After Senator Specter’s election in 1980, our relationship had its decided ups and downs, hitting an absolute low point in the spring of 2004 after his miserable performance at Millersville University where he was supposed to give a lofty address to a faculty and student packed auditorium and, to their dismay and a columnist from the Intelligencer Journal, he rattled off pretty much his usual campaign speech. At a reception afterwards he asked me what I thought of his talk, and I responded “Pathetic.” I didn’t meet with Arlen for years afterwards, until I drove him from a fund raiser in Lancaster to Harrisburg the day before he announced his switch back to the Democrat Party. It was more the old Arlen / Robert relationship but he didn’t say a word about what was to happen.
But over the years we did work together to bring about some important accomplishments. Arlen, and especially his wife Joan, a Philadelphia Council Member, had serious concerns about the War on Drugs and especially wanted to be supportive behind the scenes of harm reduction efforts, such as methadone clinics. I recall a meeting in the senator’s office with an associate attorney general and a federal prosecutor when Specter asked if they thought that there was some truth in the benefits of marijuana as medicine. They scoffed at the notion. Then Specter halted them in their traces by saying “Well I do.”
Perhaps a year later I met with Specter to discuss the importance of syringe exchanges as part of harm reduction, something that then Mayor Ed Rendell had introduced with city sponsorship in Philadelphia with the support of Joan Specter. I told the senator that a study had been sponsored by the government favorable to syringe exchange but it was embargoed. In his capacity as chair of the Senate appropriations sub-committee for Health and Human Services, Specter placed a call to then Secretary Donna Shalala and, using the speaker phone for my benefit, asked her when the report would be released.
She said “Arlen, we are concerned about the political consequences of a Democratic administration appearing to be supportive of syringe exchange. May I say we are doing so at your request?”
Specter responded in the affirmative and a few days later the following was released, perhaps most important government intervention on behalf of harm reduction that has ever taken place:
“In 1998, Donna Shalala, then Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton Administration, stated: ‘A meticulous scientific review has now proven that needle exchange programs can reduce the transmission of HIV and save lives without losing ground in the battle against illegal drugs.’” Source: Shalala, D.E., Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services, Press release from Department of Health and Human Services (April 20, 1998).
Specter’s later effort to obtain federal funding for syringe exchange programs hit a stone wall. At the time he told me that Senate tradition allowed almost any subject to be discussed candidly in the Cloak Room…with the exception of drug policy reform or harm reduction! That is how counter-factual things were at the time. It took twenty years of my efforts and those of scores of others to bring about a change. This was the major work of my lifetime.
Shalala’s and Specter’s courage in releasing the report are praiseworthy. The Watchdog along with the good people at the Bethel AME church have done what they could to provide a rudiment of a syringe exchange here in Lancaster for well over a decade. Unfortunately, public charity Lancaster General Health, with its average hundred million dollars in profits each year, has done nothing to help fund and expand the vital effort in safeguarding public health.
In recent months Congress has approved federal funding of syringe exchanges!
Later I will discuss Arlen Specter’s key role in bringing about a Lancaster prototype research project for the expansion of methadone treatment. (To be continued)
