SAVE LIVES

Make Clean Needles Available

In his waning days in Sacramento, Gov. Gray Davis will have plenty of
things on his mind -- his next job, moving, appointments, to name a few.
But two bills now on his desk deserve his signature or, short of that,
ought to become law by virtue of his declining to veto them. Both would
save lives by stemming the deadly and desperate practice of needle sharing
among intravenous drug users.

The most promising bill is SB 774, by Sen. John Vasconcellos, D-Santa
Clara, which would allow adult Californians to buy new syringes from a
willing pharmacist without a prescription. California is one of only five
states that prohibit prescription-free needle sales. Most states have by
now heeded what doctors, nurses, public health advocates and solid research
have told them: Making clean needles available to drug addicts decreases
the rate of HIV and of hepatitis infection without increasing drug use or
other related crime.

Half of California's 600,000 hepatitis C cases and one in five of its more
than 124,000 HIV cases are related to needle sharing, the Department of
Health Services reports.

Last year, Davis vetoed an earlier version of SB 774. Vasconcellos sought
to allay some of his concerns this time by including a provision to
encourage buyers to dispose of used needles when they buy clean ones.

The second bill, AB 946 by Assemblywoman Patty Berg, D-Eureka, would expand
the ability of cities and counties to establish "needle exchange" programs,
in which users trade used syringes for clean ones, by removing the onerous
requirement that their governing bodies declare a state of public health
emergency every two weeks.

If the governor needs any advice on this subject, he should look no further
than the recent Human Rights Watch report "Injecting Reason: Human Rights
and HIV Prevention for Injection Drug Users," which details how backward
and deadly California's stance on needle exchange has been.

The report focuses in particular on Sacramento County, where law
enforcement zeal has crippled an effective needle exchange program that had
been forced to operate underground.

These bills aren't perfect. AB 946's provision requiring a used syringe to
be traded for every clean one isn't practical for homeless drug users or
others whose lives aren't organized enough to collect their used syringes.
Why should that state of affairs force them to share needles?

And neither bill guarantees that users won't face arrest for transporting
drug paraphernalia, even if their intent is simply to dispose of it. But
they are a step toward more humane treatment of drug dependents, whose
addiction ought not to earn them -- or their sex partners and children -- a
death sentence. Davis should make them law.