PROGRAM AIMS TO REDUCE HEROIN OVERDOSES

SANTA CRUZ - Fear is a powerful incentive to not take action.

And that's a barrier a number of area agencies and the Santa Cruz Needle
Exchange Program are determined to break through with a new education program.

The program aims to inform heroin users that a call to 911 in the event of
a medical emergency will not mean punishment even though possessing heroin
is illegal.

The countywide needle exchange program provides more than 2,000 intravenous
drug users with clean needles. In October, Gov. Gray Davis signed
legislation legalizing needle exchange programs.

The Santa Cruz program grew out of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. To help
curb transmission among addicts, some of it attributable to dirty needles,
a group of Santa Cruz residents began trading clean needles for dirty ones
in motel rooms and on street corners.

But now county health officials and others are concerned about the 89
deaths in the county between 1995 and 1998 attributed to heroin.

Cracking down on use isn't the way to stop the overdoses, according to
needle exchange officials. They point to new research that suggests that 65
percent of needle-exchange participants who have overdosed or witnessed an
overdose did not call 911 because they feared criminal charges.

Those figures show that education - of the law enforcement community,
health officials and drug users - will reduce deaths, said Kristen Ochoa,
who led the study for UC San Francisco's General Hospital in cooperation
with the Santa Cruz Needle Exchange and the Haight Ashbury Youth Outreach
Team.

To promote the new education program, a town hall meeting was held Thursday
at the Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency auditorium. Presenters
included Ochoa; Betsy McCarty, county chief of public health; Robert
Swarner, a paramedic; Heather Edney-Meschery, executive director of the
Santa Cruz Needle Exchange; and Jeff Locke, Santa Cruz deputy police chief.

"This study shows us ... people are afraid to call 911 and that's a common
perception," Edney-Meschery said. "The goal is to reduce fatalities, and we
hope to do this by working with all the agencies."

Ochoa said she interviewed 50 participants in the Santa Cruz program. Of
those, 52 percent said they had overdosed before, while 65 percent said
they had overdosed more than once.

The problem, everyone agreed Thursday, is that those same people don't call
for help for themselves or friends because they fear the police.

But Locke said officers aren't looking to make arrests in those situations,
but to save someone. But he acknowledged that it is a fine line, because
possession of heroin is a felony.

Locke and Swarner said a medical call does not mean an officer will arrive,
and in the case of an overdose, rarely is there a charge. If there are
drugs lying around, however, the officer will collect them, Locke said. In
28 years as an officer, he said, he couldn't recall a single prosecution of
a heroin offense in an overdose case.

According to Ochoa and Edney-Meschery, overdosing is common among heroin
users not because someone is trying to commit suicide, but simply because
the user "wants too much."

"Intention falls into a gray area, where there are no plans to OD, but
there is a kind of ambivalence about the possibility," Ochoa and
Edney-Meschery wrote in their report.

Because the primary barrier seems to be a fear of police involvement, the
new education campaign also will attempt to teach users CPR and other
life-saving techniques.