Palm Trees

Clean Needles: Recent Study Evaluates Injection Drug Use

Injection Drug use is dangerous behavior. Making matters worse, many users reuse needles or share needles and then fail to clean the needle with bleach before the next use. Sharing or reusing needles and failing to clean the needle increase the user’s risk for diseases such as HIV, hepatitis C, hepatitis B, and herpes simplex virus 2.

A recent study by The National Survey on Drug Use and Health examined the behavior of injection drug users to provide information for those making decisions about designing and implementing programs to educate the public about safe needle use.

Information from 2006 and 2008 show that an average of 425,000 persons aged 12 or older used a needle to inject heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, or other stimulants over the last year. 13% of injection drug users had used a needle that they knew another person had used or suspected another person had used the last time that they used a needle to inject drugs. Less than one third of injection drug users had cleaned the needle with bleach before using it in their last injection.

More than one half of the respondents who were injection drug users indicated that they had purchased the last needle they used from a pharmacy, while 12.4 percent received the needle through a needle exchange program.

Past year injection use was higher for those aged 18 to 34, recording over a quarter of respondents, than for those aged 12 to 17 and those aged 50 or older (0.09 and 0.11 percent, respectively). Males were twice as likely to have injected drugs than females, with males at 0.24 percent versus 0.11 percent for females. Past year injection rates varied among racial/ethnic groups, though Asians and Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders having lower rates than the other groups.

Though HIV prevention and education programs and programs targeted to injection drug users have been in existence for nearly two decades, much is still unknown about the behaviors of injection drug users. The study by the NSDUH shows that there is still a need for strategic educational programs to inform injection drug users about the risks of sharing, reusing and failing to clean their needles. The NSDUH provides useful information to program designers by showing information by demographic group. This allows program designers that ability to target specific subpopulations that may prove most receptive to education.