NEEDLE CONTROVERSY MISSED THE POINT

In the long few weeks since South Side residents first complained about the
so-called "needle lady," she's been called a bad element, charged with
sending the wrong message, accused of promoting a crazy, reckless idea.
Just last week, the Peoria City Council quickly passed a law restricting
where and how she can operate.

I've rarely seen the City Council respond so quickly, and with such
unanimity, to concerns of poor residents. That alone should make
neighborhood groups suspicious. Remember the debate, discussion and
eventually tabling of the proposal to allow gas stations to sell alcohol,
the most damaging and pervasive of all drugs? But I digress.

The good news is the City Council couldn't ban the woman completely. The
other good news is that she and her program plan to hang around, and, I
would hope, work out another way to reduce the spread of infectious
diseases among intravenous drug users. Let's see what happens next.

The "needle lady" is Beth Wehrman. She doesn't look like a "bad element,"
and she's not. She's a registered nurse from the Quad Cities who, until the
City Council got involved, traveled to Peoria once a week. Working out of
her car, she cruised through the city, passing out clean hypodermic needles
to intravenous drug users.

Passing out and/or exchanging needles to drug users may not be ideal, but
if the war on drugs worked, we wouldn't be discussing needle exchange
programs. That's the real issue here.

"Of all the smoke and fire coming out of Peoria, the one thing people
haven't done is sit down and talk to each other," says Dan Bigg of Chicago
Recovery Alliance, which, in partnership with the Champaign-Urbana Public
Health District, sponsors the needle exchange program in question.

The main issue people have ignored is the crucial one. Needle exchange
programs, as controversial as they've been, are effective in reducing the
transmission of serious diseases, namely HIV infection and hepatitis. Nor,
according to federal evaluations, do needle exchange programs increase drug
use. There's also an increasing body of evidence that indicates the
street-outreach component becomes a kind of gateway into treatment for many
drug users.

The fears and concerns coming from neighborhood groups are entirely
understandable, entirely legitimate. But so is the necessity of considering
alternatives to the incarceration-mentality of the so-called war on drugs.
The state and county can't afford to keep locking up drug users and nobody
can afford the growing costs of AIDS and hepatitis.

And that's where the City Council, the state's attorney's office, the
Peoria County Health Department, the University of Illinois College of
Medicine, and, of course, neighborhood groups come in. The dialogue should
have occurred, as Larry Rogers of the U of I suggested, before the council
enacted the ordinance.

Here, as with the concept of needle exchange programs, we've got to meet
people where they are, which means proponents of needle exchange programs
have their work cut out.

The initial reaction to the needle exchange here is not unlike that of Bill
White, research consultant of Chestnut Health Systems, a community-based
treatment program in Bloomington. He is also the author of "Slaying the
Dragon, the History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America."

"I started out really opposed to them," he says. "But I've changed my
position."

And what changed him?

He started reviewing the research. "I hate it when research screws up my
biases. I was blissful in my biases."