Should Cities Fund Needle Exchange Programs?

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The myriad of health needs of individuals injecting drugs are usually unmet and silenced until they result in extremely expensive hospital stays due to the predominance of arrest and incarceration of people for their drug use as our primary means of dealing with drug use. Addiction treatment, primarily methadone treatment, has proven success and cost effectiveness in treating opiate addicted persons but it is largely not available because resources are used to arrest and incarcerate people instead of the much more humane and effective treatments. Syringe exchanges across the country have served to fill treatment programs to the extent they are available.

Syringe exchange, a respectful and collaborative intervention, allows the development and integration of numerous other public health objectives. For example, while vaccination for vaccine preventable hepatitis (a and B) has been recommended among people injecting for decades this was largely not done due to an adversarial/resource draining vs respectful/cost effective environment existing in most places.  As resources have been directed towards accomplish public health goals with people injecting viral hepatitis vaccination has become the norm through syringe exchange programs. 

As well, to this day, the Bush administration has publicly declared overdose death is preferable to action designed to prevent opiate-related overdose such as the provision of naloxone, an opiate antidote with no other effects of its own. The National Institute of Drug Abuse issued a strategic plan Spring 2008 with did not even mention overdose despite it is the number one killer of people injecting drugs.