To be honest, I didn’t really have many thoughts towards the needle exchange program. At first, I thought it was just going to be a program where people had a place to bring their dirty needles instead of throwing them on the street. I thought that this was a good concept.

After listening to the guest speaker on Thursday, I do not necessarily agree with the needle exchange program. I feel that a program like this is enabling the drug use within the community. I was honestly in shock with the number of supplies that are handed out to for these people to “do drugs safely”. Zero part of that sentence makes sense to me. In all sincereness, my thought when she was speaking was why don’t we give them the drugs to, I just feel like this program is handing everything out to keep their drug addiction going. And then we are going to give them all the Narcan that they want. So, they can continue to do drugs and have a friend Narcan them when they have gone to far. I just feel the cycle will keep repeating itself and it is not improving by doing these things.

A program that enables getting clean and detoxing from drugs would be a better strategy to resolve this healthcare disparity in the community. Providing them with access to narcotic anonymous groups to be a part of rather than the supplies to do more drugs with. It’s hard to apply what we have learned from this presentation because unless you work for an agency that is doing this, I do not believe that you will see these kinds of exchanges happening in the everyday nursing world.