It’s time to incentivize needle cleanup in Seattle

Remember collecting all those empty bottles and cans when you were a kid so you could turn them in for enough money to eventually buy that trinket you had your eye on?

Imagine doing that today as a kid, but replace bottles and cans with used syringes and a childish ignorance that leads you to pick them up with your bare hands.

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That isn’t as much of a hypothetical problem as a reality, as many Seattle parents know. The issue of publicly discarded needles and other drug paraphernalia in the city continues to weigh heavily on some people’s minds. Just take Lauri Watkins of Capitol Hill, who felt the need to create a website dedicated to awareness.

Within the first four months of this year, Seattle collected more than 10,000 “sharps” — syringes, needles, lancets — in the city’s drop boxes. The boxes are clearly being used. However, an additional 3,900 were collected by city officials, through reports from the public.

It’s great people are using both programs, but it’s unlikely that everyone is reporting the needles they find lying on the ground.

The problem is a national one. The Associated Press reports that more than 13,000 syringes were collected in San Francisco in one month.

It’s important to note that, according to a toxicologist and emergency medicine doctor, getting infected with transmitted diseases is “astronomically low.”

The AP reports it is children who risk getting stuck by needles, raising the chance of contracting a blood-borne disease.

“I just want more awareness that this is happening,” said Nancy Holmes, whose 11-year-old daughter stepped on a needle in Santa Cruz, California, while swimming. “You would hear stories about finding needles at the beach or being poked at the beach. But you think that it wouldn’t happen to you. Sure enough.”

Maybe we need more awareness at this point. Is it time to incentivize needle recycling?

Right now, there isn’t much incentive to properly discard needles. The King County Needle Exchange is a benefit, allowing drug users to exchange used syringes for clean ones.

Why not give drug users a monetary incentive to collect paraphernalia? Like bottles and cans, they could be dropped off in exchange for a small amount of money.

If providing money is a problem, just take a page from a medical marijuana grower from the City of Gardiner, Maine and give away pot as an incentive to collect needles. The Press Herald reports that “dozens” of people participated in a garbage cleanup to get free weed in July.

Or, we can just hope that everyone currently using drugs on Seattle’s streets migrate to the safe injection sites proposed for King County and keep the needles out of children’s hands.

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