 |
Halfway down the street,
a thin woman propositions customers. "Sealed works? Three dollars
a piece."
Locations like these exist all over New York, Despite the war
on drugs, business is booming. Throughout the eighties, crack
dominated traditional heroin areas like harlem and the Lower East
Side, Heroin is making a comeback. Purity levels on the street
are up from around 4% to 45%. The Columbians having saturated
the cocaine market have begun to grow poppies. The Lower East
Side is where the dope ends up.
|
 |
Syringes are
on sale at most dealing locations, sometimes they've already been used and
the package resealed.
You
pay your money and you take your chance.
|
|
The United States has
about a million injecting drug users. One quarter of them live
in New York City. By the time in the mid-eighties when epidemiologist
identified injecting drug use a major route for the transmission
of hiv, the virus had already hit New York City hard. Today, research
shows that fifty per cent of the cities intravenous drug users
have been infected. The virus has since been passed on to their
children, their sexual partners and their partners' partners.
The vast majority of these people are black and hispanic and most
of America couldn't care less whether they live or die. My friend Edith,
an ex- addict, who works as an AIDS trainer explained how the
infection spread so rapidly. New York has always
had laws prohibiting the possession of syringes and needles. You
didn't want to be arrested in possession of works, so you'd slip
into a shooting gallery to test the dope. For a few dollars you could use the room rent a works and get high.
|
|
Needles were passed indiscriminately from arm to arm, and with each hit went the
deadly virus
|
|
When British health
officials recognized that injecting drugs was a route for transmitting
the virus, they quickly set up syringe and needle exchange programs.
Drug policy in America has always been shaped by racism. The media
and politicians have denounced drug users as the enemy within
since the 1920's. As a result, AIDS prevention for injecting drug
users is virtually non-existent in many parts of the USA.
|
|
S
T
R
E
E
T
|
