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A gas station desperate to curb drug overdoses turned its bathroom lights blue so people can't see their veins

The Sheetz in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, just installed blue lights to keep people from doing drugs in the bathroom. But research suggests that won’t work.

  • A Pennsylvania convenience store is testing out blue lighting in the bathroom to see if it will detract opioid addicts from doing drugs there.
  • But existing research suggests that blue-lit bathrooms don't deter addicts with few other options.
  • Other strategies that can help include dispensing overdose anecdote Naloxone, but that's more expensive.

A Sheetz gas station convenience store in the town of New Kensington, Pennsylvania has installed blue lights in its bathroom, hoping to curb illegal drug use.

But the blue lights probably won’t stop most people from trying to do drugs.

The only peer-reviewed study of this phenomenon to date was a small 2011 survey of 18 Canadian drug users. The researchers found that 16 of the 18 addicts surveyed “

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Alexis Crabtree at the University of British Columbia, who conducted some of the interviews with drug users for the Canadian study, told Business Insider that people use drugs in public bathrooms as a last resort if they’re homeless or living somewhere with a zero-tolerance policy.

Blue lights don't deter people, she said —

end up in even riskier places," she said.

There are other proven ways to combat drug crises. Portugal, a country that dealt with decades of heroin drug use, took an unprecedented step in 2001: it became the first nation to decriminalize possession and consumption of illicit substances, basically making all drugs legal.

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ies," Susana Ferreira w

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