BEXAR COUNTY AWAITS AG OPINION ON NEEDLE-EXCHANGE PROGRAM

Project to Prevent Spread of Disease Legal Only in Bexar, Yet
Isn't

SAN ANTONIO -- Bill Day uses his shoe to brush aside a couple of used
needles littering the ground near a concrete arroyo in a seedy west
side neighborhood.

The 73-year-old lay chaplain said he used to work with drug addicts at
this spot all the time. He'd park the white minivan paid for in part
by St. Mark's Episcopal Church and throw open the trunk.

Sickly and desperate and dying, they'd swarm him as he directed them
to places to get help and gave them clean needles in an effort to keep
them from spreading HIV and hepatitis C.

Now, the red-haired retiree, himself living with AIDS for the last
decade, is awaiting word on whether he'll land in jail for a year for
administering a program that has been legalized in every state in the
nation but Texas.

Here's the irony: Bexar County is the only place in Texas that has a
law on the books intended to authorize a syringe-exchange program.
It's also the only major metropolitan area, Dallas included, where
churches or nonprofits aren't operating one anyway, with the tacit
approval of law enforcement.

But because prosecutors don't believe the 2007 law was written
properly, it's now up to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to decide
whether the law is valid.

Mr. Abbot's opinion is due today. Meanwhile, the needle-swap program
is on hold, and the addicts have drifted back into the shadows,
sharing needles, dropping them on the ground in parks and playgrounds
and neighborhood arroyos, Mr. Day said.

"The epidemic continues, and the misery continues," Mr. Day said.
"People are suffering, and it really makes me angry that we have to
stop for this."

Mr. Day and two others initially were ticketed for possession of drug
paraphernalia. But they could wind up facing stiffer charges of
distribution if Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed moves
forward with the case.

Ms. Reed has come under intense public fire since word of the Day bust
which started as a charge similar to a traffic ticket but was
upgraded to a Class A misdemeanor by the time it made it to Ms. Reed's
office spread across the nation and brought on editorials and
articles from as far away as Los Angeles hammering the Republican DA.

Officials from the district attorney's office said Thursday that
they'd wait for the attorney general's opinion to decide how to handle
the case but insisted their interest is not a political statement by
an office bent on fighting such programs of any kind, as critics have
suggested.

"We did not go out looking for this," First Assistant District
Attorney Crag Herberg said. "This was not on top of anybody's agenda
in this office."

Needle-exchange programs are widely considered by government leaders,
law-enforcement officers, church groups and health officials -
including the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - as
highly effective in stemming the spread of HIV and hepatitis C.

Politically, the programs tend to get bipartisan support as a way to
save on health-care costs. Advocates also see the programs as a way to
maintain contact with addicts and sex workers, with the hope that
eventually they'll seek treatment.

But opponents say it condones drug use and sends mixed messages in an
anti-drug society. Proponents argue that addicts will use drugs
whether they've got clean needles or not.

Mr. Day and other members of the Bexar Area Harm Reduction Coalition,
a nonprofit 501c3 group, had been trying for years to get off the
ground but had difficulty recruiting people.

The exchange idea had worked in other places. Mr. Day, a retired
real-estate appraiser, got the idea from Dallas private investigator
Jack Taylor, who runs a similar church-sanctioned program - Dallas
Area Needle Syringe Exchange - that's been around for two decades.
Austin and Houston have similar programs, run largely
underground.

Finally, last summer, Mr. Day's group got funding - largely from
churches and grant foundations that support the programs in other
states - and began collecting dirty needles and passing out clean ones.

Around the same time, San Antonio Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon drew up
legislation creating a pilot program for Bexar County. It passed the
Legislature with the help of Republican Sen. Bob Deuell, a Greenville
physician, and the support of Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio.

But as the law was about to take effect last fall, prosecutors argued
that the law discriminates against other counties by legalizing the
program in Bexar but nowhere else and therefore could not be enacted.

The Bexar County district attorney's office warned police and county
officials that the law wouldn't hold up in court and that distributing
needles was still a crime that would be prosecuted. Any county workers
who tried to pass out needles could be arrested.

Mr. Wentworth asked for an opinion from Mr. Abbott to clear up the
confusion once and for all.

County commissioners, supporting the program anyway, gave health
officials permission to create the Bexar County Harm Reduction Program
- similar in name but separate from Mr. Day's group - and to train
workers in anticipation of Mr. Abbott's ruling.

If the law is struck down, Ms. McClendon said, she will try again in
2009.

"I frankly do not believe that what Bill Day is doing is against the
law," she said. "I believe he and St. Mark's Church are both doing
God's work. He is a person that we as Christians ought to be very,
very proud of."