Tag: needle exchange

By Taylor Knopf In his 20 years at Healing Transitions, Chris Budnick has never turned away someone seeking help. But in late March after three false-positive tests for COVID-19 at the residential addiction recovery program in Raleigh, the program director made the tough call to stop all new admissions to the campuses and overnight detox.

By Liora Engel-Smith Jesse-Lee Dunlap goes where not even the mail carrier does. The Haywood County resident, who works with the N.C. Harm Reduction Coalition, routinely navigates into dirt pathways so narrow they hardly count as roads. On a recent afternoon, Dunlap maneuvered a white rental van up one such trail, squeezing up a steep

By Liora Engel-Smith Roughly three years after syringe exchange programs became legal in North Carolina, more people than ever are receiving clean needles and kits to help them reverse an overdose. Collectively, North Carolina’s syringe exchange programs — operated by local health departments, as well as faith-based and other community organizations — had more than

By Emily Davis On a recent Monday morning, a clean syringe and a bottle of naloxone got passed around the room at Grace United Methodist Church. Alongside a buffet of bagels and coffee, the Greensboro parish’s tables were scattered with leaflets of scripture recommendations, example prayers and supply lists, all on the theme of harm

By Yen Duong While conversations about the national opioid epidemic often focus on hardest-hit states such as Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, few people have analyzed county-by-county trends, where those state’s policies can make a difference. But a new study, published last month in an open-access version of the Journal of the American Medical Association,

By Taylor Knopf North Carolina organizations providing harm reduction education and services can now apply for grants ranging from $25,000 to $150,000 with the national Harm Reduction Coalition through the end of July. As infection rates for hepatitis C continue to rise across the nation largely due to injection drug use, the pharmaceutical company Gilead

By Taylor Knopf The United States is not the first country to be plagued by heroin and overdose deaths. Western Europe experienced spikes in opioid overdose deaths in the 1980s and 90s. But countries such as France and Switzerland have found ways to support drug users and rein in the problem. North Carolina Health News

By Taylor Knopf Rebekah Paulson found God in jail. As a former heroin user with a criminal record, she faced a lot of barriers when she got out. She wanted to attend church but discovered that many in the pews around her didn’t understand what she had been through. She eventually found Source Church in

By Teresa Wiltz Stateline Twenty years ago, Darlene Robertson moved back home to rural Louisiana to die. At the time, HIV was a death sentence, so she made her peace with it. But then something happened: Medication got better, which meant Robertson got better. “My doctor told me that I would die of old age

By Taylor Knopf The face of the North Carolina heroin epidemic is more diverse than one might think. “People drive in nice cars and dress professionally,” said Michael Harney, street outreach worker and prevention educator at Western NC AIDS Project in Asheville, which is home to one of 22 needle exchanges in the state. He