Saving Countless Lives With the Stroke of a Pen

In last November’s election, I received 4,305,746 fewer votes than did Gray Davis, which is to say I received none at all, while he was elected governor.

That, however, does not inhibit me from peeking figuratively over his shoulder at the stuff that’s landed on his desk in these last days of the legislative session, and telling him what I think he ought to be thinking.

Among the stuff in his “to-do” pile is Assembly Bill 518. This is the fourth time such a bill has landed on the desk of a California governor, but the last three it was a different governor, Pete Wilson, and he vetoed all of them, three up, three down.

AB 518 would permit any California city or county to set up a program to give intravenous drug users clean needles in exchange for used ones. The genesis of this, and the science backing it up, is because the bulk of new HIV cases, especially in women and children, are linked to IV drug use. If those numbers don’t register, think instead of The Times’ 1997 story of the “orphan of addiction,” the 4-year-old girl living amid her mother’s heroin-addict clutter.

What must it be like, I ponder of Davis and his pen, to be able, with no more cost than the ink it takes to sign your name, to save such a life?

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AB 518 passed the state Senate with not a single vote to spare; one Republican voted for it, a couple of Democrats voted against it. Sincere people have sincere concerns, not about motive but about message: that giving a junkie a clean needle is like handing a bottle of beer to a 10-year-old and saying, “Here, kid, live it up.” That it signals some seal of approval, however backhanded, for illicit drugs.

Studies from Yale University to the Centers for Disease Control to UC Berkeley have said it with wearying unanimity: Needle swaps save lives, not only the addicts’ but their partners’ and their children’s.

And if the health of some junkie is a matter of indifference, work out the cost-benefit instead: A clean needle costs a dime. Treating a typical AIDS case costs nearly $120,000. And inasmuch as most IV drug users don’t carry Blue Cross cards, the cost is largely mine and thine to bear, We the Taxpayers.

Common sense needs no studies to conclude that a dirty needle won’t stop a junkie from shooting up, and a clean one is unlikely to lure people to start mainlining. To assume that thousands will hit the hard stuff because the needles are clean is like assuming people will volunteer to go to prison for the free room and board.

Needle swaps run by nonprofits are already at work in Los Angeles and San Francisco, whose mayors used their emergency powers to permit such operations.

I visited one such “harm-reduction program” last year in an Eastside alley, where men came to trade in needles, like Aladdin handing over an old lamp for a new one. For his four used syringes, a sickly thin man got four new ones in 29-gauge steel, and a spiel with referrals on getting detoxed.

This, say the believers, is the real advantage of a needle swap: as a come-on to get addicts in the door to hear about going clean, getting straight, cleaning up.

“Phony compassion,” counters the no-needle crowd. They’re still junkies, just junkies with clean needles. It’s treating a symptom, not a disease.

And that too sounds reasonable. But then I ask, what is the voting record of such naysayers when it comes to paying for more rehab beds to get those junkies de-junked?

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Davis may be second only to President Clinton as a reader of polls. He must have liked one released Thursday, a Field Poll giving him approval ratings about as high as his vote percentage from last November.

Another poll was released the same day, conducted on behalf of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. It found nearly 70% of Californians favoring a needle swap to help slow AIDS and HIV.

Clinton, who like Davis casts himself as a middle-way politician, had the chance to permit a nationwide needle program. His own health honchos agreed that it would slow the swath of AIDS. But junkies don’t fill seats on Capitol Hill or line up at voting booths, so Clinton punted.

Davis, ever with an eye on his own political prospects, knows that many law enforcement groups that supported him are against this, and most gay groups who also supported him are for it. If he’s looking for other allies, of whom he can say, “I’m with them,” how about these?

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan favors it.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and San Francisco County Sheriff Mike Hennessey favor it.

Miss America 1998 favors it.

And who am I to get on the wrong side of Miss America?

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.