Program Trains Ex-Addicts in San Diego to Educate Drug Users on Risk of AIDS

San Diego County health authorities have begun training recovering drug addicts to go out to clinics, jails and the streets to educate drug users about the risk of infection of AIDS through contaminated needles.

About a dozen men and women referred through drug-treatment programs and trained this week by the county Department of Health Services are to begin work in early March in an effort to stem the spread of the fatal infection among the thousands of intravenous drug users in the county.

The pilot project, modeled on an 8-month-old San Francisco program in which ex-addicts distribute information as well as bleach for disinfecting needles, is aimed at averting the kind of increase in AIDS among drug users that has occurred on the East Coast.

“We are anticipating that if we follow the same pattern as the East Coast, we will probably also be having a surge of (drug users) getting AIDS,” said Patricia Riddle, a county public health educator. “We are hoping to prevent that.”

So far, about 8% of the 405 reported cases of AIDS in San Diego County have involved drug users or homosexuals and bisexuals who use drugs, said the county epidemiologist, Dr. Michelle Ginsberg. The comparable national figure is 25%.

But recent figures on infection rates among drug users turning up for AIDS testing at county clinics are significant, she said. She said 18% of the drug users that underwent AIDS antibody tests between June, 1985, and June, 1986, were found to have been exposed to the virus.

Although not all those exposed to the virus come down with the disease, public health officials are concerned that infected drug users are spreading the disease into the heterosexual population through sexual contact.

The counselors are to carry a multiple message.

First, they are to encourage drug users to get off drugs, not only because needles can transmit the AIDS virus but because drug abuse weakens the immune system and increases susceptibility to many types of infection.

“The second message is, ‘If you use drugs, don’t inject,’ ” Riddle said. “Third, if you do inject, don’t share needles.” And fourth, “if you are going to share (needles), be sure to clean and soak (them). We hope that will be enough to deactivate the virus.”

Finally, the counselors will encourage intravenous drug users to use condoms to protect themselves and their partners from transmission through sex. They will also encourage them to submit to confidential AIDS antibody testing at one of four county-run clinics.

Initially, the counselors will go to places with large concentrations of drug users, such as methadone clinics, drug-treatment programs and county jails, if possible, officials said. Later, they will try one-to-one counseling on the streets and in target communities.

All of the counselors are expected to have had some previous experience as “peer educators” in drug programs. They are receiving 12 hours of education and training this week from the county Department of Health Services.

The program, funded through June by a $10,000 state grant, is modeled on a similar program run by the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco. John Newmeyer, the clinic’s epidemiologist, said that program followed the first addict-education program in New Jersey.