MORGANTOWN — Opposition to the needle exchange licensing bill on the verge of becoming law extends right down to the people on the ground who work with exchange clients and fear for their safety.
Cassidy Thompson is a Morgantown-based outreach specialist for West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness and is herself in recovery from substance-use disorder. She also works with Milan Puskar Health Right’s peer recovery LIGHT Project.
Homelessness and substance abuse are not synonymous, she said, but they often overlap. “This bill proposes a lot of barriers for the clients I deal with directly.”
Thompson serves in nine counties and sees the requirement for annual local government approval as a hindrance to syringe service programs’ mission to protect public health. Some local governments won’t be willing to sign off, she said.
“You see more needle litter in Harrison County than you do in Mon, and it’s because no one has a safe place to dispose of their syringes.”
SB 334, which was signed into law by the governor Thursday, says needle exchanges “shall distribute syringes with a goal of a 1:1 model,” an easing off of its original 1:1 mandate. It does allow a program to substitute weighing the volume of syringes returned versus dispensed if certain guidelines are followed.
In contrast, the CDC says, “Restrictive syringe access policies are associated with higher infection risk behaviors and higher rates of HIV and other bloodborne infections … Under the most restrictive approach to syringe distribution … clients must return used syringes and can get only as many new syringes as used ones returned.”
“It just shows that there is really no forethought about science and what they’re doing,” Thompson said.
The ID requirement “is a tremendous barrier,” she said. About 90% of the people she works with have no government-issued ID. They’re staying couch to couch. “It’s hard to keep your belongings. I can’t put into words how much of a privilege it is to have your belongings not be stolen.”
A person may have an ID or birth certificate one week, she said, and have it stolen the next.
“I just feel that there’s a lot of disinformation that has been circulated due to hate and fear and a lack of understanding about what substance-abuse disorder is,” she said, adding it’s still stigmatized as a moral failing.
“It hurt me really personally. I’ve worked really hard to be in recovery and be a contributing member of society … To create legislation that ultimately would have left me high-and-dry to contract diseases and be disconnected from life-saving services, it just makes me wonder why did I even work this hard. Those people wouldn’t care if I was dead or alive if they knew that I was someone that used drugs.”
As West Virginia has gained national praise for its handling of the pandemic, Thompson said, this bill represents a major misstep.
“I think that West Virginia continues to be the laughingstock of the United States of America in a number of ways. This is not going to be helpful … I actually think this is going to put us ten steps behind.
“Whether or not we have harm-reduction programs, if this bill eradicates all that, people are still going to inject drugs, but they’re not going to have anywhere to return syringes, they’re not going to have someone to connect them to treatment services.
“It’s going to disconnect them. The syringe is just the carrot to get people to access the other services. The drug use is still going to happen, we’re just going to have a lot of HIV now.”
TWEET David Beard@dbeardtdp
EMAIL dbeard@dominionpost.com
