Ernest Drucker, a pioneering public-health researcher who approached drug addiction with compassion, invigorated needle-exchange programs to stem the AIDS epidemic and diagnosed the destructive impact of what he called a \u201cplague\u201d of mass incarceration, died on Jan. 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.<\/p>\n

The cause was complications of dementia, his son, Jesse Drucker, said.<\/p>\n

For more than three decades, Dr. Drucker, primed with epidemiological evidence, waged cutting edge campaigns to improve the lot of prison inmates; the homeless; patients with tuberculosis; workers exposed to asbestos; and HIV-infected drug users and their families, who had been ravaged by the repercussions of AIDS. He was an early and vocal proponent of rethinking the country\u2019s approach to illicit drugs, advocating \u201charm reduction\u201d \u2014 a strategy that prioritizes reducing negative consequences over criminal prosecution.<\/p>\n

A clinical psychologist by training, he was professor emeritus of family and social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center\/Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and had been a senior research associate and scholar in residence at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York in Manhattan, where he biked to work from the Upper West Side.<\/p>\n

Dr. Helene Gayle, an epidemiologist and a former president of Spelman College in Atlanta, described Dr. Drucker this way in an email to his son: \u201cUnapologetic about taking on issues that others wouldn\u2019t touch. Unapologetic about the humanity in all including those who had suffered the most injustice.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n