The prickly issue of needle exchange: shame on federal policy.

When I wrote the April 1992 DATA commentary entitled "The prickly issue of needle exchange," I never imagined that the Federal government would have gone almost four years without embracing an active public health policy endorsing needle exchange. At that time, we published a condensation of an article from the Journal of Addictive Disease on the success of the Tacoma Needle Exchange Project and cited the report of the President's National Commission on AIDS. The latter stated that "the President's AIDS Commission strongly recommends immediately instituting a nationally sanctioned needle exchange program." However, Bush's director of the National Drug Control Policy, Robert …