The Panic In Needle Park

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

They tell us he was steaming, but San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom shouldn’t have been too surprised when The Chronicle reported that Golden Gate Park was littered with used drug syringes.

After all, his own Public Health Department spent $800,000 last year to help hand out some 2 million syringes to drug users under the city’s needle exchange program — sometimes 20 at a time.

Although Health Department officials say 2 million needles were returned, the fact is they don’t count them and can only estimate how many are coming back.

And from the looks of things, a lot of them aren’t.

Mary Howe, director of the Homeless Youth Alliance, which operates a needle exchange program near the park with the help of city money, said her group gets back only about 70 percent of the needles it distributes.

“People lose them or the police take them,” Howe said.

Other than the needle tip, aren’t syringes made out of plastic? Previous stories had led me to believe that the San Francisco city government was doing everything it could to ban plastic, as it’s been deemed this year’s environmental public enemy number one. But it sounds like in San Francisco, it’s drug syringes: Si! Plastic water bottles and grocery bags: a definite No.

(Story via Sacramento’s Fetching Jen, headline via Al Pacino.)