His needle plan has touched a nerve

phr

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His needle plan has touched a nerve
Miguel Bustillo
LA Times
1.28.08



SAN ANTONIO -- Bill Day doesn't fancy himself an outlaw -- and with his Mr. Rogers demeanor, he definitely doesn't look the part. But soon the 73-year-old lay chaplain could spend up to a year in jail for breaking a law that he considers immoral.

Day hands out clean needles to drug addicts on some of the seediest streets in this south Texas city. He does it because he's convinced that it reduces human suffering by curtailing the spread of HIV, a view that has been supported by medical research for more than a decade.

However, Day's actions are illegal in Texas -- the only state that has not started a needle-exchange program of some kind. So when a San Antonio police officer spotted him swapping syringes with prostitutes and junkies this month, he was arrested on drug paraphernalia charges.

"This is a moral imperative," said Day, whose nonprofit group, the Bexar Area Harm Reduction Coalition, gets funding from his church. "I come from a family of altruistic people. My mother made clothes for the poor during the Depression. My father never turned down a hobo. I have to keep doing what I think is right."

Day also has a personal reason for wanting to stop others from contracting AIDS: He has the disease. Sick and weary a decade ago, he called an ambulance, thinking he was suffering from pneumonia. At the hospital, he was informed that he had full-blown AIDS -- and about two weeks to live. He fiercely fought on and overcame the odds, but not before his once-athletic frame had shrunk to 120 pounds.

"I don't want anyone else to go through that," Day said as he stood on San Antonio's west side next to a vacant lot strewn with used needles. He said his AIDS, which he did not contract through drug use, has been stabilized for six years.

Needle-exchange programs have long been controversial. Critics have claimed that they encourage drug use and send a defeatist message about the government's war on drugs.

But acceptance of the programs has grown far beyond New York and San Francisco over the last decade, due largely to concerns about the spread of AIDS and hepatitis C. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that more than a third of all AIDS cases in the U.S. stem from intravenous drug use.

Though some studies have questioned their effectiveness, most research has concluded that needle-exchange programs reduce transmission of diseases and save taxpayers money. A 2002 UC Davis study found that drug users with access to clean needles were up to six times less likely to risk contracting HIV than those without such access.

"There is conclusive scientific evidence that syringe-exchange programs, as part of a comprehensive HIV prevention strategy, are an effective public health intervention that reduces transmission of HIV and does not encourage the illegal use of drugs," U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher found in 1998.

Texas politicians, however, continue to regard the research with skepticism.

Neel Lane, a high-powered San Antonio lawyer who agreed to defend Day for free after learning about his case through their church, St. Mark's Episcopal, said it was time for the Lone Star State to admit it was behind the times.

"When you're the only state that doesn't have [a needle-exchange program], you're either the 2% smartest or 2% dumbest in the country," Lane said.

Though Texas is the only state that has not begun at least a pilot needle-exchange program in any city, lawmakers last year authorized one -- for San Antonio.

Bexar County public health officials are studying whether to launch it, but Dist. Atty. Susan Reed has warned that she could prosecute anyone who distributes needles because she considers the act illegal.

"I'm telling [local officials], and I'm telling the police chief, I don't think they have any kind of criminal immunity," Reed said in August, according to the San Antonio Express-News.

Reed has not explained why she opposes the program, and her office did not return requests for comment. But at the request of a state lawmaker, Texas' attorney general is reviewing the dispute.

Day and two associates, cited with him on Jan. 5, initially faced Class C misdemeanors, which are punishable by a fine of up to $500. But Reed's office and police plan to increase the charges to distributing drug paraphernalia, a Class A misdemeanor, which carries a possible one-year jail sentence.

Day said he told San Antonio Police Chief William P. McManus before the arrest that he was distributing needles to drug addicts for health reasons and was never warned that he could be arrested. Police spokeswoman Sandy Gutierrez acknowledged the meeting but said, "We did not tell them this was OK."

Day's supporters say they are outraged that police and prosecutors are treating the activists as criminals.

"How silly to arrest senior citizens who are trying to stop the spread of HIV in their community," said Jill Rips, deputy executive director of the San Antonio AIDS Foundation, which provides HIV testing and runs a hospice. "Don't police have something better to do?"

Day said he accepted the arrest as part of a process that his community must go through before it could begin a healthy debate about reducing the spread of AIDS by addicts.

"This has happened everywhere," Day said. "Every needle-exchange program has started underground. The knee-jerk reaction was the same: 'You're encouraging people to do drugs.' Then there was a slow metamorphosis, and acceptance."

For someone who claims he's not an outlaw, Day was sounding like a revolutionary.

"Well, looks can be deceiving sometimes," he said, with a smile.

Then he got into his white minivan and drove away.

Link!
 
sickening as an IV drug user I can say needle exchanges save lives as does OTC access at pharmacys I live in a prescription only state and it is shocking to see all the people sharing needles and reusing for lack of being able to procure more.
 
if someone wants to get fucked up, they're gonna do it regardless. its better to die from a drug overdose than AIDS
 
when i lived in austin for 4 months, there was always a needle van at least once a week. and does the place Project Phase still exist ? Meals clothing medical stuff great place & people as well as the van that pulled up near by. i have fond memories of austin even though i often slept in the cemetary (less ants on the tombs and much less chance of arrest, it wasnt a morbid thing and had nothing. this was around 1996
 
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Here's another article, with a little more info, from a local paper:

While a state pilot program languishes in legal limbo, Bexar County is prosecuting needle-exchange volunteers
By Cary Cardwell


They look like little pieces of confetti in San Antonio’s parks, vacant houses and empty lots.

Look closer. The colors resolve into small toxic booby-traps — discarded heroin balloons and orange-tipped, used syringes, waiting for a passerby to step on them.

It’s a good bet the discarded needle and syringe will carry HIV and hepatitis viruses that could infect the unsuspecting victim.

Dr. Alexandra Loffredo, a family doctor, university professor, and health director at the University Health Center downtown, treated a teenage girl earlier this year who stepped on a used needle that penetrated her shoe and pricked her foot. She has to return to the clinic at regular intervals to be tested for blood infections that could affect the rest of her life.

“That’s a huge ordeal for a 14-year-old girl,” Loffredo said.

Clinic staff often see what they call unintended “community needle sticks” - usually people in vulnerable neighborhoods — which, of course, are the poorest and most disadvantaged areas of the city.

“We’ll have parents of 6- and 7-year-old kids who will tell us they see prostitutes working behind their houses, or they always see needles on the ground. That will start a conversation with the kids about the danger of touching or picking up a used condom or needle,” Loffredo said.

It’s not a pleasant subject, but with 13,000 addicts in San Antonio, a flourishing sex trade, and younger addicted mothers and babies, it’s one that alarms public health officials here. Taxpayers living miles away from the problem north of Loop 1604 may think the statistics don’t affect them, but the tax burden to treat the diseases of addiction in the county’s public hospitals hits everyone.

So, it may seem strange that city police and county prosecutors are raising the stakes in the prosecution of a church-supported needle exchange program.

Believe it.

On Thursday, January 23, the police department plucked a “traffic ticket” misdemeanor from Municipal Court and re-filed it with the District Attorney’s office as a more serious Class A misdemeanor against three volunteers with the Bexar Area Harm Reduction Coalition, a needle exchange and condom program. Now, 73-year-old Bill Day, 67-year-old Mary Casey and registered nurse Melissa Lujan 39, face up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine each for allegedly distributing narcotic paraphernalia. The trio was cited by patrol officers on January 5 while taking used syringes from addicts and prostitutes on the street for disposal by the Metro Health District. They showed officers what they were doing — reportedly handing out baggies containing a new insulin syringe, a condom, a cotton ball, an alcohol whip, a commercial bottle cap for cooking a drug dose, and referral pamphlets to public-health agencies.

“It’s not like they were doing anything sneaky,” said State Representative Ruth McClendon, a longtime advocate for legalizing needle exchanges in Texas. “This group is well known in our community.”

But in the eyes of the police and the DA, these perfectly legal items, when assembled in a baggie and given away, constitute a “heroin injection rig.”

“You cannot flaunt the law regardless of how well-intentioned you are,” First Assistant District Attorney Cliff Herberg explained.

The case was re-filed as a more serious charge because, Herberg said, “it meets the elements of the offense.” The decision was made in the ordinary process of review given to any charge working its way through the system, he said.

Still, Herberg concedes that the cases were re-filed as Class A misdemeanors only after discussions between him and Assistant Police Chief David Head. And both men agree that it is not usual for them to review every one of the thousands of misdemeanor cases that come into their respective offices each week.

GOOD DAYS/BAD DAYS

Bill Day was greeted as somewhat of a Christian soldier when he went to Sunday services at downtown St. Mark’s Episcopal Church across from Travis Park.

“People came up and shook my hand, hugged me, patted me on the back,” Day said on Monday. Asked if he considered the case “a social-justice issue,” Day said yes. “Look at the first four books of the New Testament. They all mention tending to the poor.”

The incident received national media attention over the weekend, and much of the congregation, which includes many prominent San Antonians, seemed glad.

Day is the parishioner who brought the needle-exchange program to the attention of the church’s community outreach committee in 2005. It approved sponsoring the coalition and ponied up funds for a $10,000 van for the group’s use.

Reverend Michael Chalk, rector of St. Mark’s, rhetorically embraced Day.

“We’re just trying to help,” Chalk said. “We’re called on to alleviate suffering and help the poor as best we can.”

The mood at the DA’s office Monday morning was definitely not as buoyant as at the nearby church the day before. Express-News columnist Jaime Castillo had blasted the needle-exchange prosecution over the weekend, as had the editorial page of the Houston Chronicle.

Reed, a shrewd prosecutor and former judge who’s butted political heads in Bexar County for three decades, wasn’t offering her personal opinion on needle exchange programs to the media. Herberg was sweating that one out by himself.

The news that San Antonian Gerry Goldstein — one of the “pros from Dover” among the nation’s civil rights attorneys — was going to represent Day didn’t help.

Goldstein was in Aspen at his birthday bash when contacted by the Current last Thursday about the needle-exchange case. Lyle Lovett was signing Happy Birthday (in person) to the longtime ACLU watchdog.

Goldstein called the re-filing of the case to a Class A misdemeanor “serious overkill” on the part of the police and the DA’s office.

“These are people whose only concern is to try and make our city a better place to live,” he said of the Bexar Area coalition.

Herberg bristles at talk about overkill.

If it’s true, as the police report states, that Day told officers he was a county employee, that’s not only a sin in the eyes of the church, it also could be considered impersonation of a public official, a felony offense.

Were the volunteers looking for a “test case” on the needle exchange issue?

Herberg said he certainly wasn’t. “This thing was thrown in our laps.”

Chief Head added that “there was no communication with field officers to be on the lookout” for a needle exchange group.

As for Day: “I think I did know it could become a ‘cause celebre,’” he said in answer to a reporter’s question.

McClendon thinks it’s about time.

“Texas is the only state in the nation that does not allow for needle exchange,” she said. “Cities throughout the state have programs operated through religious organizations, and law enforcement officers statewide are aware of these programs.”

BUT IS IT ART?

Narcotics paraphernalia is one of those wispy legal constructs that require law enforcement authorities to be mind-readers. Ordinary objects that are perfectly legal can be considered criminal instruments if police decide they are intended to be used unlawfully. Wire-cutters like the ones electricians carry around today could get a man hanged in 1900 Texas in the vicinity of a barbed-wire enclosed ranch.

Narcotics paraphernalia, in the eyes of a law that has been rewritten and amended a dozen times since first entering the Texas statutes in 1905, usually refers to an insulin syringe that’s legal in the hands of your diabetic aunt but maybe not your niece who happens to be a known prostitute with a heroin habit. Depending on the decade and the drug fashion of the moment, it could also be a crack pipe or a hookah. Head shops have been selling small pipes that might be construed as paraphernalia for years, and police used to cite them. But it rarely happens today.

It would be disingenuous to argue that the coalition’s kits are not used for the injection of illegal drugs. But police in every city in the country distribute resources and manpower according to the community’s perceived needs and priorities. Police Chief Bill McManus was involved in a successful needle exchange program when he was chief of Minneapolis before coming to San Antonio.

Dr. Fernando Guerra, director of the Metropolitan Health District and a practicing pediatrician, says San Antonio suffers “enormous social and economic costs” because of IV drug abuse and the sex trade that supports drug habits and spreads STD’s – sexually transmitted diseases. And anything that reduces that cost is good policy.

“There’s a significant human dimension to all this,” Guerra said. “We see more and more women in their child-bearing years falling into the tragic use of illicit drugs, heroin and methamphetamine. If they go through pregnancy with continued use, it affects the baby.” Guerra said he was currently withdrawing two newborns in his own practice who are addicted to illegal drugs because they were born to addicted mothers. These children end up in foster care at state expense.

And the cost to taxpayers is tremendous. Addicts going through end-stage liver disease can cost county health programs hundreds of thousands of dollars before they die, even if they are refused transplants because of continued drug use. State estimates are that more than $100 million was spent over two recent years by Texas public health institutions treating HIV and Hepatitis B and C cases.

“We’re really lagging behind” other cities and states, Guerra said. “There’s this misperception that giving IV drug users needles and syringes promotes drug use. But these people are dependent on their supply of drugs and they’re going to inject them however they can.”

NERO FIDDLES

What particularly galls prosecutors and police about the criticism of their prosecutions is the fact that they were under the impression that needle-exchange programs were on hold for the moment. They were waiting for the attorney general to issue an opinion on the legality of language placed in the last omnibus health bill by Representative McClendon and Senator Jeff Wentworth.

Inserted late in the session, the language creates a pilot needle-exchange program in Bexar County and only in Bexar County. With that in hand, county commissioners last fall appropriated $60,000 to fund a needle-exchange program to be operated by county government’s health offices. But questions were raised immediately about whether the pilot program language in the health codes would override criminal statutes.

“Susan (Reed) flat out ruled that this law didn’t really change the criminal law. And she made the announcement that she was going to arrest these people,” recalled Wentworth. So his office requested the AG’s opinion last September, and since then, the county’s needle-exchange workers have cooled their heels gathering statistics.

Herberg points out that the Texas District and County Attorneys Association has written a brief stating that the language authorizing the pilot program fails to protect volunteers from prosecution. “It’s not like we went out looking for a case,’’ insisted Herberg. “They dumped it in our laps and asked us for an opinion on whether it was legal.”

But why would that language have applied to the church-supported, privately funded coalition plan anyway?

Curt Harrell, a retired laboratory and blood-bank manager and board president of the non-profit coalition, said too much time has passed already. Harrell has worked to create and fund HIV and hepatitis reduction programs in Texas for 14 years. He has testified before House and Senate health committees. He has seen language put into every statewide health plan since 1998 calling for needle-exchange programs. And he was glad in 2005 when the coalition was registered with the county, given non-profit status by the IRS, and was finally up and running.

He did all of that work as a volunteer. Yet on a recent neighborhood “tour” to a vacant lot with a dozen discarded syringes less than a mile from Guadalupe Plaza where Pope Paul spoke, Harrell admitted being “frustrated.”

“Every day we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing, someone else is catching HIV or hepatitis unnecessarily.”

link


jaskim - There is still a van in Austin that goes around some times, I believe.



I actually know a couple people involved in the legal battle which is coming up. Not sure how involved, if at all, I will become, but this is a cause I feel called to support.

It really is ridiculous how unsafe IV drug users can be around here... The only way to get clean syringes is to make up a story about a diabetic cat or something at a pharmacy. Almost all pharmacists ask for a prescription or something like that that shows that you need needles. People "authorized" to buy syringes are on a store-kept list. I know of only one store that sells needles without a script necessitating one: HEB, a Texas-based grocer. The people who work behind the counter are far more inclined to reduce harm than turn down a user.

I've heard of people stealing needles from pharmacies and leaving the drugs untouched. I have friends who only have one disposable, one-use insulin syringe that they have used daily for months.

This program, I am sure, has saved so many lives that it is nearly murder to shut it down...

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*sigh*
 
Texas seems like a fucked up redneck state.

Everyday America seems like a more shittier place.
 
pkt, it's really getting better, believe it or not. times, well they are a-changing and we're all mixed up in it. this sucks, but it will give future endeavors a chance to do things differently and get by in the political arena.
 
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