COMMENTAIRE: Scientific evidence mounts contradicting Conservatives' efforts against harm reduction

[source: Straight.com Vancouver's Online Source]

By M.J. Milloy and Evan Wood

In the wake of the release of a scathing report from international experts declaring their efforts to create a “drug free world” a failure, diplomats from 53 countries including Canada gathered in Vienna, Austria last weekend to plan the next campaign in the so-called war on drugs.

Officially assembled to review the United Nation’s progress towards its 1998 goal of a drug-free world within a decade, the envoys to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs were faced with inconvenient truths in the form of expert data showing that illicit drugs—including cocaine, heroin, and cannabis—are now cheaper and no harder to get despite the untold trillions of dollars spent on drug prohibition and demand reduction.

Spurred by increasing calls from AIDS and human rights groups and public health professionals, a group of 26 countries at the Vienna meeting split with official doctrine and demanded prohibitionist policies be bolstered by harm reduction, a public-health approach that prioritizes pragmatic interventions to reduce the likelihood of drug-related harms such as overdose or infection with HIV.

The efforts of the 26 countries—mostly from Europe and Latin America—to include explicit support for harm reduction in the final declaration were defeated by a group led by the United States, Russia, and Cuba. (Canada’s statement to the Vienna assembly called for, among other things, more drug treatment for young offenders and school-based programs to reduce drug consumption.)

The position of Canada’s diplomats is another result of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s new anti-drugs policy, which is stripped of all mention of harm reduction, including needle exchange programs and medically-supervised injection facilities (SIFs), such as Vancouver’s Insite. Unfortunately, this stance is not only increasingly out of step with world opinion but, most importantly, inconsistent with the best available medical evidence on the interventions needed to address the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Once driven primarily by new cases resulting from sexual contact, the continued growth of the pandemic is now increasingly caused by the sharing of HIV-contaminated needles by individuals who use injection drugs. According to the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS, one out of every three new cases outside of sub-Saharan Africa is the result of the use of HIV-contaminated needles. In some of the world’s fastest-spreading and least-controlled outbreaks, such as Eastern Europe and Russia, more than 80 percent of new HIV cases are among injection drug users...(suite)

M.J. Milloy is a research coordinator for the Urban Health Research Initiative at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and a doctoral student in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia.

Evan Wood is an epidemiologist at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.