PREACHING ABSTINENCE IS NOT ENOUGH

The Issue: Distribution Of Condoms And Clean Needles In Chinatown Has Drawn
Criticism.

CRACKING down on prostitution and illegal drug use while handing out free
condoms and sterile needles may seem incongruous, but it is not. While
campaigns against those crimes should emphasize abstinence, they should not
preclude measures aimed at stopping the spread of sexually transmitted
diseases, as the state Health Department, in effect, has done.

Some members of the Downtown Neighborhood Board are upset that the
department's Community Health Outreach Worker Project to Prevent AIDS has
been distributing condoms and needles in Chinatown. The condoms and needles
have little if any effect on their recipients' behavior but a significant
effect on their health. Distribution should continue.

Cindy Sharp of the American Heart Association disagrees, fearing that
handing out free condoms and needles encourages illicit behavior. "It's like
saying here's the clean needles so go and do your drugs and here's the
condom so continue the prostitution because we're not going to condemn you
for it."

The U.S. military used similar reasoning during World War I, when it
threatened courts-martial for contracting venereal diseases and provided
after-the-fact medical treatment instead of condoms to soldiers tempted by
French prostitutes. It didn't work. More than 383,000 soldiers caught
venereal diseases over a 212-year period, resulting in seven million days of
lost service. Recognizing its mistake, the military in World War II
distributed 50 million condoms along with the motto, "If you can't say no,
take a pro."

The same holds true with providing sterile needles to intravenous drug
users. Again, opponents argue that the only acceptable approach for
preventing infection is abstinence. This assumes, absurdly, that people
become intravenous drug users -- drug addicts -- because clean needles are
available.

More than 200,000 syringes a year are distributed by the Health Department,
and the results are telling: One-third of all AIDS cases nationally -- but
only 17 percent in Hawaii -- are related to drug injections. Only 1 percent
of Hawaii drug users by injection are infected with HIV, compared with 8
percent more than a decade ago.

Distributing condoms and needles does not counter the efforts of the
federal-state-county Weed & Seed program. Indeed, as Assistant U.S. Attorney
Constance Hassell explains, the distribution of condoms and needles is part
of the effort to weed out drugs by intervening and preventing the spread of
sexually transmitted diseases.