Residents of the Clinton Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn are outraged over a harm-reduction group that gives out drug paraphernalia on the street — leading to what they say is a weekly invasion of a dozen or so heroin and crack users, some of whom use in plain sight.
The group — funded with millions of dollars from the city and cash from George Soros’s foundation — hands out free needles, crack pipes and even devices to “cook” heroin, every Wednesday at the top of the entrance to the Clinton–Washington Avenue subway station on the C line.
“They’re shooting up,” Stephanie Cole, who lives next to the subway, told The Post.
She said she sees people use the free pipes handed out by Vocal-NY organizers to “smoke crack or whatever. I’ve walked over broken crack pipes on our stoop and all kinds of garbage that gets left there. Two weeks ago, I was sweeping up broken glass from the pipes.”
Cole, 44, who works in social media and marketing, and others who live on Washington Avenue near Fulton Street say they are fed up with the open-air drug scene created by the actions of Vocal-NY.
“They pull a lot of people into the neighborhood who use drugs,” Cole said. “There’s a cumulative effect where the needle exchange makes this into a hangout.”
Nate Taylor, a peer educator with Vocal-NY, was at the May 22 paraphernalia handout in Clinton Hill and claimed that the group — which, according to its website, runs syringe-exchange programs in Downtown Brooklyn, East New York, Crown Heights, Coney Island and Brighton Beach — ran into trouble with a needle giveaway in Sunset Park when someone fired a gun there and cops warned them off.
“[Someone] shot off a couple shots and … we couldn’t work there no more,” Taylor alleged to The Post. Now, though, “we can go back there and have a ball. I go every Monday.”
At the Clinton Hill handout, an East New York woman who gave her name only as Nikita said she regularly drops by on Wednesdays to pick up new crack pipes — which she called “indulgence stems.”
Asked if she planned to use the pipe right away, after receiving the pipe Nikita told The Post: “It’s early in the morning. So I’ll go further down the block.”
Miguel from the Bronx showed up to retrieve a clean needle on the street but said he didn’t want to use at home in front of his family. Instead, he said, he had plans to use at a nearby pizza joint.
“I do it in the bathroom … in the pizzeria,” Miguel told The Post.. “They don’t know what we do there.”
At Barcklay’s Pizza and Pasta on Fulton Street, diagonally across from where the needles are handed out, a counter worker said of the addicts: “We don’t like them. They buy one piece of pizza and sit for two or three hours … But no bathroom. I tell them it is out of service.”
Others, Nikita said, slip into the Clinton-Washington subway station to use. “We got to worry about the police pulling up on us,” Nikita said. “All the people down there, complaining.”
The Post has reached out to the NYPD for this story.
Another resident of the block, who did not want her name used for privacy reasons, told The Post that she has seen needles and syringes littering the ground near her home.
Alyssa Aguilera, co-executive director of Vocal-NY, told The Post that, “In addition to passing out supplies, our outreach team also does its best to clean up outreach sites.”
Neighbors told The Post they are especially frustrated because the area is family-oriented.
“There are so many kids in and out of the area,” Cole said. “There are two schools, one-and-a-half blocks in either direction.”
Adding that she has sympathy for the addicts, Cole added, “I have a problem with them doing it in a residential neighborhood and near schools. You want clean needles? Great. But don’t shoot up on my stoop.”
A three-bedroom apartment in Cole’s building is currently listed on StreetEasy for $4,500.
“A methadone program is around the corner … a lot of the users are over here and we try to provide them the service,” Vocal-NY’s Taylor said.
As for where clients do drugs once they receive supplies, he added, “They do their dirt … anywhere … once we give [the kit] to them, that’s on them.”
A drug user named Domingo, who “comes for the syringes,” seemed to feel some sympathy for the locals.
“It’s a great neighborhood, but, honestly, the people here, I know they don’t like us around here,” he told The Post. “I understand. I think if I never used drugs, I probably would have felt the same way.”
According to its website, Vocal-NY is a “grassroots membership organization that builds power among low-income people affected by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, mass incarceration, and homelessness in order to create healthy and just communities.”
The 510(c)3 tax-exempt organization received $3.5 million from the City Council to fund its ongoing expenses between 2014 and 2024, and at least $1.6 million in city contracts.
Some of that money was allocated despite Queens Councilman Robert Holden demanding an end to their funding when a convicted sex offender affiliated with Vocal-NY launched an anti-Asian racist rant while testifying to the City Council in 2021.
In 2022, $2.95 million was allocated to help the group buy its headquarters at Douglass Street and Third Avenue in Brooklyn, with the line items sponsored by Antonio Reynoso, now the Brooklyn Borough President.
Reynoso’s office did not return requests for comment.
George Soros’ Open Society Foundations allocated Vocal-NY $800,000 between 2020 and 2022, while the Ford Foundation donated $600,000 between 2018 and 2022.
