Used heroin needles more than a nuisance
Pollutinm waterways, raisinm risk of diseases
LOWELL, Mass. — They hide in weeds along hiking trails and in playground grass. They wash into rivers and float downstream to land on beaches. They pepper baseball dugouts, sidewalks and streets. Syringes left by drug users amid the heroin crisis are turning up everywhere.
In Portland, Maine, officials have collected more than 700 needles so far this year, putting them on track to handily exceed the nearly 900 gathered in all of 2016. In March alone, San Francisco collected more than 13,000 syringes.
People, often children, risk getting stuck by discarded needles, raising the prospect they could contract blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis or HIV.
It’s unclear whether anyone has gotten sick, but the reports of children finding the needles can be sickening in their own right. One 6-year-old girl in California mistook a discarded syringe for a thermometer and put it in her mouth; she was unharmed.
“I just want more awareness that this is happening,” said Nancy Holmes, whose 11-year-old daughter stepped on a needle in Santa Cruz, California. “You would hear stories about finding needles at the beach or being poked at the beach. But you think that it wouldn’t happen to you.”
One child was poked by a needle left on the grounds of a Utah elementary school. Another youngster stepped on one while playing on a beach in New Hampshire.
Even if adults or children don’t get sick, they must endure an unsettling battery of tests to make sure they didn’t catch anything. The girl who put a syringe in her mouth had to be tested for hepatitis B and C, her mother said.
Rocky Morrison leads a cleanup effort along the Merrimack River, which winds through the old milling city of Lowell, and has recovered hundreds of needles in abandoned homeless camps.
He has a collection of several hundred needles in a fishbowl, a prop he uses to illustrate that problem.
“We started seeing it last year here and there. But now, it’s just raining needles everywhere we go,” said Morrison, whose Clean River Project has six boats working parts of the 117-mile river.
Among the oldest tracking programs is in Santa Cruz, California, where the community group Take Back Santa Cruz has reported finding more than 14,500 needles in the county over the past 4 1/2 years.
“It’s become pretty commonplace to find them. We call it a rite of passage for a child to find their first needle,” said Gabrielle Korte, a member of the group’s needle team.