the region and the nation, policymakers from across the political spectrum have joined law enforcement leaders to declare that we cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.

“Simultaneously, there is a growing acknowledgement among policymakers that the war on drugs – the dominant drug policy framework for the past four and a half decades – has failed and new approaches are needed.

“Too often, our past approaches have failed to recognize that fundamentally, the community prevalence of health problems, such as problem drug use, and social problems, such as participation in the illegal drug economy, reflect deeper issues related to social and economic opportunity and racial inequality. Changes to drug policies and practices have been implemented in Ithaca with positive results (and) Mayor Myrick recognized the need to build on these successes, and develop an overall strategy to address the realities of drug use in our town.”