GREENFIELD — A proposed needle exchange program in Greenfield continues to draw support, this time from the top brass in the town’s emergency services departments.
The town Health Board invited both chiefs to speak their minds on the plan at a meeting Wednesday night.
A needle exchange would provide a safe place for drug addicts to turn in used needles and receive new, clean ones. The goal is to reduce the spread of disease.
It would also provide another place for health workers to connect with addicts and, hopefully, get them on the road to recovery.
Nicole Zabko, the town’s public health director, said Franklin County has seen a drastic 53 percent increase in new cases of Hepatitis C infection, which is commonly transmitted through intravenous drug use, in the past five years. The newly infected are also getting much younger.
“I’m in support of it,” Police Chief Robert Haigh Jr. put it simply. “I think things have changed a lot on our end. A lot of the controversial part was when needles were still illegal to possess, and they’re not anymore.”
Haigh said he now views the idea from a public health, not a criminal law, perspective. Not having access to clean needles and the ability to exchange used ones for them, he said, means there will be more dirty ones lying around in parks or on the streets, increasing the risk of an accidental stick.
“If we can prevent some of the spread of infection, we should do everything we can,” he said.
Fire Chief Robert Strahan agreed, and noted that a needle exchange program would also reduce risk of being stuck by dirty needles for his first responders. That doesn’t typically happen, he said, due to the level of training his crews are put through, but the risk is still there any time one of them enters a scene where drugs may have been used or pick up a needle reported on the street.
“It’s a simple gesture, but it’s still risky,” he said. “A program like this would help out.”
Board members also quizzed the chiefs on how the opioid epidemic has affected their departments, how often they’re finding dirty needles in public, and whether large-scale drug raids in places like Holyoke, where police recently arrested dozens of people on drug charges, are effective in fighting the crisis.
Haigh and Strahan said needles do pop up in public still, but it’s been better lately. Most of the time, the needles are encountered in homes or apartments, which run the gamut of high-income residences to subsidized housing. They’re also commonly found in restaurant bathrooms.
Strahan said the epidemic has taken a toll not only on overdose victims and their families, but also on his personnel, who have to respond to the incidents.
“They see young people suffer and pass because of this. We’ve lost a lot of people,” he said. “There was a shift that we had three overdoses, two of which were fatalities and one was a save.”
Haigh said the drug raids are an important piece of getting drugs off the streets, but have little effect in the long run. He said success stories like a tractor-trailer being pulled over in Springfield with millions of dollar and tons of heroin inside make the biggest impact, but are exceptionally rare. Most of the raids are targeting small-scale local drug dealers who are often selling to fuel their own use.
At-Large Town Councilor Penny Ricketts, though she noted she supports the idea “100 percent,” asked the chiefs whether a drug addict who turned up at the exchange with drugs on them would be arrested, predicting a criticism commonly seen when the programs are being debated.
Haigh said those people would still have to be arrested, since possession is still illegal.
“We’re looking at it from a health perspective,” he said. “I’m not turning a blind eye to the actual drug problem, but I’m looking at it from a public health side of things. I don’t think we ignore the heroin.”
Wednesday night’s meeting was the fifth time the board has discussed the plan. Chairman William Doyle said the board is taking a deliberately slow approach in light of the controversy stirred by their effort to raise the sale age of tobacco in town.
He said the board also wants to ensure the proper process is followed in approving a program, so as not to encounter procedural problems similar to those that shuttered a needle exchange program in Holyoke run by Tapestry Health.
“If we do it, we’d want it to be unanimous between the legislative and the mayor,” Doyle said. “We don’t want to create a divisive situation (like Holyoke).”
Still, Doyle said the plan has been “overwhelmingly supported.”
Previously, a survey conducted by the regional Opioid Task Force found widespread support for the idea. Roughly nine out of 10 people who took the survey supported the idea. Ten percent of respondents said they opposed the idea, while another 3 percent said they were undecided.
“We’ve had a couple of meetings where we’ve wanted people to voice some opposition, but we haven’t heard that yet,” he said.
You can reach Tom Relihan at: trelihan@recorder.com
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