RIGHTING A WRONG, MUCH TOO LATE

Public health advocates held an understandably muted celebration when
President Obama signed a bill repealing a 21-year-old ban on federal
financing for programs that supply clean needles to drug addicts.

The bill brought an end to a long and bitter struggle between the
public health establishment -- which knew from the beginning that the
ban would cost lives -- and ideologues in Congress who had closed
their eyes to studies showing that making clean needles available to
addicts slowed the rate of infection from H.I.V., the virus that
causes AIDS, without increasing drug use.

But the shift in policy comes too late for the tens of thousands of
Americans -- drug addicts and their spouses, lovers and unborn
children -- who have died from AIDS and AIDS-related diseases. Many
of these people would not have become infected had Congress followed
sound medical advice and embraced the use of clean needles.

Congress voted to withhold federal money in 1988, at the very height
of the AIDS epidemic. Back then, life in AIDS epicenters like New
York and San Francisco had begun to resemble one long funeral, made
all the more tragic by the fact that most of the dead were young
people who should have had many more years to live.

Fortunately, not all state and local governments followed the federal
lead. In New York, for example, AIDS researchers who pioneered needle
exchange programs on the Lower East Side and elsewhere managed over
several years to cut the infection rates among addicts by about 80
percent by supplying them with clean syringes and enrolling them in
drug treatment programs. But even results like these failed to move
Congress in a direction that would have better protected public safety.

The doctors and outreach workers who labored in the early struggle
against AIDS breathed a sigh of relief when President Obama announced
his support for ending the ban. But earlier this year, when bills
were introduced to lift it, some lawmakers tried to covertly
reinstate the ban through deviously worded riders.

It's good to see that Congress has finally come to its senses. But
elected officials on both sides of the aisle will need to show
considerably more courage the next time shortsighted lawmakers try to
substitute political ideology for sound medical judgment.