AEGiS-BAYW: Mass. gets its needle access law

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2006. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Mass. gets its needle access law

Bay Windows - July 20, 2006
Ethan Jacobs, ejacobs@baywindows.com

On July 13 both the House and Senate voted to override Gov. Mitt Romney's veto of the pharmacy access needle bill, ending nearly two decades worth of fights by HIV/AIDS advocates to promote access to clean needles across the state. Reached the morning after the votes, AIDS Action Committee's director of public policy and legal affairs, Denise McWilliams, said she was thrilled to see the bill become law. The bill, which contained an emergency preamble, took effect immediately after the Senate veto override vote.

"It's hard to express what a feeling of delight I have at this point," said McWilliams.

Yet she said the efforts to override Romney's veto nearly failed the evening of July 13. Earlier that day the House overrode the veto by a 113-42 vote (overrides require a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate). That evening when the Senate took up the override, Sen. Minority Leader Brian Lees, a staunch opponent of the bill who had previously tried to delay Senate action on the bill, filed a motion that would have blocked a vote on overriding the veto. Later that evening he withdrew his motion, and McWilliams said the override passed at about 8:45 p.m. that evening by a 25-11 vote. "I guess the question of the hour is why did he do [withdraw his motion]," said McWilliams. "But I'm not complaining. I'm just grateful that he did."

Lees did not return a call to comment for Bay Windows, but he told the Springfield Republican that he allowed a vote to go forward because he did not have enough votes to block it and he wanted the Senate to get on to other business. But he reiterated his opposition to the bill.

"It's going to create more dirty needles on the street," Lees told the Republican.

Yet McWilliams said she believes the bill will help drive down HIV infections among IV drug users. The bill decriminalizes possession of needles and allows pharmacies to sell them without a prescription. Until passage of the pharmacy access law Massachusetts was only one of three states to criminalize possession of needles and ban their sale at pharmacies, and McWilliams said some of the other states that have passed similar laws have noticed drops in infections rates soon after implementation. "Some places have reported an impact in as little as a year," said McWilliams.

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