Some people are hard at work to reduce the number of hours or days that the Needle Exchange Van is parked at the corner of South 14th and South G Streets in Tacoma, (next door to Guadalupe House) -- with the aim to remove it entirely in time.  I follow this issue closely because the Van’s presence not only stands for public health in my neighborhood and city, but has also come to represent safety to me personally.

I feel safe knowing there is a successful syringe exchange program that appeals to people who would not enter a more institutional setting.  Tacoma has avoided an AIDS epidemic by intervening early where the disease could be spread.  Our two local state representatives testified at the May 2007 Tacoma-Pierce County Health Board meeting in fervent support that the Van’s success not be interrupted.

I feel safe knowing that users of drugs have a low-threshold opportunity to get life-saving information, hear (in a way they can accept) that someone cares about them, and start making safer choices.  I don’t worry that someone will miss their chance for clean needles, because the Van has been rock-steady and present, day after day through all kinds of weather, right in a place where folks already pass by when getting their most basic needs met for shelter and food.

If clients are hassled or looked down on as they make their way to the Van, it’s not from the neighbors.  The 15 households closest to the Van support its operation there.  It’s not the elderly women or other retirees who walk our block during the Needle Exchange’s hours that pose a risk to homeless drug users.  The St. Leo Walkabouters greet and give out candy as they pass folks coming to the Van.  The walkers used to get stunned stares from people on the street.  Now there’s a regular ritual in which both sides of the encounter “get it,” namely, a peaceful moment where respect, regard and gratitude are genuinely exchanged across the old divide.

In fact, I have felt the most threatened in my neighborhood not by people seeking the Van’s services, but by the words and spirit I hear from people targeting the Van as “The Source” for bad behavior anywhere in the neighborhood.  Once, a neighbor from two blocks away snarled at me, “they can all die,” referring to people who use drugs as less than human.  That kind of categorical rejection scares me a lot more than, say, the behavior of someone in the street life using foul language passing by.

I’ve seen months of good-faith attempts at neighborhood consultation with professional mediation on the subject of the local Van, sabotaged by an aggressive take-over.  Ground rules and agreements were thrown out the window, and I can’t describe that hijacking as anything less than violent.  There was a domineering, calculated coldness and lack of cooperation like nothing I’ve ever experienced at the hand of any drug user in the ten years I’ve worked and lived in this neighborhood.

No, give me a Van on the corner where people are accepted as worthy of time, respect, communication, and enouragement, and I’ll continue to feel safe on G Street.  When someone is ready to ask for drug treatment, the Van is there, making the most referrals of any other outfit in town.  I feel safer knowing that someone hooked on drugs, already taking the step to look for friendship, will find it here.  We can live together across the divisions of class, race, privilege…. and it starts with as simple a practice as meeting and greeting each other as and where we are.

For more information, please email info@tpchd.org, or visit http://tacomacatholicworker.googlepages.com/.