Needle-exchange activists arrested.

• Author: Green, Sarah
• Position: Needle-exchange programs illegal in New Jersey - Brief Article

On April 18, 1996, Diana McCague was arrested for giving a clean set of hypodermic needles to an undercover county detective. Her mistake earned her a date in the New Brunswick, New Jersey, municipal court. After reviewing the extensive evidence documenting the success that needle exchange has in preventing HIV, after hailing McCague as "a modern-day Joan of Arc," after telling the courtroom he would be proud to be her father, Judge Terrill Brenner found McCague guilty of illegal distribution of drug paraphernalia. The laws of the state of New Jersey require it.

McCague founded the Chai Project in 1994. It is one of about 100 needle-exchange programs in the country that deal with intravenous drug users in an effort to curb the spread of HIV.

Unfortunately for McCague and her band of ten volunteers, New Jersey has yet to amend its drug-paraphernalia statutes to allow needle exchange. Governor Christine Todd Whitman refuses to change a law written long before the AIDS epidemic.

McCague was certainly aware of the legal status of needle exchange in New Jersey when she launched the program from her home. After several years of AIDS activism with the group ACT-UP, McCague saw a desperate need for needle-exchange programs in her community, which has one of the highest rates of drug-related AIDS cases in the country. She and a few friends began walking through neighborhoods in New Brunswick, asking people if they needed clean sets of syringes, carefully recording the numbers they were distributing and collecting, and keeping track of the recipients through a coding system that allows participants to remain anonymous.

The project has expanded over the years. It now distributes syringe sets, condoms, and public-health information from a van outside a local soup kitchen. Volunteers maintain the original walk route once a week, in addition to making house calls. The headquarters is now a small office in the...