Comments on Addiction and Recovery News: Needle Exchanges

i think the needle exhange program is the dumbest ...

2007-11-14T18:46:00.000-05:00

i think the needle exhange program is the dumbest thing ever... my mother has diabetes and she needs to buy needles for her to stay alive... but yet you give free needles to the drug users... THATS JUST WRONG!!!!! we somtimes dont have enough money for us to spent because she needs to buy her syringes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My apologies, after reading my statement I realize...

2007-06-10T11:26:00.000-04:00

My apologies, after reading my statement I realized that is was distorted and not in the right context.

I was pondering what our obligation is to others in the community, regarding the transmission of disease and also the individual themselves?

I do believe that we need to help bridge the gap in treatment, so that people from lower socioeconomic classes can have better access to good treatment programs. I also believe that we need to work towards a multifaceted approach with treatment and I do believe that Dawn Farm does an excellent job at this aspect.

Until we can work together as a society to better our treatment approaches, needle exchanges are one option that I believe is necessary. Should recovery be included in the engagement? Absolutely but its a fine line as far as frequency and intensity. I will look into the model you cited and perhaps that will provide some reference to address these points.

"It is a hard fight for those of us who believe in...

2007-06-09T15:13:00.000-04:00

"It is a hard fight for those of us who believe in meeting a client where they are at. I have tried promoting treatment and still readily do at every opportunity but not everyone is ready for that step and even those who are have issues with trying to get funding and real opportunity for treatment, not a 30 day stay in a hospital but real long term treatment."

Context matters. I recognize that you want both, so do I, but what's the message when we're willing to help them avoid spreading illness but we're not willing to help get well? How many more people would want help if they could have some faith that there was some meaningful help available? I've got no problem with a needle exchange if it is a strategy to engage people into recovery (like Kellogg's gradualism) and gives serious consideration to the values it communicates and doesn't communicate. But, how can we engage people into recovery if we can't get them help of the appropriate dose, intensity and duration?

"DO we simply say to those people, then you deserve to die or to attain HIV and Hep C?"

Who is this addressed to? I hope no one here. If you've spent any time reading this blog you'd know that I try to avoid these kinds of straw man arguments. Locally, injection drug users were 3 times more likely to die of an overdose than contract HIV. These numbers were from the year before Fentanyl caused a spike in overdoses.

I have worked with a needle exchange program for t...

2007-06-09T12:29:00.000-04:00

I have worked with a needle exchange program for the past few years. I originally had strong reservations about providing people with needles, to assist in using drugs. What I now understood through studying harm reduction is that not everyone is ready for sobriety and some may never be, no matter how much we would like them to be. If we say no to needle exchange programs, we are ultimately playing judge, jury and executioner. People are not going to stop using because they do not have a clean needle, instead they will use dirty needles and put their own lives and the lives of others in jeopardy. The issues of hepatitis C and HIV are real issues that are not going away. The fact is that an estimated 80% of injection drug users have Hepatitis C after 2 years of using. It is a hard fight for those of us who believe in meeting a client where they are at. I have tried promoting treatment and still readily do at every opportunity but not everyone is ready for that step and even those who are have issues with trying to get funding and real opportunity for treatment, not a 30 day stay in a hospital but real long term treatment. I want to keep my clients alive long enough to give them an opportunity to make positive change and at the same time protect my community. People who are against needle exchange want empirical evidence to support it, the problem is twofold, the first issue being that no one wants to fund a longitudinal study about syringe exchange and the second is that it is still hard for people to accept that sobriety isn't for everyone. DO we simply say to those people, then you deserve to die or to attain HIV and Hep C? If you are skeptical about syringe exchange good, we should all be. If you are interested in learning more about syringe exchange, I would advise you to search Harm Reduction Strategies on the internet and also look at the Philadelphia syringe exchange program.