Puerto Rico: Drug Addicts Get Clean Needles from AIDS Prevention Group

"Yes, they're drug addicts. Yes they're committing a crime with the needles we give them," said Dr. Jose Vargas Vidot, the man behind the Community Initiative at the Luis Llorens Torres housing project in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and throughout the capital. "But I'm a doctor, and the point here is to save lives. That should be the most important thing for everyone involved in fighting AIDS."

Needle exchange has emerged as one of the more controversial measures for curbing the spread of AIDS in Puerto Rico. The stakes are high. In contrast to the rest of the United States and the Caribbean, where the primary means of transmission is sexual contact, more than half of Puerto Rico's HIV cases are infected through drug use with needles. Another large percentage of new cases is among those who have sex with intravenous drug users. Health officials estimate that there are 100,000 drug addicts in Puerto Rico out of a population of almost 4 million.

"There are government programs to get them the medicine they need, but they're really not designed for anybody suffering from addiction," said Vidot. As Vidot sees it, the problem of drug use cannot be separated from lack of jobs, lack of housing and poor education. Many people in the program come from families with histories of drug abuse, violence and neglect in childhood.

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