Star-Ledger, Newark, NJ 
Copyright 1998: Star-Ledger

March 9, 1998, page 12

Reverend Bryant Ali

I have to be passionate about the need for a clean-needle program here in Newark. As pastor at an AIDS treatment facility in the heart of Newark, I see the suffering of people living with AIDS and their families every day.

About 60 percent of our residents have contracted the virus through intravenous drug use.  But I do not see addicts, I see people who are dying.  I see lives. 

Addiction is an illness.  I hear people say, “Just tell them to get off drugs, and you won’t need needle exchange.”  But I say, “Give up your cigarettes for a week” or “Imagine how your office would be if there were no coffee (a stimulant) in the morning!”

We protect those who are addicted to cigarettes and alcohol.  Cigarettes and alcoholic beverages are sold sealed, and if the seals are broken, the manufacturers recommend that you not use the product.  Until they can find a way to break their addiction, aren’t addicts who use drugs worthy of protection, too? 

Would you or I ever go to a medical office, needing to have blood drawn and say,  “Don’t  bother with a sterile syringe, nurse.  Just use the one you used on your last patient”?  Somehow, when it comes down to the spread of HIV through dirty needles among people who inject drugs, we forget about prevention.

So many mothers come to me who have never partaken of drugs.  But they are married to men who injects drugs, and now they and their newborn children are at risk. 

I take children around to their mother’s bedside and the children say to me, “Why? “You mean there is nothing the doctor can do?”  In the Newark area now we have 8,000 orphans who have lost both their mother and their father to deadly HIV disease. 

As an African American I am very concerned about what is happening in my community, which is being hit especially hard by injection-related AIDS.  Nationally, the death rate for AIDS among African Americans is five times higher than the death rate among whites.

African Americans do not grow drugs; They do not import drugs. Yet they end up filling the jails on drug charges.  We can find money to build more jail cells to hold prisoners on drug possession charges, yet we cannot find the funds to provide drug treatment for those who ask for help. 

There is at least some evidence that not all people with HIV who would benefit from the combination drugs are getting them.

It is important for our society to look at all these issues, but my focus now is on the spread of injection-related AIDS in Newark.

  Over 7,000 people in Newark have injection-related HIV/AIDS or have already died from it.  Our medical scientists tell us that clean-needle programs slow the spread of HIV and do not increase drug use.  Science and human concern for our sisters and brothers lead to the same conclusion: We must begin to save lives and families in Newark by starting a clean-needle program.

The Rev. Ali is the pastor of Outreach Ministries in Hillside and at a residential AIDS treatment facility in Newark.