By Jhon T. Schuler and Jonathan Soroko.

(This article appeared april 1991 in THE NATION - New York)

Schuler and Soroko write about drug and crimes issue. Soroko, one of the attorneys representing Bonino and Taradash, formerly worked for the Office of the New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor.

"I have not .....been able to convince myself that there is really any imminent danger". These words are spoken by the Mayor in Henrik Ibsen's AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE to his brother, Dr: Thomas Stockman.

The Mayor ignores the medical evidence that his city's health spa is using polluted water that will bring disease and death instead of tourists. Rather than face political and financial ruin, he denies the health threat and casts his brother as the real threat to the city's welfare.

New York City's ravaged health care community can easily imagine Mayor Dinkins speaking the same words when confronted with evidence of the city's escalating AIDS crisis among intravenous drug users. Needle sharing is the most efficient means of transmitting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. At least 60 percent of New York's estimated 250.000 I.V. drug users are thought to beinfected with the virus. Some 1.000 women in New York City have contracted the virus from men who inject drugs. AIDS is now the leading cause of death among women between the age of 25 and 34, and of children between 1 and 4.

New York is one of the eleven State in which possession of a syringe without a prescription is a crime. Courageously defying this ban, the New York chapter of ACT UP has operated a needle exchange program for the past fourteen mounths. But this pioneering effort cannot possibly reach all New York's Intravenous drug users, so most are left to find expensive and usually unsterile needles on their own, or to share needles.

Legally, the Mayor and Health Commissioner could permit sterile syringes to be sold over the counter or distributed by AIDS-prevention organizations, but they refuse to do so.

In England, Liverpool adopted a needle exchange program and has had no cases of HIV infection from needle sharing or of pediatric AIDS. Programs in Tacoma, Washington; New Haven, Connecticut; Honolulu; Amsterdam and other cities have had similar results.

Yet New York's Mayor, like Ibsen's, ignores the evidence and claims that a needle exchange program will "encourage" or "condone" drug use. He appears unimpressed that no one of the cities with such programs has seen an increase in I.V. drug use. His repeated claim that tere is "no evidence" that needle exchange programs reduce the spread of AIDS virus is at worst a knowing falsehood and at best a paradigm that has outlived its usefulness.

If sending the "wrong message" is the concern, what is the message of a policy that favors death by AIDS over drug use? When Hepatitis was the most dangerous disease trasmitted by needle sharing, pounding the bully pulpit of "morality" might have been defensible. When a moral judgement means that thousands will die, it cannot be allowed.

On April 8, members of the Act Up Needle Exchange Group and the National AIDS Brigade go on trial in New York City for syringe possession; a week later the syringe possession trial of two Italians ifficials also begins in New York.

Emma Bonino, a member of the Italian Parliament, and president of Radical Party, and Marco Taradash, a member of the European Parliament, came to New York to declare the City a "global public Health menace" and, as a symbolic protest, to present sterile syringes to the Mayor. In May another trial involving Act Up and the National AIDS Brigade will begin. These trial will focus public attention on this cruel, morally reprehensible policy.

Ibsen's Dr. Stockman refused to be quiet, even though it meant he would endure enmity and abuse and be labeled an enemy of the people. The ignorance, rigidity and moral impoverishment of an irresponsible few speaking in the name of the "war on drugs" must not drown out sane health policy and common sense.