AIDS Project Targets L.A. Drug Users

County officials have announced the kickoff of an ambitious outreach program aimed at reducing AIDS transmission among intravenous drug users and their families.

About 40 community workers will hit the streets on Sept. 1. Armed with leaflets, they will attempt to dissuade drug users, especially those in black and Latino communities, from sharing needles or engaging in unsafe sex.

But County Supervisor Ed Edelman wants to go a step further. Speaking Monday at a press conference at the United Methodist Church in downtown Los Angeles, he promised to ask his fellow supervisors within a week to approve supplementing the leaflets and counseling with kits containing bleach and condoms. In the past the board has balked at the idea, arguing that to implement it would be tantamount to encouraging drug abuse and sexual promiscuity.

Morality Not the Issue

“It’s not a question of morality,” said Edelman regarding the bleach, which can be used to sterilize needles shared by drug users, and the condoms, which have been shown to reduce the transmission of AIDS through sexual contact. “It’s a question of saving people’s lives.”

Added Rabbi Allen Freehling, chairman of the county’s Commission on AIDS: “It’s ludicrous for anyone to stand in the way of this kind of program. It’s so our workers won’t be out there with their hands tied behind their backs.”

The Commission on AIDS has previously recommended that county supervisors endorse distributing bleach and condoms to intravenous drug users. Several other cities in the United States, commission members say, have had some success with the practice.

“I’m always hopeful that there’s a place in (my colleagues’) minds for logic and scientific evidence,” Edelman said of his impending effort to persuade a majority of the board to go along with his plan. “Everyone in this county is in danger of having this disease spread to the general community. It’s an issue of attitudes.”

Under the program already approved, the squad of workers will tour areas known to be frequented by some of the county’s estimated 70,000 to 100,000 IV drug users. Special attention will be paid to black and Latino communities, officials said, because of the unusually high incidence of AIDS in those communities.

Although blacks and Latinos represent only 18% of the U.S. population, they said, those groups account for about 39% of the AIDS cases. And fully half of those cases, they said, can be traced to intravenous drug use.

While Los Angeles County has targeted intravenous drug users in selected areas before, officials said, this will be the first time the county has targeted them on a large scale countywide. Orange County has had a similar educational outreach in effect for several months.

Four agencies have been selected to provide the outreach services in their respective areas. They are El Centro Substance Abuse Treatment Center in East Los Angeles; El Proyecto del Barrio in the San Fernando Valley; Joint Efforts in the Los Angeles Harbor Area, and L.A. Centers for Alcohol and Drug Abuse in the San Gabriel Valley and southeast portion of the county.