Protecting IV drug users from dangerous diseases by allowing them access to clean needles is a cost effective and sound public health policy that we should not abandon, writes ACSH friend Dr. Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, in a piece for MSNBC. Nevertheless, Congressional Republicans have proposed to curtail or abandon funding for clean needle exchange programs. Dr. Caplan, however, points to numerous international studies over the last 15 years that have demonstrated that such programs lower the incidence of HIV and hepatitis C infection not just among users but also among the entire community. Decreasing the incidence of these communicable diseases not only lowers the death rates associated with these viral infections, but it also reduces the expense of caring for these patients.
Yet much to Dr. Caplan s chagrin, many people are against this practice; key legislators, in fact, mistakenly believe that providing free needles sends the message that drug abuse is OK. That belief just happens to be completely unsupported by any evidence at all, he counters. Whatever leads people to decide to ruin their lives by becoming injection drug users, it is certainly not the chance to get free needles.
ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross agrees, and adds: If we can decrease the prevalence of hepatitis C and HIV in the community through clean needle exchange programs, fewer people including those who do not inject drugs at all will become infected. This would reduce the total community burden.
ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom thinks that the entire premise of a ban on clean needle programs is idiotic. Banning such programs is penny-wise and morally foolish, he says. The short-term budgetary gain will be offset many-fold by medical and social costs a few years down the road.