A sharps dropoff at the County Health Services building on Emeline Avenue. Photo by Chip Scheuer.
On paper things look good for the future of Santa Cruz’s needle exchange program, which the city basically punted to the county earlier this year, allowing county health officials to oversee the program outside city limits and come up with new regulations. A presentation at Santa Cruz High School last month revealed data showing that exchanges in general not only reduce the spread of infections like HIV, but also reduce trash. And the council cast a vote of confidence in favor of the needle exchange within city limits, in February, as part of its public safety recommendations. But grant writer Steve Pleich isn’t waiting with bated breath for city officials to welcome exchanges back with open arms. “I don’t believe the political climate in Santa Cruz would allow it, regardless of what the county says,” explains Pleich, a supporter of the exchange.
County health officials say that a needle exchange should be close to users in order to be effective at reducing the spread of disease. Conventional wisdom would suggest that’s the urban core of Santa Cruz, but the results are not yet out from a new poll for the users in the county. Needle exchange clients recently took surveys answering a variety of questions, including what the best sites would be for exchanges.
“We are tallying the data right now,” says county health services director Giang Nguyen, “because part of the survey asked participants where some of the locations are throughout the county that would be condusive to them, and also by what kinds of transportation they get to those places. So, we can decide where would be the best place throughout the county to do this. We are not going to be able to say where we’ll go next, probably for another 90 days.”
Street Outreach Supporters currently operate at the county health building on Emeline Avenue and in Watsonville.
According to research presented by Alex Kral of San Francisco’s Urban Health Program, 13 percent of drug users in San Francisco, which has a needle exchange, disposed of syringes improperly. The city of Miami, on the other hand, has no needle exchange, and 95 percent of users there disposed of their needles improperly—including 45 percent in public places and 39 percent in the trash.
Studies aside, many concerned residents are clamoring to keep the needle exchange out of their neighborhoods out of fear that the county-run program leads to more hazards than it’s worth. Influential council critic Ken Collins, who’s taken interest in Darwinian evolution, says drugs have evolved just as animals do and that all the studies that have been done are outdated.
“How accurate are those in Santa Cruz?” Collins asks of the study results. “Does what goes on in San Francisco, New York and Miami have anything to do with Santa Cruz? I want a solution.”
In the past three years, Santa Cruz’s exchange delivered over 700,000 needles—including about twice as many in the past year as nearby Santa Clara County, which has six times the residents. Since the Clean Team began doing its weekly cleanups in November, the group has picked up 1042 needles. In addition to exchanges, needles are available in drug stores for less than a dollar each, and until recently, the county had no public drop-offs for used syringes when the needle exchanges were closed.
Collins is an advocate of increasing public bathrooms and finding a way to make rehab more affordable. A professional and big wave surfer who grew up in Santa Cruz, he says he has watched about 100 people he knew fall into addiction—a quarter of whom have ended up homeless as a result. Based on his own observations, he says the scariest trend right now is not heroin addiction, but the increase of people using needles to shoot up methamphetamines. Collins says it might be time to look away from the studies and try something new for a year.
“Consider the possibility of shutting down the needle exchange because the needle exchange’s statistics that show the exchange is supposed to work are obviously not working,” Collins says. “Something’s changed. Something’s different.”
Pleich suggests roaming exchanges, that move from one neighborhood to the next, depending on the week. That way, no one neighborhood would be too heavily impacted by an exchange—people hanging out after an exchange to shoot the breeze or their drugs.
“If we had a roving exchange, no one site in the city and no one neighborhood would bear the burden of having a needles site permanently,” Pleich says. “And that would allay some of the concerns about people hanging out after an exchange.”
