David Fawver (1956-2025) was a beloved activist in Olympia, Washington, known to everyone as Long Hair Dave. His street-based HIV-prevention work in the early 1990s later became the Emma Goldman Youth and Homeless Outreach Project, better known as EGYHOP, which today is the longest-running syringe service program in the United States operated entirely by volunteers. A community memorial was held in downtown Olympia on May 1.
Harm reduction was a different thing in the early ’90s; we didn’t even call it that yet. The closest you’d get to publicly acceptable harm reduction was maybe the “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” campaign. Even giving out free condoms to high-schoolers was controversial. Giving out free syringes to people who injected drugs was something the public hadn’t really heard of.
The Thurston County Syringe Services Program in Olympia opened as a pilot project in 1993, but that wasn’t the beginning of syringe distribution there. Ask anyone who was on the streets downtown in the early ’90s and they’ll tell you they got clean rigs from Olympia’s one-man syringe service program, Long Hair Dave.
Dave was a local legend, someone whose whole life was about bringing direct services to those of us on the streets. But the first time I met him, in 1992, I knew nothing about him and didn’t trust him at all. He was a pretty eccentric guy, to me at least—he had this big hat and long coat with buttons all over it; he rolled his own cigarettes—but the reason I was suspicious was that he was giving out syringes. We were standing on 4th Ave, right on the main drag, and he just handed my friend Tony a new syringe like it was nothing.
The HIV and AIDS epidemic was in full swing, but you needed a documented medical condition to legally possess syringes. Dave brought them to us anyway. That first day we talked for a while, and he gave me his phone number and said if I needed syringes I could call him anytime.
He probably meant that as more of a figure of speech, but when I literally called him up in the middle of the night he didn’t complain. He usually gave out syringes one or two at a time, but pretty soon he started giving me more so he could get a decent night’s sleep.
Long Hair Dave in downtown Olympia in 1993
Dave was good at meeting people where they were at. He used to come down to the train access tunnel where we slept, but he’d respect our space and not go inside. Just check on us from the entrance and hand us some condoms and bleach kits, and swap new needles for used ones. He lived the principles of harm reduction before concepts like that were written or talked about. He did the work because he believed in it.
If someone was thinking about trying to get into treatment, Dave was right there to talk to them about it. But he never told us we needed to get clean. He never told us what we needed, period. He listened, and then he tried to help as best he could.
That summer, Dave was the one who told me I had HIV. The health department outreach team who’d tested me couldn’t find me, but they knew Dave could. He sat down with me in his little office at the old Bread & Roses shelter and told me what was up.
We talked a lot. He gave me a lot more information about how the virus is actually transmitted. That was when it really clicked for me why it was so important to not share needles. There’s a good chance I already had HIV by the time I met Dave, but while I’d mostly been using clean rigs since I met him I was still sharing sometimes. After that day I stopped, and I was able to do that because of Dave. He helped make sure I always had clean rigs, as well as a supply of condoms.
I came and saw him quite a bit over the next few weeks. Even though we all assumed I was going to die pretty soon, he didn’t just talk to me about not spreading the virus to others; he also shared information about living with HIV. I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for Dave. I can say that and really mean it.
I’ve been in prison since 1995. Dave wrote me a couple of times, even sent books—he founded the Olympia chapter of Books to Prisoners—but I can’t really speak to any part of his life or work that’s more recent than that. What I can tell you is that over my years in prison I’ve met more than one person who remembers Dave, and everyone always has a story about how he helped them when they were in trouble, or went out of his way to connect them to services they needed.
He didn’t approach life like a popularity contest. He didn’t care about getting credit for the work he did. He just did what was needed for the people who needed it.
Image (cropped) via Long Hair David/YouTube
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