Fifteen years ago George Williams gave up a profitable business selling meat to spend his time in the street with drug addicts, ex-offenders, and the homeless. “I made plenty of money in business,” he says. “But it wasn’t giving me the nourishment I needed.” Before he went into the meat business, George was a dope fiend.
It was a mixed group that met that day, all the primary colors and some of the shades in between. Most of them worked in social services. Some were ex-addicts, some weren’t. Some were ex-offenders, some were HIV positive, some had good paying jobs, some couldn’t afford a meal at the restaurant. Nobody was pushed to order from the menu; the sweet rolls were free.
The AIDS organizations were already stretched to their limits with counseling programs and promoting safer sex and condom use. Due to Illinois state laws against drug paraphernalia and Chicago street laws against giving away for free something that another person sells, starting a street needle exchange program could be poison to an existing organization. Who wanted to risk arrest, or alienate a donor base, or drive off potential grantors for a cause as dubious as giving clean works to junkies?
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Getting started wasn’t going to be as simple as finding a corner, rounding up some volunteers, buying a box of syringes, and handing them over to anyone who asked for them. First they needed to set up a method. Some of the members of the Recovery Alliance had met two men who were already giving clean works to addicts they knew in their own neighborhood. With an estimated 60,000 drug injectors in Chicago, the two guys could barely make a dent.
George, Dan, and one of the other members of the Alliance scouted several locations, but they eventually opted for a sidewalk in Englewood, where George did street outreach. Englewood was littered with problems from the sidewalks to the rooftops. Dan mentioned that programs in other cities had determined where to set up by looking in the gutter. If they found piles of needles glittering there, they were in the right place. George showed Dan a street lined with enough dirty plastic syringes to make a short boardwalk.
They paid a courtesy call to the police and spoke with the neighborhood relations officer. Officially, he couldn’t give them permission to do the exchange, but he wished them luck. George’s friends in the community spread the word, and on one of the few bitter days this past January, their first customer was already waiting when they drove up. He pulled used needles out of every crevice in his bulky clothing. He waited while Dan got the bucket from the trunk of his car, then turned over 14 of them.
The three of them went down to the spot near the corner every weekend through January. In February, George took a trip to the second annual Needle Exchange Convention in Tacoma, Washington, to gather more information and support material. Representatives of syringe exchange programs from as far away as Kathmandu attended the convention. Many programs are completely underground, supported only by the people doing them and the people using them. A couple of the programs, including Tacoma’s, are run by health departments. Some of the groups sold T-shirts and jewelry to pay their way to the conference and support their projects. Most of the stuff being sold was handmade. People from a Seattle program called “Point Defiance” sold pins with hypodermics attached to them. “Pins and needles,” George said, “I don’t know who’d wear them, but I like it anyway.”
