New Jersey: Newark’s Needle Exchange Without Funding

Newark health officials were recently surprised to discover that the city's proposed pilot needle exchange project (NEP) would receive no state funding. The December legislation authorizing pilot NEPs allocated $10 million only for drug treatment centers, which would work with the NEPs.

The city's $1.2 million NEP proposal to the state Department of Health and Senior Services, which will oversee pilot NEPs, had included fixed and mobile sites. A January 2008 launch was planned, and it was hoped the NEP would have 300 clients within its first year. Without state funding, the city is looking at a much smaller program or other funding sources, said Marsha McGowan, a Newark health official.

The criteria to pilot an NEP were that the municipality enact an ordinance allowing the NEP; have a minimum of 350 HIV/AIDS cases; and have an injection drug use-related HIV infection rate of at least 300 cases people per 100,000.

New Jersey has double the nation's rate of IDU-related HIV infections. Newark has the highest rate of HIV per 100,000 in the state and the second-highest rate of IV drug use, according to health officials. Fourteen percent of heroin treatment admissions in the state were from Newark.

"The state was given the task of overseeing" pilot NEPs, said Eddy Bresnitz, deputy commissioner of Health and Senior Services. "We are requiring all the [applicants] to demonstrate that they can do the programs, but they also have the resources to do that."

In addition to Newark, Paterson, Camden, and Atlantic City are proposing NEPs. Without sufficient state funding, NEP "providers could not undertake the project," said Catherine Correa, Paterson's Ryan White program director. She expected the state would secure resources to help evaluate the NEPs.

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