The woman inhouse slippers leaves her Northwest Side apartment building carrying a plastic bottle to the van on the street. What seems an everyday activity – taking out the trash, perhaps – is anything but. She opens the bottle and dumps about 100 used drug needles into a medically safe container and gets an equal number of clean ones in return.
It’s all part of a needle exchange program run for 15 years by the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin (ARCW). Matt Hazelberg, the ARCW worker driving the van, knows the apartment building is a drug house, where addicts may share dirty needles. It’s a common way to transmit deadly viruses such as HIV.
The ARCW program began in 1994, one of the Midwest’s first. Needle exchanges have reduced HIV transmission among drug users nationally, and doubly so in Wisconsin. In 2006, injection drug use accounted for 12 percent of new HIV infections nationally, but just 6 percent in Wisconsin.
In the program’s early days, right-wing radio claimed it promoted drug use. Today, organizations like the American Medical Association, American Bar Association and U.S. Conference of Mayors support needle exchange programs. HIV is the main concern, but hepatitis C is a growing problem.
Most Milwaukeeans have no idea the program exists, which is fine with ARCW. “If people don’t know about our program, they probably don’t need to know,” says Hazelberg. “We’re known mostly by word-of-mouth. It’s not like you can look up ‘needle exchange’ in the phone book.”
ARCW has five needle exchange vans in Milwaukee. They run Mondays through Thursdays and on Saturdays, stopping at a scheduled set of locations. Friday is reserved for driving around and servicing those who can’t or don’t make it to a prearranged site. In 2007, about 775,000 needles were exchanged.
The program’s actual name is “Lifepoint,” to stress its public health goals. Lifepoint promotes solo (unshared) use of all drug paraphernalia, distributing not just clean syringes, but also rubber tourniquets, antibiotic creams, sterile water and drug “cookers.” In addition, it provides information on HIV and hepatitis C testing, helps addicts get into treatment programs, and trains people to use procedures and medicines that can prevent overdose deaths. Scott Stokes, director of prevention services for ARCW, estimates this training has helped prevent 200 drug overdose deaths in the last three years.
The precise number of area drug users is unknown. Stokes estimates some 6,000 people take advantage of the needle exchange program, which is concentrated in Milwaukee, but also has vans in Green Bay, Racine/Kenosha and Madison.
“Over the last two to three years, we have started seeing more younger, white suburban injectors,” Stokes notes. He attributes this to the widespread availability of opiate pain medicines such as OxyContin. What may start out as a recreational high can turn into an expensive addiction, and ultimately switch to much cheaper heroin. Drug abuse by suburban youth has risen so much that ARCW plans to expand its needle exchange program into Waukesha.
There isn’t a typical user, Stokes notes: “Some are down and out, but a lot are functioning and have jobs. They don’t have to steal to get heroin.”The once-condemned program is now mainstream: ARCW’s vans often exchange needles with Downtown professionals on their lunch break.
