Tapestry Health’s latest bid to continue distributing clean needles in Holyoke should surprise no one, given the inattention city councilors are paying to the program.
The Florence nonprofit last week filed a motion in Hampden Superior Court requesting that Judge Mark Mason vacate or modify his ruling in March that ordered Tapestry to stop distributing hypodermic syringes and needles at its Holyoke clinic within 120 days.
At the time, Mason ruled that the agency did not receive proper approval from the City Council when it opened the program in 2012 under the state’s “pilot needle exchange program,” overseen and funded by the state Department of Public Health. The matter went to court after Holyoke city councilors sued over the clinic’s opening. The law that set up the pilot programs calls for “local approval,” which councilors’ took to mean the city’s legislative body.
When Tapestry opened its needle exchange clinic, it received unanimous approval by the Board of Health and support from the mayor and police chief, but the council was not involved. Tapestry, Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse and that city’s health officials were defendants.
If Holyoke’s City Council felt left out of the conversation, Mason gave it a golden opportunity to weigh in. The judge’s 120-day window gave councilors time to consider the merits of the program – and back it or halt it.
Two and a half months after Mason’s ruling, the council has not raised the issue. There is no indication any councilor plans to bring Tapestry’s needle exchange clinic to the floor in the body’s two meetings in June before time runs out and Mason’s order takes effect.
Given the legal fight, it seems reasonable to expect the council would want to get involved. Isn’t that what it wanted?
Holyoke is a major source of heroin distribution in the Valley and has had some of the highest rates of HIV infection among cities and towns in the commonwealth, according to state Department of Public Health data.
The public deserves to know where their leaders stand on Tapestry’s clinic in Holyoke, which served more than 2,000 people in 6,000 visits last year. Council members should address the needle exchange before Mason’s July deadline. Not doing so would shirk their duty to address public health matters.
In addition to taking in infected needles and distributing clean ones, Tapestry’s clinic provides an array of services. They include educating drug users and their families about overdose prevention and use of the life-saving overdose drug Naloxone, health screenings, counseling services and citywide needle retrieval efforts. Its clean needle distribution is designed to help prevent HIV and Hepatitis C infection. The merits of such programs have been lauded nationally and internationally.
As Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan and J. Cherry Sullivan of the Hampshire HOPE Coalition said in a guest commentary on this page, programs like Tapestry’s syringe exchange were cited as among the most effective strategies to save lives endangered by the prescription drug and heroin epidemic at the National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit in Atlanta last month. That is not news to Tapestry, which knows how important its work is among some of the most vulnerable populations in the region.
In its most recent legal filing, Tapestry seeks to part ways with the DPH pilot program. If a judge agrees, the organization is poised to take a financial hit by severing ties with the state agency. But this would disconnect the agency from the statutory language that requires the “local approval” that got it in this legal spat in the first place. Lawyers for Tapestry argue that state laws do not prohibit, restrict or limit the possession or non-sale distribution of needles, only the “sale” of needles. They cite a December decision in which a judge ruled in favor of the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod, which faced a similar situation in Barnstable as Tapestry Health does in this case. We hope the court upholds Tapestry’s newly modeled needle exchange program in Holyoke. For city councilors, this has never been a case about public health, but rather about hurt feelings. Get over them, councilors, and do your jobs.