MORGANTOWN, W.Va. Milan Puskar Health Right Executive Director Laura Jones is responding to the visit last spring to the harm reduction program by Geno Chiarelli (R, Monongalia, 78), in downtown Morgantown.
On WAJR’s “Talk of the Town,” Jones said the Living in Good Health Together program meets addicts wherever they are with the mission of keeping them alive for the possibility of future recovery. The items offered in the program are also an effort to keep addicts healthy, which prevents disease in the community, according to Jones.
“By providing Naloxone, more commonly known as Narcan, we want to keep them alive, and we want to keep them as healthy as possible,” Jones said. “Because using drugs has a lot of harm that comes with it.”
About 10 years ago, data from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) said less than 13 percent of HIV cases were attributed to intravenous drug use, and by 2019, that number had jumped to more than 64 percent. Jones said as those numbers increased, Morgantown and Monongalia counties never experienced the spikes in HIV reported in Cabell and Kanawha counties.
“We have not seen that level of increase in HIV here in our community, and partly we believe that is because we have had an ongoing harm reduction program,” Jones said.
Recently, safe smoking supplies were added to the kits in addition to needles in harm reduction kits. Data suggests many addicts smoke drugs to avoid the health risks associated with injecting drugs, or many have such extensive damage they can no longer inject drugs into their veins.
“You’re not doing damage to your veins; you’re not exposed to bacteria or any of those things, so that was a new thing we had been doing,” Jones said.
Jones said reports of needles in public areas have been received many times over the last 10 years through the opioid crisis. She said they do abide by the new state law requiring a one-for-one needle exchange and have turned people away who cannot comply with the rule. While citing a small chance of members of the public being infected by a discarded needle, she said there are no cases to her knowledge that a resident has become infected with a disease by contact with a needle.
“We’re not an epicenter, but certainly we have a serious problem in our community,” Jones said. “Whenever you have a serious opioid epidemic, you’re going to have syringes in our community.”
In the end, Jones said this is a community problem and will only be solved when we come together.
“This is what’s happening in our community, and until we know how to better treat opioid addiction, we’re going to have to know what’s going on,” Jones said.