Anyone who doubts the importance of maintaining the embattled needle exchange clinic in Holyoke or establishing a new one in Greenfield should listen to the story of Liz Whynott. Within months of graduating from Northampton High School in 2000 with good grades and great promise, she made the mistake of trying heroin and found herself hooked.
Almost overnight, Whynott found herself scraping together cash for fix after fix, she told Gazette reporter Dan Crowley. “I hated using. I hated the hustle. I hated having to find heroin everyday,” recalled Whynott, now 33. “I felt extremely lonely, extremely confused and my life was in chaos.”
For Whynott, as for thousands of other struggling women, men and teenagers in the Pioneer Valley, the needle exchange clinic run by Tapestry Health in Northampton proved a lifesaver. Rather than contracting the AIDs-causing HIV virus or hepatitis C from a dirty needle, she had access to clean ones. Rather than try to cope with her addiction alone, she found the kind of counseling and non-judgmental support that allowed her to break the habit before it killed her.
Clean for the last 13 years, Whynott enrolled at Greenfield Community College and eventually earned a master’s in public health from UMass Amherst. And she found a way to give something back. As director of Tapestry’s needle exchange programs in Northampton and Holyoke, she told her story publicly for the first time in hopes that it will help officials and residents understand the need for such clinics.
Her message comes at a critical time. Last month, a Hampden County judge ruled the Holyoke clinic must stop distributing needles soon unless the City Council approves its existence. The ruling was prompted by a lawsuit the council filed when the clinic opened in 2012, citing a state law requiring “local approval.” While the facility had won unanimous backing from the city’s Board of Health, mayor and police chief at the time, the council said it had been improperly shut out of deliberations.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether councilors have a legitimate technical point. But we hope that Holyoke residents and their elected representatives will rise above technicalities to support the exchange’s continued operation in a city with more than its share of drug woes.
Those with lingering doubts need only look at the statistics: In 2014, the Main Street clinic in Holyoke saw 985 individuals who used the clinic 3,235 times. In 2015, the client load more than doubled, with 2,127 individuals making more than 6,000 visits.
Just as important as those statistics is this one: The clinic distributed 106,705 new syringes last year and took in even more used ones: 122,013. That not only kept addicts from deadly infections but also kept dirty needles from littering the streets where children play.
Some might argue that providing clean needles to addicts only encourages their habits, but research shows that is not the case. Steffanie A. Strathdee of the University of California San Diego Department of Medicine has studied such clinics worldwide and found they are an effective way to keep addicts safe while providing them with the services they need to leave needles behind for good.
All of these points apply equally to Greenfield, where residents and health officials are pondering the creation of a needle exchange clinic. A recent survey by the regional Opioid Task Force found overwhelming support for such a clinic, and for good reason: While Northampton’s needle clinic has cut the rate of blood-borne pathogens linked to dirty needles, the rates of hepatitis C have nearly doubled in the last three years in Franklin County. And The Recorder’s pages have filled with stories of addiction and the pain it causes not only to users but also to family, friends and neighbors.
Residents and their official representatives in Holyoke and Greenfield have the chance to take a step to reverse the tide of opioid addiction. We hope they will all support the clinics that can mean the difference between life and death.