When I saw this headline on the Voice of OC website, “Orange County’s Needle Exchange Program is Finished,” my mind jumped back in time to the fall of 1991. That’s when some brave volunteers, myself included, spent over two years, every Saturday, at the corner of 9th and N Streets NW, offering IV drug users clean needles in exchange for used ones.

The program had been started that year by fellow ACT UP DC member Margaret Cantrell; when she was forced to leave it a year later, I agreed to take over. I had been reading about the success of needle exchanges in Europe and was eager to do whatever could be done to ameliorate the HIV crisis among IV drug users. I coordinated with some friends and my primary care physician to garner supplies of clean needles and sharps containers and, along with Michael Singerman and a few other hardy souls whose names are lost to memory, went out every Saturday morning without fail.

We also received help from ACT UP DC, especially its director, Steve Michael. And, most importantly and effectively, we had a friend in the DC Council: Jack Evans, chairman of Ward 2 from 1991-2020 (where our table was set up), who kept the DCPD and the Feds off our backs for the next 18 months, when we ran out of money, resources, and luck.

Memories of this time in my life make this Voice of OC headline all the more infuriating because it means we’re still fighting the same battles from three decades ago. I literally shouldn’t have to tell anyone that exchanges work. The evidence is there in a standard Google search. Not only do the rates of HIV and other infectious diseases (like Hepatitis C) decrease among transient and IV drug populations when clean needles are readily available but there is also evidence that these programs can lead to significant decreases in IV drug use overall.

If you don’t want to take my word, feel free to do your own research. You can start with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which wrote back in 2019 that “participants in syringe exchange programs are five times more likely to enter drug treatment programs. They’re 3.5 times more likely to stop injecting drugs.

Research also shows that more than 90 percent of syringes distributed are returned.” And if, for some reason, you don’t trust the CDC, you should know that the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Georgetown Medical Review, and the Veterans’ Administration concur with that finding.

Anyone who thinks that ending this program “is a win” for Santa Ana, much less Orange County, like SA Councilman David Penaloza, apparently does, is not using their brain.

And while I applaud Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento for saying that “I don’t want to speak ill of the program – I think it has merit. I think it has good goals, good intentions,” in light of current circumstances, it reads like damning with faint praise.

I do agree with Councilman Penaloza that “other cities have to step up to the plate” and that providing needle exchanges “doesn’t solve the problem” of IV drug use. But the latter statement is a specious argument: exchanges were never intended to be the whole solution but one stretcher of an umbrella approach to dealing with IV drug use, and Penaloza is being disingenuous when he says this because he should damn well know by now that no societal problems yield to a single, simple solution. That’s taking Occam’s Razor to an utterly absurd extreme.

So, yes, I believe the Harm Reduction Institute should be allowed to set up shop – not just in Santa Ana, but in cities throughout the county. And it should be teamed with other proven approaches to reduce opiate and opioid addiction, such as Ibogaine (there’s another search for you all). For those envisioning piles of dirty needles in trash-strewn alleys, you’ve been watching too many movies or Fox “News” ad nauseam.

Besides, if addicts have nice, clean Sharps containers to put their used works in, why would they bother discarding them randomly? And no, I am not naive enough to think there won’t still be random discards of syringes–there was such a spot one block from our little table. But I can tell you that as the weeks went by, the piles of used works decreased in number to virtually zero.

So when it comes to syringe services programs – a rose by any other name – I know they will work, from first-hand experience to decades of data proving their robust efficacy. And I’ll put my personal experience and research up against anyone’s drug war hysteria.

1.(https://voiceofoc.org/2024/12/orange-countys-needle-exchange-program-is-finished/)
2.(https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1992/08/23/activists-take-to-streets-to-fight-spread-of-aids/dfc9908e-d175-48e2-be8c-cefc46f4d9a6/)