An Upper Manhattan subway station is a needle graveyard, with the tracks littered with hundreds of used syringes tossed by junkies after they shoot up on the platforms, straphangers say.
“My husband doesn’t let me go out by myself [to the station] at night, he’s horrified,” said chef Laura Licona, 49, of the cavernous 1 Line transit hub at West 181st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.
“The drug use has been a problem and compounded big time.”
The Post recently witnessed a half-dozen junkies injecting themselves there, just a few yards away from parents and elementary school children.
“If kids are seeing that, I imagine it has some sort of effect on their mental health,” said Andres Ochoa, 23, a pet stylist.
The station’s drug crisis “exploded” in the wake of the pandemic, along with the opening of a nearby OnPoint overdose prevention center in late 2021, an MTA cleaner said.
At the “safe injection” site, addicts can get high under medical supervision and are given clean paraphernalia to inject or snort their drug of choice, either on-site or elsewhere.
“I’ve been raising hell because it’s out of control to have these guys sitting on the bench, doing everything — shooting up, smoking crack,” the cleaner said.
“Somebody’s going to get hurt.”
Asked about the station’s needle blight, an MTA spokesman referred to a statement last year by the agency’s chairman, Janno Lieber, raising concerns about the OnPoint safe injection site’s proximity to the train hub.
“We understand that is something that people are doing for safety reasons and there is good policy behind it,” he said about the site.
“But we can’t abide a situation where the subway becomes, when that facility closes, the second choice for where to inject, where to use drugs.”
The city Health Department said that it is working to allow OnPoint sites to operate 24 hours a day.
Many residents said although police regularly patrol the station, they never see any crackdowns on the brazen drug activity.
“They’re just enforcing the fares,” said Doshari Abre, 29, whose family owns a candy shop at the station.
Transit narcotics arrests across the city have plunged to 234 through April 16 this year, compared to 394 for the same period in 2022, according to NYPD data.
“NYPD officers are deployed throughout the subway system, on trains, mezzanines, platforms, and at the turnstiles to keep millions of riders safe each day,” an NYPD spokesperson said.
OnPoint did not respond to a request for comment.
