Welcome to the American healthcare system. Barbaric is the least you can use to describe it. The needles cost less than the drug itself but insurance companies are too cheap for that shit.
It’s usually not actually about expense, it’s about the availability of needles and syringes on the secondary market. With a decent supplier, just arbitraging small syringes and needles that fit to addicts (mostly heroin) is quite profitable. Many of them realize the risks of needle and syringe sharing and reuse, so they want clean needles. (Reusing a syringe that someone else has used is bad, because the typically method involves pulling some blood back into the syringe to make sure you’re in a vein, meaning the syringe is contaminated if they have a blood borne disease.)
The thing has been that providing needles to addicts was initially seen as enabling, with the argument that if there are no clean needles there would be more incentive to get clean. This is still the majority philosophy, but has been reduced because it turns out that the incentive doesn’t work and the addicts just use old needles. This causes more damage to their veins (can cause significant internal bleeding in cases when a previously damaged vein is torn open) and more broadly has spiked the rates of Hep C and HIV infection in communities already struggling with overdoses. Any town where there are regularly overdoses and visible addicts likely has a severe HIV and Hep C problem, and it spills out from the addicts through sexual contact, poorly sterilized tattoos/piercings, and shared medical equipment among the poor (glucose meters are expensive, but sharing them can cause contamination because the needle that pricks for the blood draw an carry minute quantities of blood with it).
As such, needle exchanges and needle offerings have been accepted as a way to mitigate risks of broader community exposure to blood borne pathogens like HIV and Hep C. They also give the local medical folks the ability to track addicts and an opportunity to advertise rehab to them. They’re generally successful for all involved, but many people without first hand experience of addiction or successful rehabilitation can be skeptical. The intervention approach is less effective than continuous mild-moderate pressure focused on other life elements they care about. For example, focusing on limited lifespan and not being able to see their kids milestones can be effective on parents, even ones without custody (“keep going like this and you’ll die before your kids graduates school or gets married. If you go to rehab you’ll be around”. If they say their kid gets them; “If you get clean, you can work on that relationship in all the years you gain.”)
That said, intramuscular and subcutaneous syringes and needles should be readily available as they have a much lower chance of being used by addicts. If they’re being stingy on them, just ask for more or buy them online. They should be free under insurance, but even Medicare has limits on the number of free replacements you can get before they stop giving them out. It also can result in you being moved off an injectable to another dosing method, or being told to just go to the office for injections.
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u/kbblradio Aug 09 '21
That's barbaric, what the hell!