September 22, 2004

This letter is in response to your article "Needles found at nonprofit" [9.21.04]. Irrespective of whether or not Arise for Social Justice was "operating an unlicensed needle exchange program, (p. A1)" the real problem that needs to be discussed is the negligence of the Springfield City Council's on-going decision not to implement a syringe exchange program to reduce the spread of injection-related HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - in our beloved city. This negligence has quite a history to which the current situation with Arise is merely a culmination of political events whose consequence is an aggravated AIDS crisis in Springfield.

In 1998, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health called a state of emergency regarding the exponential rise of new AIDS cases in the city, and then a year later the Center for Disease Control announced that Springfield had the 11th highest per capital AIDS rate in the nation.

If you combine these scientific assertions with the federal research that proves the access to sterile syringes reduces the transmission of HIV while not increasing illicit drug use, what you have is a city council that legislates health policy through their personal opinions on injection drug use while purposely disregarding the scientific evidence.

Indeed, the Springfield Users' Council has consistently provided the evidence-based research to argue the case for syringe exchange, but the city councilors always seems to turn a deaf ear. What should be even more of a concern for Hamden county residents is that district attorney William M. Bennett is not only unfamiliar with the federal evidence and juridical statutes of syringe exchange, but he also misinforms the public by utilizing claims that have no evidence-based research to back them up, such as the reactionary and illogical misnomer that needle exchange promotes crime.

That said, the focus for debate should not be on a measly 300 sterile syringes that anyone can legally possess as long as they are registered in a state syringe exchange program. Rather, the discussion should focus on the political conditions that cause local organizations to do the work that the public health department should be doing in the first place. In short, if only the city council would let the epidemiologists in the health department determine health policy in Springfield, we could avoid spending the hard-fought funding for more police on something that is obviously a health issue.

Jon Zibbell
Springfield Users' Council