sabora

“We finally got to a place where that ban was going to be lifted, we would see sustainability, we would see a massive shift in our current state of infectious disease,” said Chad Sabora, vice president of government and public relations at the Indiana Center for Recovery, a treatment center.

Chad Sabora, the cofounder and executive director of the Missouri Network for Opiate Reform and Recovery, in St. Louis, is one of the region's leading voices for harm reduction.

Sabora harbors doubts that, in Missouri at least, the federal dollars earmarked for harm-reduction services will truly reach them.

"But that's going to be a pass-through to the states," Sabora says of the $30 million federal allocation.

Sabora notes that he has tried for years to set up legal needle exchanges and safe injection sites in the St. Louis region — programs that have long been in place in such European nations as Switzerland, the Netherlands and Portugal, with decades of well-documented evidence to back up their safety and efficacy.