PREMATURE ACT

City Should Rethink Needle-exchange Plan

In their first vote on public policy, Mayor Dick Murphy and the new City
Council have injected a badly needed dose of common sense into San Diego's
debate over whether to distribute clean needles to drug addicts.

With Murphy's backing, the council put an end to the "state of emergency"
that was hastily announced by the old City Council in October. Under state
law, such a declaration must be in place before needle-exchange advocates
may legally distribute hypodermic syringes and other paraphernalia to
substance abusers.

The old council voted to invoke a state of emergency without hearing from a
single official of the county health department, which has responsibility
for administering health programs in San Diego. The city operates no health
programs, and provides not even one treatment bed to assist addicts.

Worse, the old council acted, on a 5-2 vote, without having any plan in
place to deal with the supposed emergency. Instead, it simply declared the
emergency and then directed the city manager to appoint a task force to
come up with a proposal for passing out clean needles to junkies in
exchange for dirty ones. The aim of the plan, put forth by the Alliance
Healthcare Foundation after it was rebuffed repeatedly by the county, is to
counter the spread of AIDS and hepatitis through shared infected needles.
The city manager's report is not expected for months.

Invoking the state of emergency on such a premature basis was a clear case
of putting the donkey before the wagon. New Councilman Brian Maienschein
got right to the core of the issue when he said the council simply didn't
"have enough information" to continue the emergency declaration, which was
never endorsed by the health department. In addition to Murphy and
Maienschein, council members Jim Madaffer and George Stevens voted against
the emergency declaration.

The move to end the state of emergency offers a good opportunity for the
new council to rethink the entire needle-exchange issue. If council members
take a critical look at the multiple drawbacks of handing out needles to
junkies as a matter of public policy, they will scrub the proposal entirely.

Needle exchanges are part of a controversial movement known as "harm
reduction." It is based on the tragically flawed premise that, rather than
outlaw intravenous drug abuse, the government should merely work to make
the practice less harmful to addicts.

Consequently, government-sponsored needle exchanges deliberately abet the
illegal use of heroin, cocaine and other lethal substances. This
common-senseless approach ignores the cruel reality that there is no way to
make drug abuse safe. On the contrary, by helping addicts continue their
deadly habit, exchanges promote the even larger dangers that drug abuse
inflicts on addicts, such as fatal overdoses, suicides, homicides, liver
ailments and heart damage.

A needle exchange in San Diego is opposed by not only the county Board of
Supervisors but also by Police Chief David Bejarano and District Attorney
Paul Pfingst. The new City Council should heed their concerns before giving
its blessing to this poorly thought-out proposal.