AEGiS-NYT: Editorial: Playing a Deadly Game With AIDS

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2009. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Editorial: Playing a Deadly Game With AIDS

The New York Times - August 5, 2009

Nearly 600,000 Americans with AIDS have died since the beginning of the epidemic. Nearly a third of those cases can be traced to intravenous drug users who became infected with the virus that causes AIDS by sharing contaminated needles and who sometimes infect wives, lovers and unborn children. Many of the dead would never have been infected if Congress had allowed federal financing for programs that have been shown the world over to slow the spread of disease, without increasing drug use, by making clean needles available to addicts.

A state-financed version of the program has saved thousand of lives in New York City, which cut infection rates among addicts by about 80 percent over several years by giving them clean needles and by working hard to get them into drug treatment programs. But by banning the use of federal dollars for these programs in 1988, in the very teeth of the epidemic, federal lawmakers discarded a powerful weapon in the fight against a deadly disease.

State and federal public health officials, who have long supported the programs, were hoping that the ban would be lifted this year. But a rider attached to two House appropriations bills would actually continue the ban -- in a tawdry, passive-aggressive way -- by barring federally financed programs from operating within 1,000 feet of colleges, universities, parks, video arcades, day-care centers, high schools, public swimming pools and other institutions.

This seems reasonable -- until you consider that such a restriction would make it virtually impossible to have federally financed programs anywhere in densely packed urban communities, which is where the need for AIDS intervention is especially pressing and institutions like schools and playgrounds are numerous. In other words, this would wipe out the program.

Worse still, a rider on the city budget for the District of Columbia, which is closely controlled by Congress, would place the same limitations on the use of even locally raised tax dollars. This would be an outrage in any case. But it is especially troubling because Washington is an AIDS hotspot, where impoverished communities have long been ravaged by the disease.

Needle-exchange programs would help these neighborhoods in many ways. First, they would provide safe, central locations where addicts could dispose of dirty syringes through the medical waste system instead of leaving them on the very streets and playgrounds that lawmakers claim to want to protect. Second, the programs often serve as a bridge to drug treatment for addicts who have had difficultly finding help for themselves.

The riders, which have passed the House in two appropriations bills, are a clear threat to public health. They deserve to be stripped out in conference.
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