Students discuss history of needle exchange with Harm Reduction Coalition

When Allan Clear moved to New York in 1983, his experiences with drugs taught him that he could not sit by and watch as users spread diseases.

“I moved here in 1983, and I used drugs throughout my stay as I was living here,” Clear, executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, told a crowd of students on Tuesday during his talk, “Drug Use and HIV/AIDS: The History of Needle Exchange in New York City.”

“The more entrenched you were in the gay community, and the more entrenched you were in the drug community, the amount of people you knew with AIDS was phenomenal,” he said. “For me personally, it reached a point where I couldn’t sit by and not do something in response.”

The talk, hosted by the Student Global AIDS Campaign, is part of the group’s effort to raise awareness of stigmatized social issues. On Tuesday, the organization turned its attention to needle and syringe exchange.

“We think it’s really important to bring in people like this to let students know, especially with controversial topics, that these things need to be talked about,” said GSAC co-director Lauren Ko, CC ’10.
For Clear, the solution in the ’80s was to cut off one major source of the disease’s spread—the needles used to inject drugs.

“Syringe exchange is a very simple intervention,” Clear said. “It is ... replacing a potentially contaminated piece of injecting equipment with a new one.”

Under President Jimmy Carter, drug paraphernalia laws made access to syringes increasingly difficult. But according to Clear, this only made the widespread problem worse.

“People didn’t stop using drugs,” Clear said. “They just didn’t have enough syringes, so they had to share.”

Clear said that although it was technically illegal to establish needle exchanges, the courts saw needle exchanges as the lesser of two evils when compared with the use of contaminated syringes.

Although federal funding for needle exchange programs was prohibited in 1988, President Barack Obama lifted a ban on federal money for needle exchanges that passed last December.

But when Clear began his activist work, the lack of government support forced him to do some creative problem solving. He described trips to local public health centers carrying water coolers filled with syringes, dumping the contents out on a table inside.

“We made this stuff up as we went along,” he said.

Now, 20 years later, this activism has become a career. As director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, Clear oversees a number of public health programs to provide help to disenfranchised populations.

Jasmine Van Denventer, a student in the School of Continuing Education, said she appreciated Clear’s talk, because the distribution of clean needles is often overlooked. “It’s a pressing issue that, given the stigma of drug use, is one that definitely gets sidelined.”

Brenda Smith, GS, agreed, saying, “Most of this audience cannot really relate to needle and drug problems, and he was trying to reach them,” Smith said. “It’s a problem that can affect all of us. It’s not an isolated issue.”

jeremy.bleeke@columbiaspectator.com