HOLYOKE – A judge is expected to rule within days on whether Tapestry Health’s needle exchange program in Holyoke required approval by the City Council when it opened in 2012, or if an earlier vote by the Board of Health and backing of the mayor was enough to meet a “local approval” requirement in state law.
The expected decision comes more than three years after a half-dozen Holyoke city councilors filed a lawsuit that raised objections to the process used to open Tapestry’s clinic – one of only six needle exchange programs in the state created in the wake of a 1993 state law. Hampden Superior Court Judge Mark Mason said in a court hearing this week that he would rule on the matter before March 21.
Tapestry’s leaders say the Florence-based agency’s needle exchange programs in Northampton and Holyoke provide a critical public health service amid an ongoing epidemic of addiction, perhaps even more so in Holyoke where more than 2,000 individual clients used the state-funded needle exchange program on Main Street in the past year.
“We’re serving over 2,000 people a year in Holyoke,” Tim Purington, Tapestry’s director of harm reduction services, said. “It’s more than doubled from the year before. The vast majority of people we’re seeing in Holyoke have never been to Northampton so it tells you about the local need.”
By comparison, nearly 1,000 people used the nonprofit’s clinic on Center Street in Northampton, according to the agency’s figures.
“Everybody recognizes what a crisis this is and this is really front-line work,” Cheryl Zoll, Tapestry’s chief executive officer, said after Tuesday’s court hearing in Springfield. “It’s hard to know what’s going to happen, but I know the numbers tell their own story. There is a real need in Holyoke.”
The complaint against Tapestry, Holyoke Mayor Alex B. Morse and local health officials seeks a judicial ruling hinging on a 1993 state law that authorized the state Department of Public Health to permit up to 10 needle exchange pilot programs in Massachusetts. The law states that such programs require “local approval,” and at least six of Holyoke’s 15 city councilors named in the complaint believe that should have included the city’s legislative body.
“This is not condemning Tapestry or the program,” Harold F. Brunault, the Holyoke attorney representing the councilors told the Gazette. “This is whether a city or town wants to have the program, and the citizens in Holyoke voted against it at one point and the City Council voted twice not to have it.”
Brunault was referring to council votes in 1996 and 2001 that did not support a needle exchange program in the city and a nonbinding ballot question in 2001 when residents did not support implementing a needle exchange program in Holyoke by a vote of 4,549 to 2,495.
“It didn’t mean it’s a bad program, it’s that the people and the City Council didn’t want it,” Brunault said. “There are not too many communities that want it.”
Northampton attorney William C. Newman, of the American Civil Liberties Union of Western Massachusetts, is representing Tapestry along with Michael Aleo, a cooperating Northampton attorney. Newman said the legal argument by councilors relating to the “local approval” clause in the law was rendered moot after a newer state law in 2006 allowed for the lawful sale and distribution of needles to anyone over the age of 18.
“No special permission by a local legislative body is envisioned or permitted by the law,” Newman and Holyoke’s acting city solicitor, Karen Cunha, wrote in court documents. “…Tapestry’s distribution of needles in Holyoke is lawful.”
Newman and Aleo said the plaintiffs have made it clear throughout legal proceedings that they do not take exception to the quality of Tapestry’s needle exchange program, but rather to the way in which it was implemented in Holyoke.
“Clearly, it’s this academic exercise of whether their legislative feelings were hurt,” Aleo, of the firm Lesser, Newman, Aleo & Nasser LLP, said of the councilors involved.
Tapestry’s needle exchange program in Northampton had been approved by former Mayor Mary L. Ford in 1995 with backing from the police chief, and did not receive City Council approval.
“I made the determination that the police chief and I could make the decision,” Ford said. “The state had already given us the capability to do it. Nobody on the council at the time that I remember disputed that.”
But Northampton’s local approval process does not mean its implementation was lawful, Brunault cautioned.
“It’s subject to local approval, meaning the mayor and city council need to approve it,” he said. “Nobody challenged it. Until somebody challenges something, everybody assumes it’s legal.”
The needle exchange program in Northampton opened on Dec. 11, 1995, to help stem the spread of the AIDS-causing virus HIV and hepatitis C among intravenous drug users. The clinic began exchanging clean needles for dirty ones, but has expanded over two decades into a broader health services, education and training program that today focuses heavily on reducing the number of opioid overdose deaths, both in Northampton and Holyoke.
Purington said in addition to providing sterile needles to injection drug users, the clinics provide overdose prevention education and trainings on naloxone, a drug that counters opioid overdoses as well as health screenings, referrals for care, and counseling.
“We increasingly see our role as working with people, keeping them engaged in care, seeing a doctor,” Purington said. “People focus on the needle, but the needles are just one of a number of services we offer.”
In Holyoke, Tapestry is also engaged in outreach on the streets, safe syringe disposal and maintains hotlines. The agency also conducts syringe retrieval in that city.
“People recognize us, they know us, they trust us,” Purington said of the contact Tapestry’s employees make with drug users in the community. “It’s pretty clear we’re not trying to cause any trouble. We’re trying to help people.”
Purington said he’s “optimistic” that Tapestry’s needle exchange program will be allowed to stay open in Holyoke, but also worries about the consequences if its doors must close, as many clients will not make it to Northampton’s clinic.
Staff writer Dan Crowley can be reached at dcrowley@gazettenet.com.