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In a remarkable shift from the policies of his Republican predecessors, incoming Democratic New Jersey governor James E. McGreevey told a Tuesday news conference that the time had come to give free needles to injection drug users as a means of combating AIDS. But McGreevey then qualified that statement, adding that he wanted to first try "a hospital-based pilot program, which represents a prudent interim step," the Associated Press Reported.

Under former Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, now administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the state government routinely ignored the pleas of her own AIDS advisory council to implement needle exchange programs, and instead banned them. That ban was briefly challenged by the Chai Project, whose personnel distributed syringes in New Brunswick and suffered arrests and prosecutions from 1996-1998 before ceasing that aspect of their program (http://www.drcnet.org/wol/071.html#sentenced).

In addition to banning needle exchanges, state law also makes it a crime to obtain a syringe without a prescription. As a result of such policies, New Jersey is one of the few states where injection drug use is the leading cause of HIV infections. According to a 1999 report published by the Dogwood Center, a Princeton-based independent nonprofit research organization concerned with AIDS and social justice, New Jersey ranked fifth in the nation in having the highest rate of drug injection-related AIDS cases. It trailed only New York, Delaware, Maryland, and Connecticut (http://www.dogwoodcenter.org/top/topview.html).

While early reaction has been muted as interested parties wait to see what to see McGreevey's words translated into policy, Dawn Day, director of the Dogwood Center, expressed guarded optimism. "I think this is a good thing," she told DRCNet. "But I do have some concerns about this being based in hospitals. If the administration of an exchange program were at a hospital, that's one thing, but we need to have those vans going out into the community where the people are."

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