They hide in weeds along hiking trails and in playground grass. They wash into rivers and float downstream to land on beaches. They pepper baseball dugouts, sidewalks and streets. Syringes left by drug users amid the heroin crisis are turning up everywhere.
In Portland, Maine, officials have collected more than 700 needles so far this year, putting them on track to exceed the nearly 900 gathered last year.
In March alone, San Francisco collected more than 13,000 syringes, compared with only about 2,900 the same month last year.
Photo: AP
People, often children, risk getting stuck by discarded needles, raising the prospect they could contract blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis or HIV or be exposed to remnants of heroin or other drugs.
It is unclear whether anyone has gotten sick, but the reports of children finding the needles can be sickening in their own right. One six-year-old girl in California mistook a discarded syringe for a thermometer and put it in her mouth; she was unharmed.
“I just want more awareness that this is happening,” said Nancy Holmes, whose 11-year-old daughter stepped on a needle in Santa Cruz, California, while swimming. “You would hear stories about finding needles at the beach or being poked at the beach, but you think that it wouldn’t happen to you. Sure enough.”
They are a growing problem in New Hampshire and Massachusetts — two states that have seen many overdose deaths in past years.
“We would certainly characterize this as a health hazard,” said Tim Soucy, health director in Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city, which collected 570 needles last year, the first year it began tracking the problem.
It has found 247 needles so far this year, he said.
Needles turn up in places such as parks, baseball diamonds, trails and beaches — isolated spots where drug users can gather and attract little attention and often the same spots used by the public for recreation. The needles are tossed out of carelessness or the fear of being prosecuted for possessing them.
One child was poked by a needle left on the grounds of a Utah elementary school. Another child stepped on one while playing on a beach in New Hampshire.
Even if adults or children do not get sick, they must still endure an unsettling battery of tests to make sure they did not catch anything.
The girl who put a syringe in her mouth was not poked, but had to be tested for hepatitis B and C, her mother said.
Some community advocates are trying to sweep up the pollution.
Rocky Morrison leads a cleanup effort along the Merrimack River, which winds through the old milling city of Lowell and has recovered hundreds of needles in abandoned homeless camps that dot the banks, as well as in piles of debris that collect in floating booms he recently started setting.
He has a collection of several hundred needles in a fishbowl, a prop he uses to illustrate that the problem is real and that towns must do more to combat it.
“We started seeing it last year here and there, but now, it’s just raining needles everywhere we go,” said Morrison, a burly, tattooed construction worker whose Clean River Project has six boats working parts of the 188km river.
Among the oldest tracking programs is in Santa Cruz, where the community group Take Back Santa Cruz has reported finding more than 14,500 needles in the county over the past four-and-a-half years.
It said it has received reports of 12 people getting stuck, half of them children.
“It’s become pretty commonplace to find them. We call it a rite of passage for a child to find their first needle,” said Gabrielle Korte, a member of the group’s needle team. “It’s very depressing. It’s infuriating. It’s just gross.”
Some experts say the problem would ease only when more users get treatment and more funding is directed to treatment programs.
Others are counting on needle-exchange programs, now present in more than 30 US states, or the creation of safe spaces to shoot up — already introduced in Canada and proposed by US state and city officials from New York to Seattle.
Studies have found that needle-exchange programs can reduce pollution, said Don Des Jarlais, a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
However, Morrison and Korte said that poor supervision at needle exchanges would simply put more syringes in the hands of people who may not dispose of them properly.
After complaints of discarded needles, Santa Cruz County took over its exchange from a nonprofit in 2013 and implemented changes. It did away with mobile exchanges and stopped allowing drug users to get needles without turning in an equal number of used ones, Santa Cruz County Government spokesman Jason Hoppin said.
Along the Merrimack, nearly three dozen riverfront towns are debating how to stem the flow of needles. Two regional planning commissions are drafting a request for proposals for a cleanup plan.
They hope to have it ready by the end of July.
“We are all trying to get a grip on the problem,” Haverhill Mayor James Fiorentini said. “The stuff comes from somewhere. If we can work together to stop it at the source, I am all for it.”
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
RSS