Word: addiction
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Parents who are not bought off can be intimidated. A Washington-area woman called her minister for help when she discovered $40,000 and two semiautomatic weapons under her son's bed. In New York City, a recovering drug addict intervened when his mother found 400 crack vials in her younger son's coat pockets: "I told her if she throwed it away, she'd find her son dead...
...dictation to small businesses and even churches and synagogues. Some foes of the bill took up the cry and unloosed a barrage of phone calls to Capitol Hill. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority charged, somewhat hysterically, that the bill could force churches to hire a "practicing, active homosexual drug addict with AIDS to be a teacher or youth pastor." Some mainstream religious groups scoffed at these fears as chimeras. Even most Republicans seemed less impressed by the evangelical broadsides than by the dangers of voting against anything called a civil rights act in an election year. Moreover, however valid Reagan...
...there is any American parallel to the African experience, it may be developing in some inner cities, where drug addiction and prostitution are inextricably linked to AIDS, where pregnancies among teenagers have become commonplace and where educational programs about safe sex either do not reach their intended audience or cannot cross cultural barriers. In January an article in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed a surprisingly high, 5.2% rate of AIDS virus infection among 4,028 patients attending clinics for sexually transmitted diseases in Baltimore. Most of the patients were black, and their infection rate was notably higher than...
Critics of the needle giveaway point out that it places city government legally at odds with itself. Says Sterling Johnson, New York City's special prosecutor for narcotics: "To give an addict a needle to shoot drugs is facilitating a crime." New York Archbishop John Cardinal O'Connor, a member of the presidential AIDS commission, blasts the proposal as an "act born in desperation that drags down the standards of all society." Moreover, he strongly questions "whether it will accomplish its purpose," inasmuch as the free needles will probably be shared...
...needle-exchange programs in the Netherlands, Scotland and Australia tend to encourage that view. Since 1984 an estimated 70% of the 15,000 drug addicts in the Netherlands have registered in treatment programs, which allow health authorities to maintain regular contact with them for AIDS testing and counseling. The underlying strategy of New York health officials is similar. Says Commissioner Axelrod: "Our needle-exchange program has nothing to do with needles and syringes. The needle gets the addict in so we can educate and counsel." Still, some wonder if the project will even begin to curb the AIDS epidemic among...