Intravenous Drug Users

As Drew Walters strolls through Skid Row, drug addicts swarm toward him as if drawn to a magnet. "You got some for me today?" one man asks in a raspy voice, his eyes struggling to focus. The junkies are not looking to Walters, a former cocaine and heroin user, for a fix. He is a health worker now and they want the miniature bleach bottles and packets of condoms he carries to help them ward off AIDS. "That's the stuff!" the addict said.

Four years after it was proposed, Los Angeles County supervisors Tuesday approved a program intended to dampen the spread of AIDS by distributing bleach and condoms to intravenous drug users. Board observers said the action signals the most significant shift in county policy since Supervisor Gloria Molina took her oath of office on March 8, ending a decade of conservative domination of the board.

With a new liberal majority in power, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is expected to approve Tuesday the distribution of bleach kits and condoms to fight the spread of AIDS--four years after the preventive measures first were proposed here and years after similar programs were established in New York and San Francisco.

The prevalence of the AIDS virus among intravenous drug users appears to be low in San Diego right now: 2% to 5% of the drug injectors, according to county figures. But, once the virus gets into a drug-abusing population, it can spread silently and swiftly in the absence of aggressive intervention efforts. Increases of more than 10% per year in the prevalence of HIV antibodies--a precursor to AIDS--have been reported among IV drug users in New York City, parts of Italy, Edinburgh and Bangkok.

In the first case of its kind, a Los Angeles police officer is seeking a city-paid stress disability pension because he tested HIV positive after arresting a drug suspect who was infected with AIDS and later died of complications from the disease.

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday approved a sweeping AIDS policy that requires comprehensive AIDS education for all city workers and endorses a number of nationally controversial measures, including the distribution of condoms to prisoners during incarceration and bleach to drug users for sterilizing needles. The policy, largely the work of the city's retired AIDS coordinator, Dave Johnson, passed by an 11-1 vote.

An experiment in providing free needles to drug addicts not only reduced unsafe practices that transmit the AIDS virus but resulted in more addicts seeking drug treatment, a health official involved in the nation's first needle-exchange program said Tuesday.

A pilot project using street outreach and other methods to try to reduce AIDS transmission among drug addicts has helped many to stop or decrease their use of intravenous drugs, according to preliminary data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control. The early findings are based on interviews with 1,584 drug users in five cities.

There is growing evidence that prevention programs aimed at stopping the spread of the AIDS virus are failing to influence many of those at highest risk, and experts say the reasons include a lack of imaginative approaches and a kind of societal failure of nerve.

Many young physicians entering practice intend to go out of their way to avoid treating people infected with the AIDS virus--less out of fear of infection than out of personal bias against the types of people who most often have the disease, new research shows. Sixty-three percent of aspiring internists surveyed by UC San Francisco researchers said they were not planning to treat people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).