The photos above and statement below is by Bryan Hall, Executive Director of the Rescue Mission.
Despite yet more evidence, why are our City officials silent on Humboldt Area Center for Harm Reduction?
"We have a crew of our program members out cleaning the community of trash and weeds and we also have a crew of our homeless overnight guests who are being incorporated into our community cleanups.
Today on 1st Street behind Antich Automotive our overnight homeless guests found over 300 hypodermic needles.
This is right next to the new Trail that has been made for people to jog and enjoy our community. I am absolutely sick and tired of the negligence.
I understand addiction very well but there is no excuse for leaving hypodermic syringes all over the place like this. THE NEEDLE EXCHANGE MUST STOP NOW.....!
Years ago I utilized the needle exchange program and looking back on it I realize that it only enabled me to continue in my addiction. It made it very easy for me to consume my drug of choice.
This is absolutely ridiculous. What if a family was walking on that trail and their child walked over and got stuck with one of these needles.
What if somebody accidentally stumbled and fell into the bushes while jogging and got stuck with one of these needles and contracted some type of a disease.
The people doing this type of stuff are not interested in the services at the rescue mission because we have rules. We run an extremely tight ship at the mission. We must all come together and stand together as a community to rid our community of this blight.
We (myself and the Mission) have compassion on people struggling with drug addiction and the bondage that it has. I understand that they are living breathing human beings whom God loves with all of His heart.
However, there must be consequences for this type of behavior or we are not truly loving our fellow humans struggling with drug addiction.
The program at the mission is extremely profound in that lives are being changed but we cannot force people to come into our program and make changes. Those who refuse to make positive changes in their lives must be held accountable for their destructive actions. When I was running amuck and doing drugs it was before Prop 47 and I suffered serious consequences for my illicit behaviors. That needs to happen again. "
The needle exchanges came out of the need to curb disease transmission. Having a needle exchange doesn't have to mean that the community is littered with dirty needles, and I would love for Eureka to come up with a needle exchange method that reduced the amount of used needles on our streets and beaches.
ReplyDeletehttps://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1477-7517-1-2 is a pretty interesting read, though it's old--from 2004.
Have you seen some of our downtrodden? Some of them exchange diseases just by breathing on each other or touching one another. It's not the needles doing the infecting by STDs for starters. The only way you're going to reduce the amount of disposed needles is to not distribute them at all without a scrip or showing an ID, and limiting purchases to 1 a day. It HAS to be very restrictive. Also, create a 4-for-1 exchange. You don't get a new one without bringing in 4 others. Or hell, make it 40. Barring all that, give them $1 a needle and you will have a pallet of them in a couple days. ~TMOB
DeleteBut it's so much safer and prettier than discarded cigarette butts. (sarc)
ReplyDeleteTime to shut it down. Harm reduction = FAIL.
ReplyDeleteYou can just walk into Walgreens pharmacy and buy them. They are cheap too.
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