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A man shoots up heroin and has needles strewn about him in St. Mary's Park in the Bronx.Richard Harbus
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to have junkies toss their used syringes into special receptacles has failed to clean up drug-infested parks, and the bins are serving more as suggestion boxes — spreading the message that the city is OK with them shooting up there.
Official statistics obtained by The Post from the first six months of de Blasio’s controversial program show that parks in the Bronx are still littered with dangerous hypodermic needles, with nearly 60,000 found on the ground compared with just 7,000 in Hizzoner’s 44 locked containers.
Even worse, the green metal bins are seen as a welcome mat for druggies to take over the parks, said one addict who openly injected himself in St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx Thursday morning with what he said was a speedball of heroin and cocaine.
“They’re giving permission with that box,” said Javier Martinez, 32.
“Kids don’t come here. They don’t build anything for them like a playground. If they don’t want us doing drugs, why are they putting the boxes here?”
Martinez also claimed that he’d rather get his fix elsewhere, “but if you go in a hallway or an alley it’s trespassing.”
Martinez was hanging out with four buddies on a rock outcropping littered with syringes, even though an official needle-disposal box sat on a post about 5 feet away.
One of the men said he has AIDS but insisted he always bent his needles so no one could reuse them and contract HIV — unless they happened to step on one.
When the group abandoned the spot at around sunset, they left behind an assortment of trash that included more used syringes, empty packages of disinfectant tablets and the blue tops from plastic vials of sterile water used to mix the heroin.
Data collected by the Parks Department from May 1 through Oct. 24 show that only 11 percent of 66,656 needles went into de Blasio’s bins, which are installed in 14 parks in the Bronx.
Geoffrey Croft, of NYC Park Advocates, said the results proved the program was “a terrible idea from Day One.”
“Instead of addressing the dangerous public-safety conditions this activity creates, the city has turned our parks into shooting galleries,” Croft fumed.
He also accused de Blasio of unfairly targeting the Bronx for his “incredibly ill-conceived policy.”
“I’m certain the mayor would not dare place them in Carl Schurz Park [on the Upper East Side near his Gracie Mansion home] or Central Park,” Croft said of the needle receptacles.
According to the city’s figures, St. Mary’s, in the Mott Haven section, recorded the most intravenous drug use, with a total 21,434 needles collected there.
Only 163, or less than 1 percent, were safely discarded, forcing workers to pick the rest up off the ground.
The second-worst drug spot on the list is Aqueduct Walk park, which is closed for reconstruction.
But before it was fenced off in October, workers collected a total 19,768 needles, of which just 2,995 were safely discarded, stats show.
Area resident Michael Joseph said the mayor’s needle-disposal program made “no sense.” ”
“I’ve lived here since 1993 and never heard of the city doing anything like this,” the 64-year-old carpenter said.
“Why say it’s OK to do drugs where the children play?”
The boxes proved a failure at both Crotona and Rose Hill parks, where they collected zero syringes but workers picked up 1,611 and 30, respectively.
At Crotona Park, one container is set up amid a stand of trees that appears to have been used for Santeria rituals, with three small animal skulls on the ground near the feathered remains of a rooster and a collection of religious candles in tall glass jars.
A worker said that box “does nothing, or nothing good, anyway.”
“It’s like we’re making a landmark for bad stuff, like we’re marking that spot,” he said.
“So I say, ‘We got to clean up the voodoo,’ and [my co-worker] says, ‘Where?’ I say, ‘Next to the needle box.’ ”
The worker said there were also boxes in the park’s bathrooms, “but we find the needles in the same spots as always — mostly up on the rocks.”
“They drop the needle wherever it falls. They don’t care,” he said of the park’s druggies.
Christopher Williams, 50, who walks his dogs in Crotona Park, was outraged about all the needles strewn about.
“Why are they testing this out on us?” he asked.
“If it was working, I’d say, ‘Good, keep doing it,’ ” the building super said. “But if all it’s doing is saying this is their spot — ‘Come here to do this’ — no!”
De Blasio spokeswoman Jane Meyer defended the program.
“The notion that these disposal containers are encouraging drug use is ludicrous,” she said in an email. “This program has removed thousands of syringes and is protecting our kids and neighborhoods. ”
But during an appearance last month to announce a “Bronx Action Plan” to combat fatal overdoses in the South Bronx, de Blasio refused to admit his needle-disposal plan wasn’t working.
“I can say there’s more we got to do,” he said.
“That’s why we’re doing this cleanup effort because clearly not everyone is using those kiosks who should.”
Additional reporting by Kevin Sheehan
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