Should Cities Fund Needle Exchange Programs?

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With rare exceptions, American medical and public health personnel support making sterile syringe available to IDUs. During the 1990s, the federal government funded several studies of NEPs, including an extensive review of almost 2,000 U.S. and foreign research reports. The National Academy of Science, the Centers for Disease Control, the American Medical Association, the Institute of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, the American Public Health Association, the General Accounting Office [1993], the National Research Council [1995], and the American Bar Association all conducted studies and issued reports on the topic of access to clean needles.  Without exception, these studies and organizations endorsed access to clean needles as an effective measure for reducing the incidence of blood-borne diseases and increasing access to treatment for drug users. In addition, they have persuasively documented the important finding that access to sterile needles neither encourages people to start injecting drugs nor increases drug use by those who are already users. To the contrary, as the New Haven and Baltimore programs demonstrated, NEPs typically facilitate linkages to various forms of treatment, where such treatment is available. Moreover, they take millions of potentially contaminated needles out of circulation, instead of leaving them to be passed around or left in parks or public restrooms, where they could injure or infect children and others, including health workers and police, who might come in contact with them accidentally.