Some harm reduction programs do include sterile pipes — which are used for smoking methamphetamine and fentanyl as well as crack cocaine — in such kits, with the intent of preventing infectious disease or injury in drug users who might otherwise rely on contaminated paraphernalia.
Yet even now, decades into a pervasive opioid epidemic that has led to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths from prescription painkillers, heroin and synthetic fentanyl, which now also frequently turns up in stimulants like methamphetamine and cocaine — and many more from infectious diseases stemming from drug use — addiction experts say the backlash is not entirely surprising.
Local, state and federal health officials were urging Mr. Pence to allow clean needles to be distributed to slow the outbreak, but Indiana law made it illegal to possess a syringe without a prescription.
Safe smoking kits are often distributed by syringe service programs, and often include glass stems, which function as pipes, as well as lip balm, alcohol swabs, rubber tips and other items to protect against mouth sores and cuts that can spread disease.
Daliah Heller, an addiction policy expert at Vital Strategies, a global health nonprofit organization that supports harm reduction, said the Beacon story was “calling up a racist trope, very clearly, of Black people smoking crack.
“Manchin was never going to save us, but now it looks like he is going to bury us,” said Joe Solomon, a founder of Solutions Oriented Addiction Response, or SOAR, a which ran a syringe exchange program in Charleston until last year, when the City Council imposed restrictions that effectively forced its closure.
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