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Asbury Park Press,
Asbury Park, NJ
Needle exchange, drug treatment the missing links
I never wanted to do drugs.
I just wanted to escape because I always felt different being
gay. I sniffed glue when I was 12 or 13.
In high school, still trying to escape, I used LSD, marijuana,
alcohol, speed, whatever. I
was what they called a garbage head, although I did manage to finish
high school. I knew I needed to change. I took what I called a geographic cure. The trouble was that I brought myself along. In California I fell in with a crowd that glorified shooting drugs. I started shooting up too. For five years, I lived on the street or in a trash container. I know the day I got HIV.
I had $3 worth of speed. I
borrowed the needle of someone who said he was HIV-positive.
I knew about AIDS, but I wanted that $3 rush.
I did not care right then, but very soon afterward I did. I did not know about needle exchange back then. But if I had, I definitely would have gone for it. When I finally hit bottom, I was able to call my family for help. They gave me a plane ticket back to New Jersey. Their insurance paid for 28 days in rehab, and their own money paid for the 3-and-a-half months I lived in a halfway house. I have worked myself up from owning a bag of clothes to owning a house. I have a full time job. I am close with my family now; we are focused on the important things. I get support from a 12-step program. In recovery, I have found a way to be a proud gay man. But life is not easy. There is the uncertainty of my illness. There are the reactions of strangers, when I am open about my illness. I take four pills a day. Now I am without side effects, but I know I live with a time bomb. I have friends with HIV who take 14 or 21 pills a day and experience side effects. From one support group of 20, only four of us are still living. I practice safe sex – which is more than just using a condom. I always tell potential partners about my HIV status – a piece of information that makes about three-quarters of them leave. (Sometime I would like to write a black comedy titled “Oh, But You Look So Good.”) But with all this, I still hope to find a long-term relationship. I have made fighting HIV my life’s work. In my work, I meet poor, young people who are injecting drugs and asking for help. They are just where I was years ago. But they do not have families who can pay the bills. I can arrange for HIV testing for them, but for a number I cannot arrange for drug treatment. Welfare can cover the cost of drug treatment, but not the treatment entrance fee of several hundred dollars. Where can a poor person get that kind of money? If the person seeking help has a drug charge on his record, the new welfare rules can exclude them entirely. Many of those I test do not have HIV. But for how long? The present situation makes no sense. HIV/AIDS prevention is where it’s at. Needle exchange is prevention and totally unavailable in New Jersey. Getting people into drug treatment is prevention, and unavailable to many who are poor in New Jersey. People need help. No one ever says, “I want to grow up to be a junkie with AIDS.” My job is HIV prevention, but I am so limited by the resources available. I have turned my life around, and others want to do the same. Until they are ready to seek help and can get it, people who inject drugs need needle exchange. Just because people shoot drugs does not mean they deserve to get HIV or hepatitis C. We need to stop dehumanizing people. Our political leaders are very busy, I know. But just once, when I have to tell a 19-year-old who injects drugs that there is no needle exchange and that is no drug treatment for him, just once, I wish one of our political leaders could be standing there to explain why this is so. Frank Engelbert is a resident of Monmouth
county. He is working with the New Jersey AIDS Coalition in its first
annual AIDS Lobbying Initiative.
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