The Lowell City Council met on Tuesday night. The longest and most intense discussion involved a proposed amendment to the city’s “Peace and Good Order” ordinance that would impose a new limitation on already-legal “needle exchange programs” by prohibiting such programs from operating within 1000 feet of a school. In the end, the council voted unanimously to send the proposed amendment to the council’s Public Safety Subcommittee for a meeting with the city’s Board of Health and with representatives from the state Department of Public Health.

For a while, the council seemed headed down the “we don’t care what the data show, we’re going to follow our own common sense” approach that we witnessed last week with the pre-emptive “safe injection site” ban, however, the council this Tuesday jumped back onto the rational decision track in sending the proposal to the subcommittee for further consideration.

The problem councilors seek to address is the profusion of used needles scattered about certain parts of the city, especially in public parks like the South Common. Although city health officials questioned on Tuesday could not identify a single instance of a public-school student having been pricked by a stray needle, the fear of that happening is not far-fetched and the potential harm that would come from it is considerable.

While a councilor’s “common sense” might say that a program that hands out free needles to addicts would contribute to this epidemic of used needles in public spaces, experts disagree. Tuesday night, two members of the city’s board of health, Chair JoAnn Keegan and Member Erin Gendron, spoke on this motion and urged restraint in curtailing the needle distribution programs now in place. They, and several councilors, referred to a presentation made by representatives from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health at the last Lowell Board of Health meeting.

At that meeting, Dawn Fukuda of DPH explained that Syringe Service Programs do much more than distribute clean needles to addicts. They also provide a continuum of care that includes treatment of wounds, testing for infectious diseases, and linkage to substance abuse treatment. She emphasized that drug users have personal autonomy and will make better health decisions when provided with accurate information, and often those decisions lead to recovery treatment.

Dr. Alex Walley, also of DPH, said 30 years of scientific data prove that Syringe Service Programs (SSP) are an effective public health tool that reduce the transmission of HIV by 34 percent to 58 percent, depending on the quality of the program. Dr. Walley also cited a Seattle study that showed addicts who participated in an SSP were five times more likely to start addiction treatment and three times more likely to stop using drugs entirely than those who did not use the program. He pointed to another study from Miami that showed a 49 percent decrease in syringe litter after the program opened.

Next, Dr. Walley spoke about an outbreak of HIV in Lowell in 2018 when there was a spike in new HIV cases with most having been transmitted by dirty needles. Infections were not limited to intravenous drug users but spread through the general population, usually due to sexual transmission. However, statistics showed that once an SSP program opened in Lowell, the rise in new HIV infections relented.

At the council meeting, Councilor Rita Mercier who, along with Councilors Corey Robinson, Erik Gitschier and Corey Belanger, attended the board of health meeting, criticized SSPs for lacking a strict one-for-one needle exchange policy. As I understand it, clean needles are typically distributed in packages of ten, however, a patron who turns in fewer than ten used needles still gets a full package.

In response to this no one-for-one policy criticism, both DPH’s Fukuda at the board of health meeting and Ms. Keegan at the council meeting explained that the primary purpose of the SSP is harm reduction among the served population, and that an addict who is unable to get clean needles will just reuse a dirty one which will damage their veins and risk infection.

Besides Councilor Mercier, her colleagues who support this amendment (and those who supported last week’s safe injection site prohibition) have a familiar litany of complaints: the suburbs are not sharing this societal burden; rampant vagrancy drives businesses out of downtown; public spaces are rendered unsafe or uncomfortable for everyone else; the state was wrong to abolish involuntary civil commitments; and so on. In the face of this frustration, curtailing the SSP program might make councilors feel as though they are doing something when, as the public health professionals tactfully explained, such restrictions just reshuffle the deck of pathologies the community faces without solving any of them.

There is no magical solution to this but two things, more addiction treatment and more housing, seem to be the best long-term strategies for addressing these issues. But both are expensive and, with the housing piece at least, require tough political choices that many elected officials are unwilling to make, so instead we have a revolving solution-of-the-month approach from the council.

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The council did give a small boost to creating more housing in Lowell by voting unanimously to amend the 20-year-old “Rebuilding of the Julian D. Steele Public Housing Development” plan. The amendment allows the construction of 16 new duplexes which will create 32 housing units that will be sold to buyers whose total household gross income is between 70 percent and 100 percent of the area median income as defined by HUD.

The state legislation that established this project back in 2000 requires the approval of the Lowell Housing Authority, the Department of Housing and Community Development and the Lowell City Council. With the council’s action on Tuesday, all three entities have approved the plan so presumably construction may now proceed.

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Twelve months ago, when many “best books of the year” lists appeared, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz was prominently mentioned. I bought, read, and enjoyed the book which challenges the nostalgic view of the early 90s as a peaceful “end of history” between the Cold War and the War on Terror. Instead, Ganz argues this period was a turbulent crucible that birthed modern American extremism and the MAGA movement.

Besides authoring this bestselling book, Ganz writes about the writes about the history and ideology of the American Right on his Substack newsletter, Unpopular Front, which I subscribe to. One day last week, Ganz discussed US policy towards Cambodia in 1975, after the Khmer Rouge had come to power and the North Vietnamese had defeated South Vietnam. Because events from that time and place are central to understanding Lowell today, I read what Ganz wrote with great attention.

Ganz explained that to understand US policy towards Cambodia in 1975, one must understand the larger geopolitics of the Cold War at the time: “The Khmer Rouge was aligned with China, which viewed them as a counterweight to Soviet-backed Vietnam. The United States was capitalizing on the Sino-Soviet split to cultivate relations with China and form a bloc against the USSR, so the US was effectively the ally of the Khmer Rouge’s ally.”

In support of that analysis, Ganz cited a now declassified but once Secret transcript of a meeting between US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Foreign Minister Chatchai Chunhawan of Thailand. Here are the relevant parts of their conversation:

Kissinger: Our interest in Southeast Asia remains strong. We appreciate the spirit in which the negotiations for our withdrawal have taken place . . . It is important that we still have a presence in Southeast Asia. We appreciate what you did in Vietnam. I am, personally, embarrassed by the Vietnam War. I believe that if you go to war, you go to win and not to lose with moderation.

We are aware that the biggest threat in Southeast Asia at the present time is North Vietnam. Our strategy is to get the Chinese into Laos and Cambodia as a barrier to the Vietnamese.

Chatchai: I asked the Chinese to take over in Laos. They mentioned that they had a road building team in northern Laos.

Kissinger: We would support this. You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don’t tell them what I said before. (Emphasis supplied).

The full transcript, which makes fascinating reading, is available online (link below).

When Henry Kissinger died two years ago, the Boston Globe interviewed some survivors of the Cambodian genocide who were living in Lowell. Their comments about Kissinger were extremely harsh which surprised me, not because they weren’t deserved (a view that Ganz also shares), but because they were so passionate. Reading this meeting transcript gives me a better understanding of the reasons for that passionate response.

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Links cited in today’s newsletter:

Lowell Board of Health meeting on November 5, 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPCaNf4bR0A

Proposed Amendment to Needle Exchange Program ordinance

https://www.lowellma.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item/33286?fileID=86916

Transcript of November 26, 1975, meeting between US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Foreign Minister Chatchai of Thailand.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB193/HAK-11-26-75.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email