Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1986. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The New York Times - November 11, 1986
Could the further spread of AIDS virus among addicts be limited by providing sterilized needles? New York's health officials now plan a long-overdue experiment to find out.
Widespread distribution of clean needles to addicts was recommended last year by David Sencer, then the city's Health Commissioner. But Mayor Koch rejected the idea after law enforcement officials objected. The city Health Department now intends to give sterilized needles to a few hundred addicts enrolled in the three-month waiting list for methadone maintenance, and to see if this protects them from acquiring the virus.
Addicts put not just themselves at risk of AIDS, but also their sexual partners and, since AIDS can be transmitted in the womb, any children they may conceive. If AIDS spreads into the general population, drug addicts and their partners will be the route. Ideally, the transmission of AIDS among addicts would be halted by eradicating drug addiction. Since that won't happen immediately, distributing clean needles is a public health measure obviously worth considering.
New York City's five District Attorneys have vigorously opposed the idea of giving out needles as unworkable, an apparent sanction of addiction and likely to foster further drug abuse. Certainly the need to avoid any encouragement of addiction must weigh heavily in designing a needle distribution program, should the experiment demonstrate its effectiveness against AIDS.
But with a quarter of New York's addicts already likely to die from AIDS, a policy of doing nothing will permit the death of thousands more, as well as of their innocent partners and children. The Health Department's experiment should at least resolve the first step in the argument, that of whether giving addicts sterilized needles indeed protects them from AIDS.
If it does, the experiment must be carefully extended. But there's no need to await the results for the city to begin taking other measures to curb the epidemic of AIDS among drug users, such as expanding programs for treatment of heroin addiction. A city that requires addicts willing to enroll to wait three months for methadone maintenance cannot be said to take AIDS very seriously.
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