Eight months after Congress voted to end a decade-long ban on the use of federal funds for needle exchange programs (NEPs) in the District of Columbia, money is starting to flow to the programs in

A state-sanctioned needle exchange program envisioned for Bexar County (greater San Antonio) under legislation passed last year will not happen -- at least not this year.

Officials of the Iranian government announced last week that they are embarking on a pilot program to provide syringes and condoms to drug users in an effort to prevent the spread of AIDS and hepat

David Borden, Executive Director

The needle exchange program bill passed nearly a year ago by the New Jersey state legislature has borne its first fruit.

An amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill that would have barred the dispersal of federal funds from those departments to any city that opened a safe injection site for drug users

Repressive law enforcement responses to injection drug users in Southeast Asia are undermining the effort to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS in the region,

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The Jersey City, New Jersey, City Council Wednesday unanimously passed an ordinance allowing for the creation of a needle exchange program in the city.

From The Washington Post:

The House yesterday lifted a nine-year-old ban on using D.C. tax dollars to provide clean needles to drug addicts, handing city leaders what they consider a crucial new weapon against a severe AIDS epidemic.

Well, I know what I'm doing tonight. Heroin. Because concerns about the availability of clean needles were the only thing stopping me.

Pro-AIDS activist Mark Souder is furious. He thinks this will cause a heroin epidemic or something. He's right, if you can call a bunch of heroin users that would otherwise be dead an epidemic.

Not to mention that all my friends are pawning their playstations in anticipation of getting super-wasted on uncut, AIDS-free H. I hear it's like having sex with a cloud.

Report from DANA LARSEN
President, eNDProhibition
The unofficial anti-prohibition wing of Canada's NDP.
http://www.endprohibition.ca

MY EXPERIENCES AT THE NDP CONVENTION

Drug warriors don’t answer phone calls or emails from the likes of us, so the only way to ask them questions is to show up when they’re speaking publicly and hope to get called on during Q&A. Sitting in the moderator’s line of sight helps, as does not looking like a balls-to-the-wall hippie drug-legalizer (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Press Release – For Immediate Release, August 31, 2006

Drug Users go to Court to keep Safe Injection Site Open

Vancouver – The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) will seek an injunction in BC Supreme Court to prevent the federal government from closing Insite, North America’s first safe injection site.

A few weeks we reported in Drug War Chronicle that New Jersey had become the only state in the nation not allowing needle exchange programs in some form or at least syringe purchase without a prescription -- the second to last state, Delaware, passed a needle exchange law last month.

Steubenville, West Virginia, has an interlocking problem of drugs and prostitution, The Intelligencer in nearby Wheeling reported this morning. The article was prompted by an anti-prostitution sting operation that rounded up six men and five women Wednesday night.

"The prostitution and the drugs go hand-in-hand," [police chief William] McCafferty said. "Most of the (prostitutes) are drug users, and that's how they support their habit. None of the men who are coming here to purchase the product the women are selling are from Steubenville, and we don’t need them in our city.

INSITE, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside safe injection site, is in danger of being shut down after September 12 if the new conservative health minister doesn't reapprove it. Here's the email MP Libby Davies sent out today:

Dear friends,

I am writing you today regarding the fate of INSITE, North America’s first supervised safe injection facility. As you may know, this program started as a three-year study in September of 2003, and the results have been incredibly impressive. INSITE has reduced public injections, reduced the transmission of blood-borne infections like HIV and Hepatitis C, and reduced the number of injection-related infections. Most significantly, however, is that of 453 overdoses at INSITE, not one has resulted in a fatality. This is strong evidence of the success that this project has had in reducing the harm to drug-users.