In this Tuesday, July 3, 2018, photo, Evelyn Milan, right, director of services at VOCAL-NY, prepares a package with sterile injecting equipment for a member at the organization's headquarters in the Brooklyn borough of New York. | Mary Altaffer/AP Photo.
Many Republicans have long accused such programs of encouraging addiction, despite years of studies showing they reduce rates of infectious diseases without promoting drug use. Their opposition softened in the last decade as the opioid epidemic devastated communities and Trump pledged to defeat the crisis.
“Many in conservative America feel like we’ve given the opioid crisis the full court press,” Adams wrote in an email. “The attitude is we turned on these controversial harm reduction measures and gave people a chance – now it’s their fault if they don’t get better.” “It’s one thing to throw gasoline on a vacant lot,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an HIV researcher at Yale University. “It’s another to throw it on a smoldering fire.”
It was Scott County’s 2015 HIV outbreak — when over 150 people were infected primarily by using tainted needles to inject the powerful synthetic opioid Opana — that led many Republicans to rethink their opposition to needle exchange. In just the next two years, six states passed legislation allowing such programs: Louisiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia.
“There are some moderate Democrats who are certainly concerned about drug addiction who have substantive questions about what this would mean — does it increase drug use?" said Williams, who represents a district spanning Philadelphia and Delaware counties.
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