Drug addicts and their dealers are back at Mass and Cass, and city leaders should have seen this coming.
City Councilor Ed Flynn said people are drawn to the Mass and Cass area because public drug use and dealing has long been “tolerated” there by the city. He’s calling for city officials to “revisit and redouble our efforts” that began with last fall’s crackdown on tent encampments and crime.
That was the convergence of Mayor Michelle Wu’s plan to address crime and homelessness and the approval of an anti-encampment ordinance that empowered police to remove the tents that officials said were shielding crime, sex trafficking and weapons.
While removing the tents along the stretch of Massachusetts Ave. and Melnea Cass Blvd. was a major blow to the rampant and blatant drug use and crime in the area, it was, inevitably, a temporary fix.
Fighting addiction, crime and homelessness isn’t a one-and-done deal. New victims fall prey to the scourge of opioids, and dealers are more than willing to prey on them. As the Herald reported opioid-related overdose deaths increased by 12% in Boston last year.
There may no longer tents which hide criminal activities along Mass and Cass, but with the warm weather, the open-air drug market is back.
Flynn said he visited the area recently and saw an “organized system of drug dealers on Melnea Cass.” He found South Boston residents he spoke to “very concerned about the significant escalation of drug dealing and drug use in the neighborhoods.”
So what is Boston going to do about it? More importantly, what can it do?
While Mayor Wu asserted that the absence of tents has put the city in a “different and better, safer position than we were a year ago this time,” in one sense, Boston is worse off.
The city and state weren’t as hamstring by the challenges of housing and caring for the influx of migrants as they are now. No doubt the city wants to get addicts and homeless at Mass and Cass into shelters and treatment programs, but Boston and state shelters are full-to-bursting.
And while President Biden is tamping down on the number of asylum seekers allowed to cross the border, it does little to ease the crisis already in play.
“This has always been an issue of intersecting and evolving crises — housing, opioid addiction and mental health — and now, the increasing influx of migrants,” City Councilor Henry Santana, who chairs the body’s Public Safety and Criminal Justice committee said in statement.
All this calls for resources, and Massachusetts is spending money on migrants as if that were the only challenge the state is facing. The budget outlay projected to cover migrants next year is a whopping $1B. Imagine how many addiction intervention programs that could fund, to say nothing of maintaining a strong police presence at Mass and Cass and surrounding neighborhoods.
Biden’s latest move to “ease” immigration woes is to offer legal status and a streamlined path to U.S. residency and citizenship to roughly half a million unauthorized immigrants who are married to American citizens, it was reported.
How will this help free shelter space and resources to help those in the throes of addiction?
It won’t. And that’s a problem for cities like Boston.
