Courier-Post, Camden, NJ 
Copyright 1997: Courier-Post

May 29, 1998, page 7A

Jeff Beach
Courier-Post Staff

CAMDEN - City Council on Thursday became the first governing body in the state to voice support for legislation that could pave the way for syringe-exchange programs to combat the spread of AIDS.

By a 6-0 vote, with Council President Gwendolyn Faison absent, the council strongly backed two bills sponsored by Sen. Wynona Lipman, D-Essex .

One bill would allow the state to create a pilot exchange program to slow the spread of AIDS through intravenous drug use. The second would allow pharmacies to sell 10 or fewer syringes without a prescription.

Community activist Frank Fulbrook, who lobbied both city and county government for two years to garner support for Lipman's bills, said he was pleased with the vote and would ask the Camden County Board of Freeholders to reconsider its earlier vote against the bans.

"City Council made history with this vote," Fulbrook said. "But a lot more education needs to be done. There's still some misunderstanding."

The vote has significance beyond support of the bills.

Under the legislation, no exchange program could be set up by the state in a municipality that doesn't vote to accept it.

The freeholders in February voted 4-3 against backing the pilot-program bill and 5-2 against support for the pharmacy-sales legislation. That came despite a strong recommendation from the county's Harm Reduction Task Force to back both bills.

The majority of members on Gov. Christie Whitman's Advisory Council on AIDS have backed needle exchanges, but the governor has bucked that recommendation, saying she believes such programs send a message that the government is condoning intravenous drug use.

Those concerns also had been raised in the local debate, most recently by several members of the city's clergy. In a forum on the issue held Wednesday, the Rev. James Fitten of Shalom Baptist Church urged council members not to support the Lipman bills.

"If we supply users with the tools and the equipment for them to use, then we are helping them to perpetuate the problem," Fitten said. "The investment the state and others should make is to curb the flow of drugs."

Members of Mayor Milton Milan's administration also had reservations, but those ran more to what establishing a pilot syringe-exchange program might do to Camden's image.

"If this municipality were to choose such a program and others in the county did not," City Business Administrator Preston Taylor said, "wouldn't we have a situation ... where individuals would be coming in from all over the county and even other states to get needles?"

Sharon O'Leary, a county health department official and member of the Harm Reduction Task Force, said the city could tailor a program limiting syringe distribution to city residents.

Still, city spokesman Keith Walker argued, the council's support of the bills would make rejecting any state-sponsored exchange program more difficult in the future.

"If we do this we are going to open a Pandora's box," Walker said "People at the state will say, 'Let's go to Camden, because the Camden City Council supported this from the beginning.'"

City Councilman Ali Sloan El, the prime force behind the council vote, countered that the city could no longer ignore the explosive growth of AIDS cases within its borders. The city should support the legislation, he said, so it can have all options available to it to fight AIDS.

According to state Health and Senior Services Department statistics 60 percent of the county's reported AIDS cases have come from Camden, with the next-highest number, 15 percent, coming from Cherry Hill.