The Sixteenth Street Clinic, which has a location at 2906 S. 20th St., is one of the three operating Syringe Service Programs in the City of Milwaukee today.
Six months. That’s the amount of time city and non-profit leaders have to come up with a solution to fix the high number of needles littered across Milwaukee’s streets.
The number of dirty or used needles is rising according to police—especially on the city’s south-side. Alex Ramirez, captain of Milwaukee Police Department District 2, said the issue is only getting worse. “It’s not every other day—it’s every other hour,” said Ramirez about the number of calls his district gets regarding drug-related issues.
This led Alderman Bob Donovan, whose district covers much of the south-side, to seek answers as to how the city can do a better job of dealing with this issue. “This is a middle class to lower class working class neighborhood, full of good people,” said Ald. Donovan, chairman of the Public Safety and Health Committee. “But it’s been subjected to a lot of drug activity. I’m hoping to get to the bottom of some of these things.”
In 2017, there were 722 new cases of Hepatitis C (HCV) reported in Milwaukee County—the majority of which occur from injection drug use. Milwaukee County accounted for more than 24% of new HCV infections across the state, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. There were also 118 new cases of HIV diagnosed in Milwaukee—8% of which were attributed to injection drug use.
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Syringe Service Programs (SSP) are public health programs for people who either inject drugs themselves or know someone who injects drugs. Generally, they offer safe and clean needles to users while offering them ways to dispose of used needles, while offering HIV, STI and HCV testing. United Migrant Opportunity Services (UMOS), the Sixteenth Street Clinic and the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin (ARCW) are currently the only SSP’s or needle exchange programs in the city. Needle exchange programs also swap out used needles for new ones.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, SSP’s reduce opioid overdose deaths while reducing needle stick injuries among the public. And according to the ARC, which started the first syringe exchange program in Milwaukee in 1994, syringe exchange programs in Wisconsin helped support a 65% reduction in transmission of HIV attributed to the injection of drug use over a 23-year-period.
However, used needles not being properly disposed is still an issue the city is interested in dealing with. In the last two years alone, ARC has distributed 2,860,112 syringes, while collecting 1,713,003 syringes. In August 2018, UMOS began a new needle exchange program. They distributed 2,901 syringes and collected 1,810 syringes.
Both the police department and fire department have said they are getting an increased number of calls for discarded syringes on the streets. The MPD said they do not have the resources or time to pick up the syringes. That’s where the non-profit groups and the health department come in. The Public Safety and Health Committee gave these groups six months to tackle this issue during a meeting Thursday.
Bill Keeton, the vice president and chief advocacy officer for ARC, said the opioid epidemic is a large issue to tackle. “We want to make sure that any solutions that we come up with are things that are going to make it easier for people to discard needles, and in this case it’s not just people who are using illicit drugs,” said Keeton.
One idea that was mentioned was re-purposing mailboxes across the city to drop syringes into—an idea that has worked well for the city of La Crosse, Wis. The group will meet together to discuss this idea, and others, soon. They also plan to work in close coordination with the Health Department, Department of Neighborhood Services and MPD.
“It’s not just syringes that are indicative of the scope of the problem,” Keeton said of the opioid epidemic in the area. “Until we figure out a way to deal with the bigger issue of addiction, we’re going to continue to struggle with issues like inappropriately discarded syringes.”
