Jon Stuen-Parker is founder of the National AIDS Brigade and has helped establish needle exchange programs nationwide. For his efforts, Jon has been arrested more than 40 times. Over two dozen arrests have been in Massachusetts. Jon now runs a drop in center for veterans in south Boston and also leads volunteers to foreign nations to help prevent the spread of AIDS.

They’ll say if we allow needles, we’ll never help the community- it’s “a band aid approach to drug problems…” That’s crazy; you give em clean needles until they can get something else. You keep em AIDS free. It’s hard enough to stay off drugs without having the burden of AIDS on your shoulders. You keep em AIDS free. You can have treatment programs and people won’t go unless they want to change. But you keep them AIDS free until that can happen.

They have to allow people opportunities for positive change. Work, employment, school. We have a lot of smart kids and if they don’t have the opportunity to use their brains the right way...

You can’t confine people to small area- in these housing projects- without aberrant, deviant behaviors. You have a drug which is going to offer you a good feeling. I did it initially because I wanted to be able to hang out with the older guys. What it is, drug dealers want the kids to use. I had a drug addict, come, shoot me up, rip me off until I learned how to do it myself.

They’re not just cutting the drugs. They’re changing, they’re making a much more addictive drug. People say you get a habit in one day. People come in here, they only used it one day and they have the diarrhea. Even after only one day of using this- I think it’s if you had a habit before you can get a habit real quick.

Once this stuff arrives, addicts demand it. It cuts through methadone, if addicts use the traditional stuff, they won’t feel it. We’ve been speaking about it for years.