EDITORIAL: Proper placement for needle drop box

Published 10:19 am Monday, December 4, 2023

Discarded syringes are potentially dangerous. We can all agree on that. Putting these needles in a secure metal box, where a heedless child can’t get at them, is better than the needles lying on the ground.

This, too, is hardly a controversial concept.

New Directions Northwest, the agency in Baker City that runs drug and alcohol treatment programs, received a grant from the state to install several syringe drop boxes.

One proposed site is outside the Baker County Library, 2400 Resort St. Library Director Perry Stokes is surveying the community about the proposal. The survey is available at the district’s website, www.bakerlib.org, or you can pick up a copy at the library.

Some concerns posted on social media regarding the proposal seem misguided.

It’s nonsensical to think such a receptacle would entice people who don’t already use needles to inject drugs to start doing so. Nor is it reasonable to think that intravenous drug users would congregate around a drop box, a sort of illicit modern version of the 1950s soda fountain.

Whether people would dispose of their needles safely is a valid question.

In Malheur County, where the county health department installed drop boxes in Ontario, Nyssa and Vale in 2021, about 15,000 needles were collected in 2021, and 25,000 in 2022. Syringe litter dropped by an estimated 87%, based on preliminary surveys in that county.

Notwithstanding that the boxes are available to people with diabetes who use needles to inject lifesaving insulin rather than potentially life-ending drugs, those are significant numbers of needles that couldn’t potentially poke an unwitting person.

The data also paint a distressing picture of the level of drug abuse, of course.

But that’s a societal problem which predates the installation of drop boxes and is neither caused by, nor catered to, those receptacles. Lamenting the amount of drug use does nothing to reduce the risk — needles, specifically — to others that results from drug users’ terrible choices.

Yet as beneficial as the drop boxes can be, not all locations are equally suitable.

And based in part on anecdotal information from the library district, the library property seems to be a poor spot.

New Directions officials told the library district board in October that used syringes are found occasionally along the Leo Adler Memorial Parkway, which runs along the east side of the library.

But according to a press release from Stokes, library staff rarely find needles in trash bins — about two per year, dropping to only about one more recently.

Those statistics suggest that another location might be more effective at reducing the number of accessible needles.

Moreover, it could be a location that isn’t frequented by children, as the library and the adjacent Geiser-Pollman Park certainly are.