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One Boston neighborhood saw a 149 percent increase in needles reported to the city through 311 over the last five years.
South end resident Brian McCarter holds used needles found on the street near his home in July 2025. Barry Chin/The Boston Globe
March 6, 2026 | 5:00 AM
8 minutes to read
Littered around dumpsters. Scattered across cobblestone paths. Discarded near playgrounds.
Used needles and syringes have been a relatively common landscape feature in some Boston neighborhoods for years, sparking action amongst advocacy groups and city officials.
The total number of calls for needle pickups around Boston surged nearly 71 percent from 2022 to 2025, an analysis of city 311 data by Boston.com shows, though that was still 17 percent below the number in 2020.
What is 311?
Boston 311 is the city’s nonemergency service line where residents can request various city services, from rodent control to pothole filling to graffiti removal.
While the system captures thousands of service calls each year, countless issues go unaccounted for. The requests reflect only incidents reported through the BOS:311 app or direct calls to the city.
City officials say many needle pickups are handled through a dedicated team that operates beyond individual 311 requests.
“Our citywide mobile sharps team operate(s) on a rapid response model, following up on 3-1-1 calls while also conducting proactive sweeps. This team operates seven days a week, 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, conducting proactive sweeps of parks, schools, and hot spots throughout the city,” Boston Public Health Commissioner Dr. Bisola Ojikutu said in a statement to Boston.com. The spokesperson for the Public Health Commission declined a request for a phone interview and would only respond to questions submitted by email.
Needles and syringes are categorized under “sharps,” a medical term for objects with points or edges that can puncture skin. Used sharps are dangerous to people and animals if they are not properly disposed of, as they can spread infections like Hepatitis B and HIV, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
These Boston neighborhoods saw the most needle pickup requests in 2025
While Boston overall has seen a 17 percent decline in needle pickup requests since 2020, specific neighborhoods have experienced sharp increases over the past five years.
The most significant increase was in Jamaica Plain. With 235 requests in 2020 and 585 in 2025, the neighborhood saw a 149 percent increase in needles reported to the city. The next largest was in Back Bay, which saw a 73 percent increase in pickup requests, from 798 in 2020 to 1382 in 2025.
The South End, Roxbury, and Dorchester account for the vast majority of all requests in both 2020 and 2025, though the neighborhoods all saw declines over the past five years.
The South End alone represented 36 percent of citywide requests in 2020 and 29 percent in 2025, with 2507 requests. The neighborhood is home to the Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard intersection, also called “Mass. and Cass,” the epicenter of Boston’s opioid and homelessness crises.
The Fenway-Kenmore area saw the biggest five-year decline in the number of needles being reported, with a 54 percent decrease.
The intersection of Blagden and Exeter streets in Back Bay, behind the Boston Public Library’s Central Branch, was the specific location with the highest number of pickup requests in 2025. In 2020, the intersection only logged two requests. In 2025, that skyrocketed to more than 100.
With tents removed, needles still a consistent problem
In 2021, tents filled the sidewalks around Mass. and Cass. In November 2023, Mayor Michelle Wu announced a tent clearing ordinance after an escalation in public safety concerns.
“You don’t see tents around at all anymore. You used to see hundreds of tents,” says Sue Sullivan, executive director of the recovery assistance program Homeless Back2Work. The jobs program operates through the Newmarket Business Improvement District, a nonprofit run by Sullivan aimed at helping businesses in the neighborhood surrounding Mass. and Cass.
She said the ordinance pushed people away from congregating around Newmarket Square, causing spillover into other communities, like Nubian Square in Roxbury and Andrew Square in South Boston.
The South End in particular has seen disruptions in the neighborhood stemming from the dispersion, residents and business leaders have said. Although more than two years have passed since the ordinance, residents are still pushing for a crackdown on open drug use and more sharps pickups, a movement that saw a resurgence after a 4-year-old stepped on a needle in South Boston in July 2025.
@SouthEndSOS, an Instagram account that posts scenes from the area, posted in October 2025 that a volunteer group picked up 175 needles in three days.
“This is what parents, residents and volunteers are finding where children should be playing, dogs should be walking, and we should be enjoying these beautiful green spaces without worrying about dangerous needles,” the account posted.
What 311 doesn’t capture
For every 311 request submitted, there may be 10 or more needles that go unreported, says Andrew Brand, co-president of the Worcester Square Area Neighborhood Association in the South End.
The closest residential neighborhood to Mass. and Cass, Worcester Square has been a hotspot for public drug use.
“I’ve lived here for 30 years, and for the first 20, it was great, and for the past 10, not so great,” Brand said. He added that many residents in the South End have small gardens in front of their homes and are worried about the possibility of getting pricked by a camouflaged needle.
The Back2Work program picked up approximately 89,000 needles in 2024, according to Sullivan. The recovery assistance program hires people in recovery for street cleaning, trash, needle, and syringe pickup.
“We would have a crew that went out there at 7 in the morning,” Sullivan said. “The 311 calls dropped because we were finding the needles before people were coming out of their houses in the morning.”
Sullivan said more than 200 people have gone through the program, and approximately 90 percent of the program’s participants have or had addiction issues. The program also has an “around-the-clock” rapid response team, which can be dispatched anywhere in the district within about five minutes, she said.
As groups work to pick up discarded sharps, the city distributes clean syringes through its public health programming.
“Distribution of clean syringes and other harm reduction supplies is a vital component of our strategy to decrease overdose deaths, stop the transmission of infectious diseases … and build trust with clients to facilitate placements into [substance use disorder] treatment, shelter, and housing,” Ojikutu said.
The City of Boston distributes an average of more than 81,000 needles a month, Ojikutu said in September 2025, a 22 percent dip from 2024, Boston.com previously reported.
The BPHC has adjusted how it delivers services in recent months in an effort to “mitigate the impact on neighbors,” Ojikutu said in a statement to Boston.com about why distribution decreased.
“Our city outreach team no longer provides harm reduction supplies on the street and instead directs people indoors for access,” she said. “We have also reduced the number of syringes we give out during outreach and in our syringe exchange program to ensure we’re balancing client needs with the impacts on surrounding communities.”
Syringe distribution remains a central part of Boston’s substance use response strategy, according to Ojikutu.
“Syringe litter is a legitimate public health concern that has impacted our distribution efforts; however, it is not a reflection of the effectiveness or value of harm reduction services,” she said.
Needle exchange offered hope — then its funding was cut
Allie Hunter co-founded Addiction Response Resources in 2020 as a passion project aimed at finding solutions to the issue of syringe litter.
In December 2020, the organization established the Community Syringe Redemption Program, a syringe buyback program that offered a cash incentive — 20 cents per used syringe and up to $10 per day — for enrolled adults to return used syringes.
The program’s initial goal was to collect 1,000 syringes per week. On its first day, it collected more than 2,000. During its four‑and‑a‑half‑year run, the initiative collected approximately 30,000 syringes weekly and enrolled more than 3,000 participants, Hunter said.
“We intentionally operate very early in the morning so that the streets are clean before people start commuting to work,” she said. “It’s a little bit under the radar. It happens while most people are still sleeping, and you wake up and syringes aren’t there, and you don’t really know why, but it’s a positive thing.”
The mobile program once had three sites in Boston — on Atkinson Street near Mass. and Cass., in Nubian Square, and in downtown Boston — but the city funding it relied on was eliminated in June 2024.
“It was also creating a sense of purpose and self efficacy for people that are looking for that to help build the blocks of recovery in their lives, creating consistency and stability,” Hunter said. “It was having a positive impact on the syringe litter, but then all these other really positive indicators as well.”
Dr. Traci Green, director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, said people experiencing addiction should have more access to “services that treat them with dignity.”
She said the syringe buyback program was a service like this, one for which Boston should be recognized and other cities should emulate.
“The environment benefits, the community benefits, and the participant would benefit. It seemed like it really kind of hit multiple points along the way,” Green said.
She described proper sharps disposal as a broader issue of public health infrastructure, beyond being an issue for drug-users. People with diabetes or who use injectable treatments, like fertility or hormone medications, also generate sharps waste.
“An environment that’s not conducive to help-seeking may be more stigmatizing and often has more of these problems,” she said.
Despite progress and advocacy, stigma may push people to hide their use and dispose of sharps in less ideal ways.
“Having the mindset that people still feel shame, and the importance of being able to design spaces with stigma in mind,” she said. “Having syringe disposal that’s really thoughtful, as opposed to shameful, and that people respond to this in really important ways.”
Allie Hunter, co-founder and president of Addiction Response Resources, gave a participant ten dollars in one dollar coins after they turned in 50 needles counted out at the Community Syringe Redemption Program in Nubian Square in 2021. – Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe
South End officials: A ‘non-linear’ recovery model
South End community leaders and city officials on Feb. 18 announced a proposal addressing the issues around Mass. and Cass.
The proposed plan involves offering people engaged in public drug use a choice between immediate placement into a recovery program or facing criminal charges, the group behind the recommendations said in a press release.
“We didn’t want to make it a win-lose. We didn’t want to make it about the crime. We wanted to make it about getting people help they need, which, as a side effect, will solve the crime,” Brand, of the Worcester Square Area Neighborhood Association, said.
“No solution is good if there’s a winner and there’s a loser. You have got to have everyone come out better off in order for a solution to be lasting,” Brand said.
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