My name is John, and I don’t do drugs.
I’ve certainly never injected anything.
I’m OK with needles, I guess — I give blood from time to time — but as a concept, shooting up just creeps me out.
It probably has something to do with that horrible movie "Requiem for a Dream;" when I hear “heroin,” I immediately think, “abscess.”
For many non-users like me, intravenous drug use has a very strong associated feeling of “otherness.” Sure, we have friends who smoke weed. But shooting up is for homeless people, ex-cons, drug fiends and prostitutes.
So we don’t worry a lot about the dangers of needle use. Which is a mistake, and not only because our stereotypes about users aren’t quite true.
Good people get hooked on bad drugs, and we should care about them. But if that’s not enough, Hepatitis C and HIV infections that strike first through dirty needles find the rest of us in hospitals and bedrooms.
And there are things we can do to protect users, and the rest of us, from these infections. Easy things.
For example, states like Washington and Oregon have had significant success with needle exchange programs. A needle exchange is exactly what it sounds like: Drug users bring in their dirty needles, and trade them for clean ones.
These programs can do a lot of good. They encourage users not to leave dirty needles in alleyways or trash bags where they can stab and infect people. They encourage users not to share, or hurt themselves by using blunted needles over and over again. And they create a safe environment for addicts to seek information on quitting.
A needle exchange can run a whole year for less than the cost of a single new case of HIV. Clean needles run between 5.5 and 7.5 cents apiece — about the cost of a health department condom.
So however you look at it — compassionately, pragmatically, economically — needle exchanges seem to make a lot of sense.
Too bad that they’re completely illegal here.
In Arizona, drug paraphernalia laws make it illegal to give someone a needle if you know they’re going to use it for drugs. And we have no exception for exchanges.
Which not everyone thinks is a bad thing. Opponents of these programs argue that giving out needles to inject drugs is the next thing to giving out drugs themselves. And of course, they have a point. There is probably some level of acceptance conveyed in the act of handing 20 clean needles to a smack addict.
So it’s tacit approval vs. HIV. Balance those evils yourself.
And if you come to the same conclusion I do, there are definitely things that can be done. In an on-campus presentation sponsored by the Phoenix Harm Reduction Organization this weekend, I heard an intriguing suggestion: Research grants are much easier to get than treatment grants.
An ASU study on needle sharing could really make a difference. For the purpose of collecting important statistical data on things like disease and demographics, such a project could take thousands of dirty needles off the street.
And that data could be crucial in the debate over exchange legalization.
Anybody looking for a thesis?
Reach the columnist at john.a.gaylord@asu.edu
