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Mark Kinzly,
Agent Of Change
By Jonathan L. Sherman-Presser |
Mark Kinzly knows a thing or two about drug use. He spent fifteen years of his life as an injection drug user. He's spent time in jail for drug possession and assault. "The most terrifying two years of my life were when I was smoking crack," he tells me over dinner one night. While most of his colleagues at Yale's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) are PhD's and doctors, Kinzly struggled to graduate from high school and is only just now returning to college to earn his bachelor's degree. But when it comes to firsthand knowledge of drug use, Kinzly says, "I've probably got a PhD in another area."
Kinzly first arrived in New Haven in 1990, looking to get clean. At the time, AIDS was so rampant in the drug-using community that he was "literally going to a funeral a day." Kinzly's best friend at the time was a diabetic, so he had a constant source of sterile syringes. He knew it was time to clean up his act when he realized that "the only difference between people getting infected and me was that I had access to clean injection equipment."
The New Haven needle exchange van had begun making rounds in the city in November of 1990, and Kinzly began to volunteer several months later. Shortly thereafter, he was hired as a full time worker. After a couple of years in New Haven, he moved to Nashua, New Hampshire, to work in a statewide health outreach program.
"Nashua has been voted the number one town in America to live in a couple of times, but it has a tremendous drug problemÑand enough affluence to hide it," Kinzly says of his experience there. As a result, the community was neither ready to acknowledge its problems nor to embrace Kinzly's solutions. Kinzly recalled walking through a heavy drug and sex traffic spot, and seeing a couple having sex in a car. He left some condoms on nearby trees. The next morning, Kinzly was all over the news - local papers covered the scandal "as if I had put up 100,000 condoms." Jay Leno even picked up the story. Nevertheless, Kinzly persisted and continued his work in Nashua. After hearing rumors that the police had been harassing Hispanic kids in the local projects, he distributed notebooks to the kids so they could write down times and dates of the harassment. The night after Kinzly met with the mayor to discuss the complaints, the police broke down his door at two a.m. and ransacked his house. Outraged, but reluctant to go to jail again, Kinzly realized it was time to leave Nashua.
Luckily, he'd recently been offered a job heading up the Bridgeport needle exchange program, so he accepted the offer and moved back to Connecticut. Bridgeport had recently become the first city in the United States to declare bankruptcy, and was willing to do whatever it took to set itself straight. "It was worse than South Bronx and Harlem," says Kinzly. "There was nothing in Bridgeport but drugs. People just had tombstones in their eyes." He began by adding new services to the needle exchange vans, including late-night hours, food, and medical services. He also started putting together Safer Smoking Kits for crack users, which included information about disease transmission in crack stems and rubber mouthpieces for the pipes. Those same kits are now being used worldwide.
But the most important work he was doing at the time, Kinzly says, was developing trust. "The most important thing when you're going into communities that are devastated is that you have to develop trust. Don't say you're going to do something if you can't do it." He warns that drug users are often wary of academics at first, so anyone who wants to make a difference has to treat them with compassion. "People need to be treated with dignity and respect regardless of where they are in their lives," Kinzly declares. His new programs were met with remarkable success, and the Bridgeport needle exchange began to receive state funding and national recognition.
When asked about potential criticism that he is enabling drug users, he begins hesitantly. "There was a point in my life when I didn't deal with that criticism so well," he admits. He remains defiant, however. "First off," he says, "I don't know when Ôenabling' became a negative thing. If enabling means giving something to a person that will prevent them from getting a virus that is going to kill them, then I'm an enabler."
Kinzly is more hesitant when asked about how much of a difference he thinks he can make. Most users will eventually quit if they don't die first, he claims. "I've never seen a dead person walking into a twelve-step fellowship," he says sardonically. Public health officials can provide drug users with information and resources, he admits, "but in my experience, the users are going to be the agents of change in their lives."
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