The Curtis is a grand building in the very heart of Lenox, a four-story brick edifice in the Georgian/Colonial Revival style with a covered porch supported by white columns. The former hotel built in 1829 set just steps from Town Hall has served as public housing for elderly and handicapped residents for decades, and Lenox Village Integrative Pharmacy is located on the ground floor. The Curtis is also host to a crimson metal container located by its Walker Street entrance labeled “SHARPS.” On a bright, cold January morning, a group of public health workers gather around the red box – one node of a network that spans the region – to explain the vital role it serves in the Southern Berkshire community.
“So, sharp is essentially anything that could poke you, hurt yourself or others," said Great Barrington native Sarah Drucker of the Southern Berkshire Public Health Collaborative. “What we're seeing most commonly is a lot of GLP-1s, we're seeing insulin lancets, even, just like, if your cat has diabetes, that's a sharp. Razors that you use to shave your face, those are sharps. It's anything, really, that can cause harm to yourself or others through a poke and then a potential blood borne illness.”
The most common misconception around sharps disposal is that it primarily concerns syringes used for illegal drugs.
“It's funny, I actually just talked maybe 30 seconds ago to a woman who was concerned about homeless people being around this," Drucker told WAMC. "And I mean, the biggest concern for people is, oh, people are going to break in and steal all the drugs that are in there- First of all, there's no drugs in there. We don't want your medication, we don't want your drugs. Bring those to the police department. And second of all, I would say 98% of the sharps we see are [legal injectable weight loss drugs] Ozempic or GLP-1s.”
Massachusetts law has a significant blind spot around safely getting rid of sharps – one that the kiosks are designed to remedy.
“There’s a law passed in 2012 in Massachusetts that said you can no longer put sharps in the garbage," explained Drucker. "But there was absolutely no legislation following that to place sharps containers or sharps kiosks around, and even with GLP-1s or insulin drugs that we see when you go to pharmacies, or when you even get them online, they give you the needles, but they don't give you anywhere to put them, and technically it's illegal to put them in the trash.”
The effort to formalize a sharps disposal system in the Southern Berkshires is about two years old. Shared Services Manager Jayne Smith says the 12 communities the Southern Berkshire Public Health Collaborative serves identified it as a priority, spurring both the implementation of the kiosks and a better understanding of what sharps actually represent.
“It was something that about 12 or 13 years ago, when the ban came out from the state of Massachusetts, there had been a push to try to get sharps containers put in throughout the county, but the area just wasn't ready for it, and there was a lot of stigma around it," said Smith. "I think that the more that our population realizes that that all of these injectables that they're doing at home, whether they're prescribed or not prescribed, it's kind of developed into a public health awareness that's not so stigmatized, which is really amazing for everybody.”
The town of Lenox is welcoming its kiosk with open arms.
“Anything that makes it easier, and this is just an ideal location," Board of Health Chair Dianne Romeo told WAMC, "because people are going into the town hall, there's a community that lives here, and the pharmacy is here, so what better way to allow people that opportunity to come in?”
WAMC caught the sharps public health team as they made the rounds visiting nearly a dozen communities who participate in the disposal system in the Southern Berkshires.
“We're going to some pretty small towns," said Drucker. "I mean, Mount Washington is the third smallest town in Massachusetts, but [the kiosk is] being used. We wouldn't be bringing them there if they weren't getting used, and we have calls from Mount Washington, Alford, some of the smallest towns in Massachusetts saying, we need this to be serviced, it’s all filled up.”
One of the goals of the disposal program is to protect the workers who process trash in Berkshire County.
“40% of all injuries at transfer material recovery facilities are needlesticks," said Drucker. "So, we're just trying to get less people injured, less bloodborne diseases, and less, honestly, needles on the street, needles on the ground. People don't know what to do with them, so, we want to give people a resource that they're clearly using.”
This year, the Southern Berkshire Public Health Collaborative is expanding the sharps disposal program by teaming up with Berkshire Harm Reduction- a program out of the county’s major health care provider, Berkshire Health Systems, aimed at mitigating the negative impacts of drug use. BHR representative Jennifer Bishop was at the Curtis with a colleague for hands-on training with the sharps kiosk, learning how to safely dispose of their contents.
“Sharps are not as terrifying as people want to make them out to be," Bishop told WAMC. "If you are informed and educated and know how to properly dispose of them, it is very easy to. And if you don't, we have flyers that say, Berkshire Harm Reduction can help, five us a call. If you see one out in the community, we will come and pick it up and dispose of it.”
Drucker of the Southern Berkshire Public Health Collaborative studied public health at Tulane. When she returned home to the Berkshires from the sweltering heat of New Orleans, she didn’t expect the lessons she learned in a major Southern city to apply to the rolling hills and small towns of New England.
“But then I come here and I see these same issues that I kind of grew up with in a more nuanced perspective, going to school and getting a public health degree and coming back and applying that to these issues that I didn't really understand growing up," she told WAMC. "I didn't understand why a needle on the ground could be a big deal, or that lack of third places and lack of transportation could have as big of an effect as any sort of health-related phenomenon. So, seeing these issues from a more educated, a more worldly perspective has definitely helped me to be able to apply it to this program.”
After demonstrating collection of the disposed sharps inside The Curtis’s kiosk, the team locked it up and was off to the next red box down the road.
“These little boxes we got, they're all weatherproof," said Drucker. "So, we have ones that are out in the elements that are doing just fine. So, if you're worried about any sort of stigma, which hopefully you shouldn't be, but it's a private thing, and it's protected, and you should feel safe doing this.”
