juliet

Mike Plotkin, who’s been a New York City sanitation worker for 20 years, recently noticed something happening at his garage on Staten Island. In the last 14 months, there have been 15 incidents in which one of his colleagues has gotten stuck by a needle someone tossed in the trash alongside their used tissues and Oreo wrappers. That number felt unprecedented. And he had a theory about the apparent increase in needle sticks: GLP-1’s. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans are doing this now. All of them new to needles, most of them with no medical training.” It was a compelling enough theory that @mattsedacca reached out to the Sanitation Department to see if they’d noticed anything similar. It turns out that what Plotkin had noticed at his garage appears to be part of a citywide trend. Per DSNY, in 2019, there were just 25 cases of sanitation workers getting stuck by a needle while on the job. By 2024, there were 36 reported cases. And in 2025, there were 46. As of June 3 of this year, there have already been 35 needle injuries, which puts the city on track for about 83 by year’s end. A spokesman for the department declined to speculate on what might be behind the rise in incidents. But we are, increasingly, a city of injectors, right? Beyond the more familiar terrain of diabetics, IVF patients, people using hormone therapy, and intravenous users of illicit drugs, people have been turning themselves into lab rats for new wellness frontiers. Per a 2025 Gallup survey, 12.4 percent of people nationwide said they were using semaglutide drugs. Dr. Neil Paulvin says that his midtown office has seen a 50 percent increase in patient inquiries about peptides this year, and William Allen of the West Village–based Extension Health says peptide orders to his clinic have essentially doubled since 2025. It seemed worth asking around, so Sedacca started reaching out to people in the city using peptides, semaglutides, and other at-home cosmetic injectables about how they discard their spent needles. Read what he found: nymag.visitlink.me/OnqeEf

@ashley_fembass If you are wanting to go onto hrt talk to a doctor to find out if that is the right option for you