🚀 go-pugleaf

                              A Veto's Victims
                             by Steven Meinrath*

	Last October 8, Governor Pete Wilson vetoed for a second time 
     a bill that would have allowed pilot needle exchange programs to 
     be established in California.  Wilson took this action despite a 
     recent study by medical experts at the Centers for Disease 
     Control and Prevention documenting the value of needle exchange 
     programs in reducing the spread of AIDS and refuting the 
     assertion that such programs increase drug use.  In explaining 
     his veto of AB 260 Wilson piously proclaimed that allowing 
     addicts access to uninfected needles would send the wrong message 
     to young people about drugs.  The right message, according to 
     Wilson, is that, "[T]hey must suffer the consequences of their 
     personal choices."  Wilson's veto will do more than send a 
     message, it will cost people their lives.

	Wilson will never know the names or anything else about the 
     people who will suffer from his veto.  Let me tell you about one 
     person who might well have been alive today if there had been a 
     needle exchange program in California ten years ago.  She was a 
     talented and compassionate attorney and a dear friend.
     
	I met Susan Zwick in San Francisco in 1980.  Susan was a 
     self-employed landscaper at the time and I was selling furniture. 
     We quickly became good friends.  Within the next year or so we 
     both decided to go to law school and, as luck would have it, in 
     the Fall of 1982, we both ended up at the University of San 
     Francisco School of Law. 
     
	We studied together, but Susan was always the better 
     student.  In fact, Susan became a very distinguished law student: 
     winner of the advocate of the year competition, Agnes O'Brien 
     Smith Scholar, member of the McAuliff Honor Society.  It did not 
     take long for Susan to be recognized as an extremely bright, 
     talented, warm, generous person and as a very promising attorney. 
      
	After law school Susan was very sought-after by law firms in 
     San Francisco.  She accepted a clerkship with the superior court 
     and, after a year with the court, she was even more sought-after 
     by some of San Francisco's most prestigious firms.
     
	Although she had worked her way through college and law 
     school and was saddled with heavy debts from her student loans, 
     Susan was not interested in the salary or status that was hers 
     for the taking at the big-name, big-money law firms.  Before law 
     school, Susan had been a shop steward for the Laborer's 
     International Union, Local 261 in San Francisco, and she never 
     lost her identity as a working person and an advocate for other 
     working people.  Susan went to work for the small firm of 
     Needham, Hull and Dykman specializing in plaintiff's personal 
     injury cases.
     
	It wasn't until 1988 that Susan learned she had been 
     infected with HIV.  A man she had dated in law school had, 
     unbeknownst to Susan at the time, been an intermittant IV drug 
     user and had shared needles with others.  When Susan did learn of 
     his drug use, she ended their relationship.  Five years later, he 
     called to tell her he had just tested positive for HIV and that 
     she might have been exposed.  Susan had herself tested for the 
     virus and she tested positive.
     
	For the next two years, Susan remained free of any symptoms 
     of AIDS.  She continued to work and, despite knowing the danger, 
     refused to reduce her workload.  You see, Susan felt she could 
     not tell her firm's partner's that she had been infected with 
     HIV.  It was not that she feared their reaction.  She had come to 
     revere her employers as mentors, colleagues and close personal 
     friends and she knew they would not abandon her, no matter what 
     the cost.  Susan kept her condition a secret because she feared 
     what would happen to the firm's health insurance premiums once 
     its insurance carrier learned that one of the firm's associates 
     was HIV positive.  She continued to work at her usual exhausting 
     pace even when she began to feel herself getting weak.  
     
        Eventually, Susan developed full-blown AIDS and was forced 
     to leave work.  Her employers did all they could to provide for 
     her security and well-being.  Over the next two years, Susan 
     slowly deteriorated and died an agonizing death.  In her final 
     months, as throughout her life, she was surrounded by family and 
     friends and we were all awestruck by her dignity and courage.
     
        Had there been a needle-exchange program in San Francisco in 
     1983, it could have saved Susan's life.  A needle-exchange 
     program in 1994 would save other people's lives.  We know that.  
     Pete Wilson doesn't care.  He thinks that wouldn't send the right 
     message.  I have a message for Pete Wilson: may you never have to 
     watch a loved one die of AIDS.  And in November may you suffer 
     the consequences of your own personal choices.    
      
     (*Steven Meinrath is an attorney in Sacramento, California.)