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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowScott County, the center of a huge outbreak of HIV in 2015, plans to end a syringe-exchange program that was widely credited with curtailing the crisis.
The county commissioners voted 2-1 Wednesday evening to end the program in six months, despite strong support to continue the program from a wide array of community leaders and health officials, including former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams and Indiana State Health Commissioner Dr. Kris Box.
The vote, which followed more than two hours of discussion, will halt the program after six years. It was established after Scott County generated national headlines for racking up more than 237 cases of HIV in a single year, in a county of just 24,000 people.
The program has come under criticism from some officials and residents who say it encouraged drug use and led to littering.
However, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged state and local health departments to improve access to syringe-exchange programs, saying the sharing of needles is a “horrifyingly efficient route for spreading HIV, hepatitis and other infections.”
The Indiana State Health Department strongly supports needle-exchange programs, calling them an important way to engage with addicts, get them into treatment, and reduce the spread of disease.
Last year, about 350 people in Scott County, about 90 miles south of Indianapolis, received 137,730 syringes through the program.
County Commissioner Mike Jones, who has voted twice to shut down the program, remains no fan of providing needles to drug users.
“I’m not going to assist people killing themselves,” he wrote on Facebook earlier this month. “…We need to take our county back from the stigma of this program.”
He added: “I don’t know … how you get to somebody to say, ‘Enough’s enough,’”
But dozens of Indiana health providers and researchers have signed a petition urging the county to keep the program going, saying it saves millions in taxpayer dollars and provides “essential, life-saving services” for people at risk of HIV, hepatitis C, skin and soft tissue infections, endocarditis and fatal overdose.
Get Healthy Scott County, a coalition of members made up of health care, education, business, human services and other organizations, said after Wednesday’s vote that the syringe-exchange program was the only thing “standing in the way of another epidemic.”
“The syringe service program works. It’s unnecessary to close it,” said Dr. William Cooke, a local physician who treated patients during the 2015 HIV outbreak, according to a press release distributed by Get Healthy Scott County and another group, Hoosier Action. “It’s an indispensable tool. Nothing replaces that tool.”
Jesse Milan Jr., president and CEO of AIDS United, a not-for-profit based in Washington, D.C., said the decision to close the program was a mistake.
“Syringe service programs save lives,” he said in a written statement. “Syringe service programs prevent the spread of HIV. Syringe service programs are good for people who use drugs. Syringe service programs are good for communities. Despite the mountains of evidence demonstrating the truth of these statements, the Scott County Board of Supervisors has decided to make its community less safe by closing its syringe services program.”
The lifetime cost of treating someone with HIV, which can also be transmitted through dirty needles, can be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Republican Mike Pence, governor during the 2015 outbreak, was criticized for resisting calls to allow the county to set up a syringe-exchange program. He finally relented, signing an executive order that allowed a state-supervised program.
Dr. Jerome Adams, who was Pence’s state health commissioner during the outbreak and later U.S. surgeon general under President Trump, has joined the call to keep the Scott County syringe program alive.
“We can’t afford to go backwards,” Adams wrote on Twitter earlier this month. “So many worked so hard to make this syringe service program happen [and] to create a template for the rest of rural/middle America to connect people to care. I hope cooler heads prevail.”
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The claim that needle exchange programs encourage drug use is stupid. No one starts shooting heroin or meth or whatever because they can get free needles. Nor do current addicts continue their use because of free needles. And littering, really? The way these programs work is you bring in a used needle and you get a clean one in return. God forbid we do something to actually help these people overcome their addiction. Free/ clean needles to avoid HIV, hepatitis, etc. is the least we can do. Oh, and it’s also cost effective since needles are cheap and providing health care treatment to a person with HIV, hepatitis, etc. is expensive.
If we are going to shut down needle exchange programs so people can feel the consequences of their mistakes … let’s also close ICU’s to people who won’t get the COVID vaccine. Fair’s fair.