New York City Mayor Eric Adams today announced a new legislative change he is proposing in the 2026 state legislative session to support people struggling with substance use disorder and address public drug use on city streets that degrades quality of life and leaves a feeling of disorder among many city residents. The “Compassionate Interventions Act” will give clinical professionals the authority they need to bring someone who appears to pose a danger to themselves or others due to substance use disorder to a hospital and allow a judge to mandate treatment if the person is unwilling to enter treatment voluntarily. The change would help put New York in line with 37 other states that authorize involuntary commitment for substance use disorder as it builds on Mayor Adams’ successful work since the start of the Adams administration to address the interwoven crises of severe mental illness, addiction, and homelessness playing out on city streets.
Additionally, Mayor Adams today announced a $27 million investment focused on improving access to substance use disorder treatment through outreach and enhanced treatment strategies. The plan will add more teams on the ground dedicated to engaging people struggling with substance use, enhance back-end coordination of care across outreach teams, and launch new programs to keep people engaged in treatment once they start.
Since coming into office, the Adams administration has fundamentally shifted the conversation and produced results in addressing street homelessness and severe mental illness, refusing to continue walking by New Yorkers in clear need of intervention, and declares this new proposal as the next step to increase support and build a safer, more compassionate city for all residents.
The announcement was made during a signature speech on confronting the challenges of drug use in public spaces hosted by the Manhattan Institute and comes during Mayor Adams’ week-long “End the Culture of Anything Goes” campaign. The effort highlights the work the administration has done to change the culture and laws that prevented people with severe mental illness from getting the help they needed while making the investments necessary to support outreach, harm reduction, wraparound services, and housing to make lasting impacts in lives and communities. Mayor Adams is bringing the same energy, investment, and approach that is showing results among people with untreated severe mental illness to addressing the crisis of public drug use playing out on city streets and helping people overcome addiction. Through the End the Culture of Anything Goes campaign, Mayor Adams is unveiling his vision to build on the progress his administration has already achieved by pursuing state legislation, and making budget investments and policy changes at the city level, that would move the needle on public drug use, incentivize treatment, and take the compassionate steps necessary to prevent people from being left in dire condition on city streets.
“Our administration has made incredible progress on cleaning up our streets and getting people the help they need. We have changed the conversation around involuntary transports for people with untreated severe mental illness, implemented new ground-level outreach initiatives, helped pass state legislation to expand our toolkit, invested hundreds of millions of dollars in wraparound services, and more. And while we have made our system work better to address severe mental illness and homelessness, we often hear from New Yorkers that there are still too many people in need of help. Today, through our ‘End the Culture of Anything Goes’ campaign, we are putting forward our vision to support those dealing with substance use disorder and address public drug use on our streets and in our subways through the ‘Compassionate Interventions Act,’ because ending ‘anything goes’ means changing the reality of how we support those in crisis,” said Mayor Adams. “Our proposed legislation will build on our success in Albany and give medical professionals the tools they need to get people connected with treatment, while our $27 million investment in outreach and treatment will expand the support available to people dealing with addiction. Our administration refuses to turn our backs on New Yorkers in need, and with today’s announcement, we’re laying out a vision that will help get everyone the support they need. In the name of public safety, public health, and the public interest, we must rally to help those in crisis because ‘anything goes’ is worse than nothing at all.”
Compassionate Interventions Act
In the upcoming state legislative session, the Adams administration will pursue legislation to authorize involuntary hospital transport and hospital admission of a person who is dangerous to themself or others due to substance use disorder. Under current New York law, involuntary removal to a hospital for evaluation requires that a person “appears” to be mentally ill, as well as dangerous, and for the person to later be admitted to the hospital for treatment, a clinician must diagnose a mental illness likely to result in serious harm to that person or to others. The law currently does not allow involuntary transport of a person who poses a danger to themselves or others due primarily to substance use disorder. This prevents involuntary admission in the many cases where a person does not appear mentally ill but presents a significant danger to themselves or others due to an untreated substance use disorder.
This effort will build on the Adams administration’s successful advocacy in 2025 to clarify, in the current law for involuntary treatment of mental illness, that extreme self-neglect creating a risk of serious physical harm makes a person a danger to themself. In next year’s legislation, the Adams administration will seek to have this enlightened definition of “danger” apply as well in the evaluation of someone struggling with addiction.
Updating the state’s involuntary commitment law would bring New York in line with 37 other states that authorize involuntary commitment for substance use disorder. Having similar provisions in New York law would greatly enhance the ability of outreach teams to ensure that individuals struggling with addiction receive appropriate medical evaluation, as well as give hospitals the ability to retain such patients when they are seen in emergency rooms. Currently, many such patients are released from emergency rooms despite doctors’ grave concerns for their or others’ safety, only because the risk stems from substance use disorder rather than mental illness. While effective treatments are available and routinely offered to patients in a hospital, often, those struggling with addiction are not ready to accept this help voluntarily.
The Compassionate Interventions Act will also incorporate several important legal reforms from last year’s Supportive Interventions Act that Albany has yet to take action on, such as recognizing a risk of psychiatric deterioration as a type of danger to oneself that may require a mental health commitment and mandating that hospitals screen all psychiatric inpatients for potential court-ordered Assisted Outpatient Treatment upon discharge.
Creating New York City’s First-Ever ‘Contingency Management’ Program
Under the Adams administration’s plan, the city will invest $27 million to expand existing services to enhance engagement for those who need addiction care by utilizing evidence-based interventions that focus on linking people to treatment, and especially, retention in treatment. Transport to the hospital, while important, is only temporary. That is why Mayor Adams’ plan includes multiple investments and innovative programs to connect more people in emergency rooms with longer-term treatment — saving lives and improving the quality of life and strength of the community.
The Adams administration will launch a pilot program called ‘Track to Treatment,’ which utilizes contingency management, a treatment approach that provides existing patients with small rewards for positive behavior, including engagement in addiction care. This proven approach will effectively motivate patients with addiction challenges to continue with their treatment plans after discharge from NYC Health + Hospitals emergency programs. Program participants will receive clinically supportive rewards which can be extended or deactivated based on their clinical need and for engagement in care. To date, the most effective large-scale contingency management implementation effort has been conducted through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Years after implementation, over 90 percent of the initial agencies continue to utilize contingency management.
The pilot program is designed to pair the contingency management approach with sustained behavioral health and medical treatment for existing patients. Treatment options will include medication-assisted treatment, such as long-acting medications (LAMs) for opioid and alcohol use disorder. LAMs include medications that prevent patients from feeling the effects of substance use, curb cravings, and protect from overdose. Additionally, LAMs significantly reduce barriers to obtaining and adhering to medications, because they are administered on site and provide continuous medication, which last for a week to a month. The pilot program will be run by NYC Health + Hospitals with an initial investment of $5.1 million, with enhanced engagement around LAMs for eligible patients starting in September.
Additionally, the city will strengthen the successful nonfatal opioid overdose response program, Relay, which provides peer support to individuals transported to hospital emergency departments following a non-fatal overdose, with the goal of connecting people to treatment and services they need to avoid future overdose. Relay teams serve over 2,500 New Yorkers annually. Through a $2 million initial investment, the city will provide Relay participants with cell phones to ensure follow-up and more successful outcomes in treatment after discharge. This effort aims to disrupt visits to hospitals, jails, and courts, and support sustained engagement in care, housing, family, and community relationships.
Boosted Funding for Substance Use Disorder Outreach and Treatment
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) operates 14 syringe service programs citywide, which offers drop-in spaces, wellness activities, and access to health, mental health, and substance use disorder services. Currently, five of these locations in Upper Manhattan, Midtown West, and the South Bronx have outreach teams that engage people on the streets and connect them with local drop-in centers where they can receive additional health services and access hot food, showers, laundry machines, and treatment referrals. In 2024, the teams made 8,000 referrals and had 25,000 engagements. To expand upon this work, the Adams administration will add an outreach team to every location and give all teams one clinician to enhance their ability to connect people to treatment in real time. This will support getting more people off the streets, into treatment, and, when necessary, enable assessment and 9.58 involuntary removal actions. The expected investment will be $14 million.
Additionally, the plan announced today will add staff across DOHMH, NYC Health + Hospitals, and the New York City Department of Social Services to oversee and focus specifically on coordinating care for patients with complex behavioral health needs that frequently cycle between systems with dedicated harm reduction staff to address those with substance use disorder. The expected investment will be $2 million.
Finally, the Adams administration will create a new drop-in space in “The Hub,” a major commercial center along Melrose Avenue in the south Bronx, to address community concerns of public drug use, public intoxication, and overdose. This drop-in center will operate on a low-threshold model, where people can come inside to seek respite, eat meals, and use laundry, showers, and other hygiene services. At the same time, the drop-in center will have medical, peer specialist, and mental health staff to respond to overdoses in the area and provide opportunities for engagement in substance use and mental health services. This service will support people experiencing homelessness and who use drugs, and will be located in an area with exceptionally high rates of fatal overdoses. The expected investment will be $4 million, and builds on Mayor Adams’ "Community Link" multi-agency operation that has been operating in The Hub since February 2025.
“End the Culture of Anything Goes” Campaign
As part of his End the Culture of Anything Goes campaign, Mayor Adams made a series of announcements this week promoting the administration’s efforts to help New Yorkers struggling with severe mental illness and substance addiction, while simultaneously addressing quality of life and public safety on New York City streets, which includes:
- A major milestone to connect over 3,500 homeless New Yorkers from streets and subways to permanent housing, including over 1,000 New Yorkers as a result of Mayor Adams’ Subway Safety Plan, first launched in 2022.
- The expansion of the NYPD’s Quality of Life, or “Q-Teams” across the entire borough of Queens, which will soon be present in every precinct across the city. Already having responded to 31,500 quality of life calls, the Q-Teams focus on tackling daily issues that impact New Yorkers’ sense of safety and well-being, including cracking down on illegal mopeds, towing abandoned vehicles, cleaning up encampments, addressing outdoor drug use, and responding to noise complaints.
- The opening of 13 newly contracted clubhouses — the city’s first-ever procurement for clubhouses in nearly 30 years — to support people with severe mental illness thanks to a $30 million investment by the Adams administration, and.
- The launch of the city’s first-ever Involuntary Transports Dashboard, which allows New Yorkers to track trends in involuntary transports and better understand how the city connects individuals with emergency psychiatric care, while simultaneously upholding the administration’s commitment to transparency.
Mayor Adams Long History of Supporting Those in Need
Mayor Adams has prioritized investments in outreach teams to engage the hardest-to-reach New Yorkers. In February 2022, Mayor Adams launched the Subway Safety Plan to address public safety concerns and support people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, including some of the city's hardest-to-reach New Yorkers with mental health and substance use challenges, on New York City's subways. Since the start of the plan, over 8,600 New Yorkers have been connected from the subways to shelter and 1,000 have been connected to permanent affordable housing. These outreach efforts, along with others, such as Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams (SCOUT) and Partnership Assistance for Transit Homelessness (PATH), encounter a range of people living unsheltered with various needs.
Mayor Adams has also made supporting New Yorkers with severe mental illness a top priority since entering office. In 2022, the Adams administration first announced an ambitious plan to support unsheltered New Yorkers with untreated severe mental illness, which included a new city protocol on involuntary removals, as well as a package of proposed state legal reforms to maximize the city’s ability to serve this population. Since then, the Adams administration has developed new programs, like SCOUT and PATH; added 1,400 new Safe Haven and stabilization beds; and successfully advocated for — over three years of persistence — changes to state law passed in 2025 that remove barriers to psychiatric care for those unable to recognize their own need for it.
SPRING CLEANING COSTUME COLLECTION 
