Re-reporting, excerpts with minor editing by Carolyn Bennett
Criminalization of illicit drug users fuels the HIV epidemic and results in overwhelmingly negative health and social consequences mandating a full reorientation of policy.
“‘Rights Here, Right Now’ … emphasizes the right to health care, including access to all scientifically sound HIV prevention interventions, such as opioid substitution therapy and needle and syringe programs,” says Brigitte Schmied, President of the Austrian AIDS Society. “To this end, I urge each of you to add your voice to the growing call for the reform of illicit drug policies by signing the Vienna Declaration.
“‘Treatment, not prosecution, is demanded!’
“In our shrinking world, the goal of universal access and global health can no longer be viewed as a story about ‘others.’ These are our stories. Universal access is our responsibility. Holding our political leaders and ourselves accountable is our continued challenge. Let us meet this challenge with tenacity and fervor in the days and months ahead.”
The XVIII International AIDS Conference is meeting this week (July 18-23) in Vienna, Austria.
From the Vienna Declaration:
There is no evidence that increasing the ferocity of law enforcement meaningfully reduces the prevalence of drug use. The data also clearly demonstrate that the number of countries in which people inject illegal drugs is growing ─ with women and children becoming increasingly affected. Outside of sub-Saharan Africa, injection drug use accounts for approximately one in three new cases of HIV. In some areas where HIV is spreading most rapidly ─ such as Eastern Europe and Central Asia ─ HIV prevalence can be as high as 70 percent among people who inject drugs. In some areas more than 80 percent of all HIV cases are among this group.
Governments, international bodies, organizations and individuals must acknowledge and address these (though not limited to these) harmful consequences of criminalization:
- HIV epidemics fuelled by the criminalization of people who use illicit drugs and by prohibitions on the provision of sterile needles and opioid substitution treatment
- HIV outbreaks among incarcerated and institutionalized drug users because of punitive laws and policies and a lack of HIV prevention services in these settings
- Undermining of public health systems when law enforcement drives drug users away from prevention and care services and into environments where the risk of infectious disease transmission (e.g., HIV, hepatitis C & B, and tuberculosis) and other harm is increased
- Crisis in criminal justice systems because of record incarceration rates in a number of nations. This has negatively affected the social functioning of entire communities. While racial disparities in incarceration rates for drug offenses are evident in countries all over the world, the impact has been particularly severe in the United States, where approximately one in nine African-American males in the age group 20 to 34 is incarcerated on any given day ─ primarily as a result of drug law enforcement.
- Stigma towards people who use illicit drugs, which reinforces political popularity of criminalizing drug users and undermines HIV prevention and other health promotion efforts
- Severe human rights violations, including torture, forced labor, inhuman and degrading treatment, and execution of drug offenders in a number of countries.
- Massive illicit market worth an estimated annual value of $320 billion (U.S.) ─ profits remaining entirely outside the control of government; fueling crime, violence and corruption in countless urban communities; destabilizing entire countries such as Colombia, Mexico and Afghanistan
- Billions of tax dollars wasted on a ‘War on Drugs’ approach to drug control that does not achieve its stated objectives and, instead, directly or indirectly contributes to the above harms.
- Undertake a transparent review of the effectiveness of current drug policies
- Implement and evaluate a science-based public health approach to address the individual and community harms stemming from illicit drug use.
- Decriminalize drug users, scale up evidence-based drug dependence treatment options and abolish ineffective compulsory drug treatment centers that violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- Endorse unequivocally and scale up funding for the implementation of the comprehensive package of HIV interventions spelled out in the WHO, UNODC and UNAIDS Target Setting Guide.
- Involve meaningfully members of the affected community in developing, monitoring and implementing services and policies that affect their lives.
- Ensure in measures implemented by UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon that the United Nations system—including the International Narcotics Control Board—speaks with one voice to support decriminalization of drug users and implementation of evidence-based approaches to drug control.
“The hypocrisy of our federal [U.S.] drug policy has to be seen for what it is, Jesse Ventura writes in American Conspiracies. “When millions of dollars from illegal drug sales are being used to fund government agencies like the CIA and being laundered through our leading banks, isn’t it time to rethink this situation? The fact is, the ‘war on drugs’ is killing and imprisoning our citizens, way out of proportion to how it is helping anyone. Revamping a criminal justice system that incarcerates thousands of people for using ‘illicit substances’ ─ is a necessity.”
Sources and notes
Speaking in Vienna, Brigitte Schmied, AIDS 2010 Local Co-Chair and President of the Austrian AIDS Society, Austria [http://blog.aids2010.org/post/2010/07/19/Powerful-Words-at-Opening-Session.aspx]
The Vienna Declaration, http://www.viennadeclaration.com/the-declaration.html
The Vienna Declaration is a statement seeking to improve community health and safety by calling for the incorporation of scientific evidence into illicit drug policies. The declaration is the official declaration of the XVIII International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2010) held in Vienna, Austria, July 18-23, 2010.
The declaration was prepared through an extensive consultative process involving global leaders in medicine, public policy and public health. A team of international experts drafted the declaration and several of the world’s leading HIV and drug policy scientific bodies initiated it, among them: International AIDS Society, the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, and the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy (ICSDP) [http://www.viennadeclaration.com/about-the-declaration.html].
Opioid
The term opioid has been adopted as a general classification of all of those agents that share chemical structures, sites, and mechanisms of action with the endogenous opioid agonists. Opioid substances encompass all the natural and synthetic chemical compounds closely related to morphine, whether they act as agonists or antagonists. Although interest in these drugs has always been high because of their value in pain relief and because of problems of abuse and addiction, interest was intensified in the 1970s and '80s by discoveries about the naturally occurring morphinelike substances, the endogenous opioid neuropeptides [Britannica].
American Conspiracies: Lies, lies, and more dirty lies that the Government tells us by Ventura, Jesse with Dick Russell. New York: Skyhorse Publishing 2010.
WHO, UNODC, UNAIDS
World Health Organization (WHO)
WHO is responsible for providing leadership on global health matters, shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidence-based policy options, providing technical support to countries and monitoring and assessing health trends [http://www.who.int/about/en/]
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
Operating in all regions of the world, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime is mandated to assist Member States in their struggle against illicit drugs, crime and terrorism. In the Millennium Declaration, Member States also resolved to intensify efforts to fight transnational crime in all its dimensions, to redouble the efforts to implement the commitment to counter the world drug problem and to take concerted action against international terrorism [http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/about-unodc/index.html?ref=menutop].
UNAIDS
UNAIDS is the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, uniting efforts of the United Nations system, civil society, national governments, the private sector, global institutions and people living with and most affected by HIV. Its vision:
Zero new HIV infections
Zero discrimination
Zero AIDS-related deaths
[http://www.unaids.org/en/AboutUNAIDS/default.asp].
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