EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second story in a two-part series on a rise in heroin use on the North Olympic Peninsula.
For a few minutes at a time, public health workers in Port Townsend and Port Angeles have a chance to talk face to face with heroin users.
This chance comes when an addict visits the Clallam or Jefferson county health department’s syringe exchange service, a program that has grown busier than ever in 2014.
Clallam County Health Program Manager Christina Hurst has watched heroin overtake methamphetamine as the most common drug of choice for Clallam’s syringe exchange — and she reports some telling numbers.
In 2012, Clallam’s Health & Human Services Department exchanged 117,322 needles and syringes. Last year, that number rose to 223,471.
In the first 10 months of this year, Hurst and her staff exchanged 229,531 needles and syringes.
At the Jefferson County Health Department, the numbers are lower, though they’re climbing too: from 17,405 syringes two years ago to 24,596 last year.
Statistics aren’t yet available for 2014 as the department is understaffed, said Lisa McKenzie, Jefferson’s communicable diseases program coordinator.
She explained that the syringe exchange program affords her a chance to talk to clients about matters of life and death.
“We can offer them free HIV testing, and vaccinations for hepatitis A and B,” she said.
“We do overdose prevention education. We talk about not using alone. If they’ve taken too much, no one is there” to call 9-1-1 or bring them to the emergency room.
And, Hurst and McKenzie added, they offer addicts information about the many drug treatment programs on the Peninsula.
Providing needles and syringes directly conflicts with anti-drug paraphernalia laws, acknowledges Dr. Tom Locke, Clallam and Jefferson county public health officer.
But the spread of HIV, AIDS and hepatitis C through shared needles is a public health emergency, and as such, it “trumps the law.”
“Washington was one of the national pioneers in syringe exchange,” Locke said, adding that today the state has one of the country’s lowest rates of HIV associated with intravenous drug use.
“We don’t ‘give’ people needles,” he noted. “We exchange them. People bring them in,” instead of discarding the hazardous waste in public parks or playgrounds.
The heroin users who come to the county health department are getting younger, Locke added.
In Clallam County, Hurst compiled a report on the ages of syringe exchangers’ ages in 2013. Six clients were under age 19, while the largest group — 54 people — were age 20 to 24. Another 40 clients were between age 25 and 29.
At the top end of the spectrum, age 55 and older, there were 14 people.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.