Do needle exchange programs “just say maybe” to children?
In a state with the third highest injection-related AIDS rate in the United States, former Governor Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey repeatedly felt pressed to explain her opposition to needle exchange programs. She casts her opposition in terms of her concern for children. Government cannot, on the one hand, say that drug use is bad and illegal; and on the other, provide the tools for this destructive behavior in the name of health. Kids will not accept that. It is like saying Just say maybe. (2) Again, our best scientists say that no such message is being sent; injecting drug use does not increase when needle exchange programs are instituted.(1) So children, like other members of our society, are not getting a message that causes them harm. But there is a real and uncontested consequence to the absence of needle exchange programs: the spread of drug-related HIV. In health departments across the country, statisticians count the ill and the dead from injection-related HIV/AIDS. Wha
