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The Times,
Trenton, New Jersey
Twenty years and counting: AIDS in New Jersey
A woman in a Texas town is found to have condoms in her purse, the police use it as evidence that she is a prostitute and arrest her. In this age of AIDS, what were those police officers thinking? For months, the leader of South Africa refused to permit the doctors in state hospitals there to use AZT to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to newborn child. What was he thinking? Here in New Jersey, we have programs to encourage sex workers to use condoms and very effective hospital protocols for handling births to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to newborn infant. But what else are we doing to protect New Jersey women and their children from HIV/AIDS? A rough measure of the effectiveness of HIV prevention among women is the percentage of all AIDS cases that involve women. By that measure, New Jersey is the worst state in the nation. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New Jersey has the highest percentage of its AIDS cases among women of all of the 50 states. The main way women in New Jersey get HIV is through injecting drug use or through having a husband or boyfriend who inject drugs. Our national public health officials emphasize, at every opportunity, that the most effective way to end the spread of HIV among people who inject drugs and their sexual partners is for people who inject drugs to stop injecting drugs or if they are unable to do that, to use a new, sterile needle with each injection. New Jersey is failing people who inject drugs on both counts: drug treatment and needle access. Heroin, the most commonly injected drug, is highly addictive. Many of those who wish to quit need help, yet in New Jersey, drug treatment for those without resources is severely limited. For those who continue to inject drugs, access to
sterile needles is essential to prevent the spread of HIV, hepatitis C
and other bloodborne diseases. The
American Medical Association, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Institutes of
Health have all issued reports saying needle access is essential for HIV
prevention. (The
important conclusion of all these reports has been that needle access
programs reduce the spread of HIV and do not increase drug use.) In New Jersey, we continue to do everything we can
to prevent access to sterile needles.
The
actions of the state governments of New York and New Jersey provide a
stark contrast in their responses to the AIDS epidemic and the need for
access to sterile needles. New
York has 14 needle exchange programs, permits pharmacy sale of syringes
without a prescription and has recently changed its drug paraphernalia
law so that possession of a sterile syringe is not a crime. New
Jersey has taken a disastrously different path from New York.
Through criminal prosecution, New Jersey shut down the state's
one needle exchange program. New Jersey remains
one of only six states that require a prescription to purchase syringes
from a pharmacy. Possession
of a sterile syringe is still a crime under New Jersey's drug
paraphernalia law. Twenty
years have passed since the mysterious deadly disease that came to be
known as HIV/AIDS was first reported in a medical journal. The first cases were reported in California, but we know that
soon thereafter AIDS cases were found in New Jersey residents. We
in New Jersey like to think that we follow enlightened social policies.
But in AIDS prevention that affects women, the statistics show
that we remain in a prescientific age, ignoring our own national public
health officials’ best medical advice.
And while we ignore that advice, the New Jersey AIDS epidemic
expands, affecting more women and families, bringing suffering, death
and expensive medical bills. What
are we thinking? Dawn Day, Ph.D. is the director of the Dogwood Center in Princeton, an independent research center concerned with social justice issues related to AIDS and drugs.
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