N.Y. to Stop Supplying Clean Needles to Drug Addicts : Health: The program has been part of the effort against AIDS. But Mayor Dinkins and others say the tactic hasn’t paid off.

The New York City Health Department plans to abandon its politically controversial pilot program of providing clean needles for drug addicts in the effort to prevent the spread of AIDS.

Fulfilling a campaign pledge, Mayor David N. Dinkins ordered the program eliminated because, according to a mayoral spokesman Wednesday: “It was condoning drug use” and “did not show any scientific results” because of the small number of intravenous drug users who participated.

In the first 10 months of its operation, 250 clients enrolled at the single site where they could receive clean needles. Three-fourths of them eventually accepted referral to other drug treatment centers.

At least three other U.S. cities--Portland, Ore.; Tacoma, Wash., and Boulder, Colo.--still have programs of needle exchanges, where used needles can be surrendered and clean ones obtained.

In New York, with 21% of the national total of AIDS cases, the program was designed to stop the sharing of infected needles and syringes by addicts. The common use of needles is a major method of transmitting AIDS. Statistics show that by the end of 1988, IV drug users accounted for 45% of the newly reported AIDS cases in New York.

Health officials said while the rate of increase of AIDS cases in the homosexual community had stabilized, the rate of increase among IV drug users continued to climb.

In his report summarizing the needle exchange program’s first year, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, the health commissioner under former Mayor Edward I. Koch, urged that it be expanded, noting that the concept already had been adopted in other countries.

But in an interview Wednesday, Joseph said that political sentiment was against the program from its inception on Nov. 7, 1988.

“The idea that Dinkins expresses that it is the paraphernalia that causes the problem, is just rubbish,” Joseph charged.

Lee Jones, a spokesman for New York’s new mayor, said Dinkins had indicated while he was serving as Manhattan borough president that he believed providing clean needles “was the wrong message to send in this day of raging drug use.

“It was never able to achieve the model that had been set for it and was never able to yield any scientific results,” Jones charged. “It became just another venue for IV users to seek treatment.”

In Portland, the needle exchange program is administered by Outside In, a nonprofit organization. Some 260 IV drug users have received clean needles and a kit containing bleach, cotton and distilled water as well as information on drug treatment during the first three months of operation.

“We make sure that anyone who comes in is an IV drug user,” said Rachael Silverman, a coordinator of the AIDS prevention program. “We check for needle tracks and make sure they are at least 18 years old. We provide a lot of education about AIDS prevention.”

Tacoma’s publicly funded needle exchange has been operating for about 18 months. Officials said about 300 people a week are treated. But it is being challenged by the attorney general of Washington State, who charges in a court case that health officials are violating drug paraphernalia laws.

In Boulder, needles are handed out by drug counselors at a local drug detoxification center, which is open 24 hours a day. A study shows that people seeking the needles have been using drugs an average of 12.8 years.

“I think we were able to convince people here that this is a health problem and it is not a moral problem and not an ethical problem or a religious problem,” said Anne Guilfoile, heath program manager at the Boulder County Health Department.

In Boston last month, a municipal court judge acquitted a defendant charged with helping to distribute thousands of needles to drug users. Lawyers for Jon Parker, who was accused of illegal possession of needles, and who was dubbed the “Johnny Appleseed of needles,” said needle exchanges were an important tool to attack the spread of AIDS.