Tennessean, Nashville, TN 
Copyright 1997: Tennessean

December 19, 1997, page 19A

Reverend Edwin Sanders and Joyce Perkins

World AIDS Day is appropriately placed at the beginning of the month in which we celebrate Christ’s birth.  Christ has much to teach us about how we should treat people who are vulnerable and at risk in relationship to diseases, such as those most likely to contact AIDS from injecting drugs.

We deeply wish people would not inject drugs, but we must be realistic.  Some do.  In fact, here in the Nashville area, there are an estimated 6,200 people who inject drugs and are at risk of getting HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s Dr. Scott Holmberg.  

A quarter of all AIDS cases in Tennessee are injection-related, and the proportion is growing.  Nationally, half of all new HIV infections are drug-related.  

An important part of the answer is clean-needle programs.  In the last six years, seven different federally-sponsored scientific panels have concluded that clean-needle programs slow the spread of HIV and do not increase drug use.  Clean-needle programs are recommended by the Tennessee Medical Association House of Delegates, the American Medical Association, and President Clinton’s Advisory Council on AIDS.

Our society has many ways of informing people who inject drugs that their behavior is self-destructive – everything from public service announcements to prison sentences.  Clean-needle programs are about medical care and the spread of a deadly, infectious disease.

Given the medical consensus that has emerged on the effectiveness of sterile needles as a way of avoiding the spread of drug-related HIV/AIDS, it is difficult to see the denial of access to sterile needles as anything other than the denial of access to a life-saving medical intervention. 

In the history of modern medicine in the United States, we are aware of only one other instance where a life-saving medical intervention involving a deadly infectious disease was deliberately denied to a group of people.  That instance was the infamous case of the Tuskegee syphilis “experiment.”  The victims of this study were 400 black men in Macon County, Alabama, who were denied medical treatment for their syphilis from 1932 when the study began until they died or, if they lived, until 1972, when the “experiment” was exposed and stopped.  

Clean-needle programs are pro-family and pro-child.  Think of the terror and anguish of the child watching a parent die of AIDS.  Consider the terrible loss to family and friends as young adults, having recovered from an interval of injecting drugs, die of AIDS just as they begin to blossom. 

We must do everything we can to prevent such tragedies.

Clean-needle programs not only save lives, they also save millions of dollars.  The combination drugs needed to treat an HIV-infected person cost anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 a year.  Clean-needle programs cost less than $1000 per person per year.

The majority of all Americans favor clean-needle programs as a way of slowing the spread of HIV, according to a Harris poll released in November.

Clean-needle programs are not the whole answer, of course.  We need more drug treatment for people without resources; we need to make methadone maintenance more available for those for whom that is an appropriate option.  Pharmacists, who do not now do so, need to be willing to sell syringes over-the-counter.

And we need more clean-needle programs.  In Nashville there is one community of believers who have a small clean-needle program to help with this terrible problem, but additional programs are needed.

The medical scientists tell us that we all have an interest in controlling the spread of HIV, an deadly, infectious virus.  The Bible tells us that we have an obligation to love and help our fellow human beings.  In this Christmas season, let us each ask what we can do to help eradicate this terrible problem of AIDS.

The Rev. Sanders is senior servant of Metropolitan Interdenominational Church in Nashville.  Joyce Perkins is coordinator of the Davidson County Harm Reduction Program.