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The End of a Stupid Policy

By Michael Blankenship

Public health advocates held an understandably muted celebration when President Obama signed a bill repealing a 21-year-old ban on federal financing for programs that supply clean needles to drug addicts. The bill brought an end to a long and bitter struggle between the public health establishment ? which knew from the beginning that the ban would cost lives ? and ideologues in Congress who had closed their eyes to studies showing that making clean needles available to addicts slowed the rate of infection from H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, without increasing drug use. But the shift in policy comes too late for the tens of thousands of Americans ? drug addicts and their spouses, lovers and unborn children ? who have died from AIDS and AIDS-related diseases...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Justice Gambit on December 26, 2009 (boomark / email).