Federal Ban on Needle Exchange has been lifted

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Tuesday December 22, 2009 · 10:35 AM PST

2009/12/22 · 10:35

Last week when President Obama signed into law the Fiscal Year 2010 Consolidated Appropriations, it included an important provision that repeals a decades-old policy that prohibited states from using their share of federal HIV/AIDS prevention money to fund needle exchange programs. This ban frustrated advocates and underminded their efforts for a decade. But after grueling efforts to lift this ban, it's finally a reality.

This is an important victory for DC. Here is what Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said when the House voted to lift the ban:

We will never make up for the HIV/AIDS epidemic that has besieged this city because needle exchange was banned for a decade, or make up for the resulting loss of lives. There is no way to make poor women, forced to carry pregnancies to term, believe that their reproductive choice was guaranteed in the decades during the longest of the bans, on using local funds for abortions for poor women. But, today we start a new chapter in democracy in the District of Columbia with the first D.C. appropriations in memory free of all un-democratic, anti-home rule riders.

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Friday May 09, 2008 · 12:43 PM PDT

2008/05/09 · 12:43

My grandmother is a white upper middle class Yankee. The only black folks she interacted with (before my father married her daughter) were those who worked for her as help or at her husband’s business. She has shades of racism that she does not recognize but are second nature to her. I can say without a doubt that she loves me and my brother, as she loves any of her other grand kids.

It is worth mentioning that she always voted for the Democratic Party and she believed in the civil rights movement and social justice.

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