Jon Fuller

About the author: Jon Fuller is an assistant director of the Adult Clinical AIDS Program at Boston Medical Center. Fuller was also the 1997-98 Margaret Pyne Professor of Theology at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Catholic Church should support needle-exchange programs which supply heroin addicts with clean needles in exchange for used ones. International experience and research conducted in the United States confirm that needle-exchange programs (NEP's) help reduce the transmission of the HIV virus which causes AIDS. Supporting NEP's is morally right because the programs do not promote illicit activity and they save lives. The Catholic Church, therefore, has a moral duty to support the exchange programs in order to help protect the health and welfare of society's most vulnerable people.

In a remarkable rejection of...