Washington's largest needle-exchange program will close its doors this month.
Officials with Prevention Works, which gives clean needles to drug addicts to try to curb the spread of AIDS, said the needle-exchange program will close up shop on Feb. 25 after struggling for donations amid delays in city funding. High turnover among top managers is also a contributing factor, officials said.
The program began in 1996 as a project of the Whitman-Walker Clinic. It incorporated as its own organization and was the only provider of free needles for almost a decade due to a congressional ban on city funding for needle-exchange programs.
Last year, the program provided almost one-third of the free needles in the city, with staff handing out about 100,000 sterile syringes to 2,200 people.
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