NEEDLE POLITICS

Re: Needle Happy, Editorial, Nov. 16.

We should not allow our excitement about the possibility of prisoners
being supplied with clean needles to obscure the wider issue.

Drug addiction is recognized as an illness and, for whatever reason,
society is imprisoning large numbers of ill people and offering them
little or no treatment whilst they are incarcerated. The result of this
failure to treat, together with an apparent inability of correctional
systems to prevent access to drugs, is appallingly high levels of
disease such as hepatitis C and HIV with documented transmission within
prison.

This not only has very serious public health implications for when
prisoners are released, but also has very significant long term health
care costs. Needle exchange on its own is not a solution -- neither is
doing nothing.

Peter M. Ford
MB Professor of Medicine
Queen's Univ.
Kingston, Ont.