Growing up, Katie Chamberlain walked the straight and narrow as a “dorky straight-A student.”

The Riverside resident attended a Christian school until ninth grade. The stark reality of drugs hit home the second week of classes, when a classmate died of a heroin overdose.

Over the years, the 27-year-old watched with sadness and despair as too many friends fell victim to illegal narcotics.

“I was that friend who was spending Christmas Eve in the hospital with a friend,” she said. “I was the one who got called. I was the responsible one with the car who cared.”

Today, Chamberlain is trying to create Riverside County’s first program to help drug users by giving them clean needles. County elected officials rejected a similar proposal a dozen years ago, and so far she’s meeting similar resistance.

While attending college in the Bay Area, she met a woman who worked for a program that provided clean needles and other support to drug users.

“It sounded awesome, thinking about the overdose reversal drugs and how life saving that can be,” she said. “I thought about all the friends who I could still have around if I knew about this when I was 15.”

DETERMINED TO ACT

Chamberlain returned to Riverside determined to act. She did research and learned about harm-reduction and how drug policies can trickle down to people on the streets.

In April 2014, she took her cause to the alleys and parking lots of downtown Riverside. She opened her car trunk and passed out clean syringes, overdose prevention kits and other resources to homeless people who showed up for a free weekly meal at a local church. The supplies, donated by Los Angeles-area support groups, ran out a year later.

Possessing devices used to inject narcotics or controlled substances without proper certification violates state law and could lead to a person’s arrest, said Deputy Michael Vasquez, a spokesman for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

Chamberlain said she had a permit from the state public health department to carry syringes and other drug paraphernalia and didn’t believe she was breaking any laws.

The Sheriff’s Department “understands and supports the need for the public to have access to clean needles for legitimate medical reasons,” Assistant Sheriff Lee Wagner said in an email. “Conversely, we do not support illegal drug use in any form or fashion and do not support a needle exchange program for those purposes.”

SEEKING SUPPORT

Chamberlain is setting up a nonprofit group, the Inland Empire Needle Exchange. She’s working with university students and health professionals whom she said don’t want their names made public because of the controversial subject matter.

She aims to operate an authorized exchange program in Riverside County to be run out of a mobile van or storefront. She and other volunteers would distribute sterile syringes to intravenous-drug users to help reduce the spread of HIV, viral hepatitis and other blood-borne diseases. They could also pick up overdose prevention kits, receive HIV testing, counseling and referrals for drug treatment and other services.

The program requires the approval of state public health officials as well as local authorities who can control zoning and other standards. Chamberlain hasn’t settled on a location but is looking at areas where people are already using drugs away from schools, parks and “gated communities.”

The county Board of Supervisors denied a similar proposal in May 2003, arguing that it promoted illegal drug use. Gary Feldman, then the county’s public health director, declared an unofficial state of health emergency in response to a rapid rise in reported cases of hepatitis C, hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS.

A 2013 county report shows an upward trend in new cases of hepatitis B and hepatitis C while new HIV cases have remained essentially the same the past six years. The county reported about 2,400 new cases of hepatitis C in 2013, said Dr. Cameron Kaiser, the county’s public health officer.

Kaiser said in a statement that needle exchange programs are generally effective at reducing overall disease transmission, which also lowers the risk to medical staff and law enforcement who may have contact with drug users.

He added that people have justifiable safety concerns in neighborhoods where the programs operate.

‘A FINE LINE’

“There’s definitely a fine line between harm reduction and enabling,” Kaiser said. “The limited amount of available data suggests that these programs don’t encourage more drug use, but the jury is out on whether they actually lessen it.”

A successful program must “get people to kick the habit, not just make it safer,” and a partnership with public health, behavioral health and law enforcement is essential, Kaiser said.

Riverside County District Attorney Michael Hestrin said he needs to see details of the proposed needle program before rendering a verdict.

“The addicts are still prone to death from overdose, poisoning, violence and criminality,” Hestrin said. “It does serve a purpose in protecting them from bloodborne diseases, but it’s not dealing with the underlying problem, which is the widespread and growing use of heroin and other hard drugs in our society.”

Riverside County Supervisor Kevin Jeffries wants to hear the pros and cons of the plan.

“My gut reaction is to wonder if you’re not furthering the habit, helping with the habit, versus trying to give somebody some assistance to get off the habit,” Jeffries said. “The No. 1 goal is to get them clean so they don’t need a needle exchange.”

Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz said he has worked on drug issues going back to his days as a narcotics lieutenant at the Los Angeles Police Department in the early 1990s.

“I think needle exchanges save lives,” Diaz said. “They make things healthier for all of us. When they’re correctly run and regulated and located in the right places, it’s a very good thing.”

Chamberlain, who works at a winery in Ontario, knows she faces an uphill battle. She said she’s heartened by what’s happening in Indiana, which launched a needle exchange program in March in response to an HIV outbreak. She’s also encouraged by recent laws that make it easier to offer programs in California.

“Times have changed a lot since 2003,” she said. “I think it’s becoming a lot harder to ignore these problems in Riverside. Everybody’s experienced some kind of loss related to drugs. We need to fix it. Let’s help these folks.”

Contact the writer: 951-368-9292 or swall@pe.com