What a bunch of idiots.DBTrek wrote: And for bonus irony points . . . "Those needles littering the streets? The city gave them out"
The whole point of running a needle exchange program is to get dirty needles out of the rotation. Just giving away clean needles with no accompanying collection of old needles and a brief health check solves nothing. The stupidity at work here is just mindboggling.No doubt that goal is well-intentioned, but what wasn’t mentioned is that the health department is the biggest source of the needles — it hands out an estimated 400,000 syringes a month through various programs aimed at reducing HIV and other health risks for drug users.
The program began under Mayor Frank Jordan in 1993. It was originally billed as a “needle exchange,” but there never have been strict rules for returns, and the number handed out has steadily climbed.
