FORCE OF HABIT

Larry Pasco doesn’t remember how or when he started using drugs, but
he hasn’t forgotten the lengths to which he’d go for a high.

A New York native, the 42-year-old Indianapolis resident spent late
nights looking for drugs in the less-than-desirable portions of many
New York City neighborhoods in the early 1980s. After Pasco bought his
heroin or cocaine, he’d return to his Upper East Side Manhattan
apartment and the high would begin. When he awoke, it continued.

Because Pasco used money from his family to buy drugs, he didn’t have
to commit crimes to obtain to obyain them. But Pasco did pay a price.
He was diagnosed with the AIDS virus 14 years ago, and figures if it
wasn’t his promiscuous sexual activity that transmitted the disease,
it was his drug use.

But Pasco, who moved to Indiana in 1985, says he might have never
contracted AIDS if he had access— like a number of Terre Haute addicts
currently do — to a needle exchange program.

Needle exchange programs, which have been in place nationally for more
than 10 years and in Indiana for approximately seven years, mainly
serve drug addicts by providing them with clean needles for their used
ones.

The trade’s purpose is to ensure that addicts won’t risk contracting
diseases by sharing needles with other addicts. Exchange programs also
focus on building trusts with addicts so they can put their drug
problems behind them.

“I might not be infected today if they had a syringe exchange
program,” said Pasco. “It's more about just giving a clean syringe to
somebody. It's about working with them through their own problems,
talking with them and caring about people. “It's about a positive change.”

OFFERING HELP

Pasco has made that change his own responsibility this decade. Through
the National AIDS Brigade, Pasco worked in Indianapolis with an
underground syringe exchange program from 1991 to 1992.

In August 1993, after it became clear that the state and local health
officials would not fund a needle exchange program, Pasco founded
Prevention Point in Indianapolis. Prevention Point was founded as an
open publicized street outreach, Pasco said.

Today, Pasco runs Harm Reduction Institute, which he founded in June
1996. He left Prevention Point because of conflicts in funding and
strategy with other workers, he said.

Harm Reduction Institute, which Pasco runs out of his home, served
2,500 people and exchanged 91,000 needles throughout Indiana last year.

While Pasco serves clients in the greater Indianapolis area,
Prevention Point does exchanges with addicts in other places too —
including more than two dozen in Terre Haute, according to Marla
Stevens, its policy director.

What started with a 34-year-old Terre Haute man in 1994 who became
involved after seeing numerous friends die from HIV has turned into a
25-person client base, Stevens said.

Of the Terre Haute clients, 18 are in three user groups. The user
groups have one representative travel near or into Indianapolis to
trade old needles for new ones.

The rest of the Terre Haute clients travel individually to
Indianapolis or Bloomington to exchange needles.

Like the first person from Terre Haute to get involved with Stevens’
program, clients learn about needle exchange through word of mouth,
Steven said. And Stevens feels she’s just hit the iceberg in Terre
Haute.

“The need is there and we’d like to fill it,” she said. “Terre Haute
needs it as much as anybody else does. The state can’t tell us what
the rate of injection drug use is in Terre Haute with any accuracy.

“There is no governmental health agency that has that data, but it’s
very evident to us that it’s far greater than what we’re currently
filling in Terre Haute.”

Those in Terre Haute who have joined the needle exchange ranks include
a nurse, several fast-food employees, two house painters, a few
construction workers, a couple of truckers and two prostitutes,
Stevens said.

Pasco furnishes the homeless, escorts, madams, strippers, people who
run drug shooting galleries and even some mainstream people who are
financially stable.

“Our goal is to try to make sure that people use a clean, fresh,
sterile syringe every time,” Stevens said. “I hope if they’re going to
shoot drugs, that they shoot drugs in a way that is less dangerous to
them and less costly to the state of Indiana.”

Proponents of needle exchange say it’s a health issue, not a drug one.
And in terms of health, needle exchange helps control the spread of
disease, said Dr. Steve Morin, who handled legislation for needle
exchange for 10 years in Washington, D.C.

“What happens is you can prevent an epidemic of HIV among injection
drug users,” said Morin, now an associate professor of medicine at the
University of California at San Francisco. “That in turn prevents an
epidemic of secondary infection of their sexual partners and children.”

Morin admits that using drugs is wrong, but calls needle exchange
“pure practical public health.” However, opponents to needle exchange
disagree.

Robert Maginnis, senior director of National Security and Foreign
Affairs for the Family Research Council in Washington D.C., says
heroin addicts are not sensible people, Maginnis said.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re surrounded by 1,000 needles which are
clean and one dirty one,” he said. “There is a good chance they could
care less if they pick the right one. They are so in need of the next
fix that they’re not going to act rationally.”

And the cocaine problem is much worse than that of heroin with needle
sharing, he said.

“They’re doing it so frequently that you’d have to walk around with a
wagon full of needles, and it just doesn’t work like that,” Maginnis
said.