Inside a storage room at the Clark County Health Department are boxes with taped-on signs reading, “DO NOT USE.” They contain cookers and sterile water that people use to shoot up drugs.
The supplies, which came from the state and were paid for with federal money, were for a program where drug users exchange dirty needles for clean ones, part of a strategy known as harm reduction. But under a July executive order from President Donald Trump, federal substance abuse grants can’t pay for supplies such as cookers and tourniquets that it says “only facilitate illegal drug use.” Needles already couldn’t be purchased with federal money.
