Rochester’s Mayor and other local officials and community groups are vowing to clean up issues with heroin sales along North Clinton Avenue.
Mayor Lovely Warren says she started hearing about the problems this past summer, but the city has had a renewed focus in that northeast neighborhood in recent weeks. She says people who live in the area, homeowners, are upset with the aftermath of heroin sales and usage they are seeing on their streets.
“You had people that lived in this area, children that would be coming outside to play, and they were walking over needles, some of our neighbors were finding people that had overdosed or had utilized drugs on their front porches.”
Warren also says the data shows that a majority of the people involved in the heroin usage and sales in that North Clinton area are coming from outside the neighborhood, from other towns and communities throughout the region.
She says besides enforcement, officials are also looking at ways to provide additional health services to heroin users, such as creating a drop-in center where police could bring people addicted to heroin to get them some help.
Miguel Melendez is with the the Ibero-American Development Corporation. He says his organization understands this is also a health problem.
“We understand that heroin is a disease and should be treated as such, with compassion. But needles in the ground is a challenge that is not one that we should be accepting. Compassion does not make needs in the ground okay.”
Police say this neighborhood is probably the worst in the city in terms of the heroin usage and sales problem. And they vow to make sure the same problems don't crop up somewhere else if they are able to curtail the heroin activity in the North Clinton Avenue corridor.
