HIV only winner in useless drug war
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Over the centuries, scientists who dared to challenge rulers of the day often found themselves in jail. Today, politicians who prefer ideology over truth just stick their fingers in their ears.
The key statement that emerged from last week’s International AIDS Conference was a declaration asking governments to base their drug policies on scientific evidence.
So far, about 14,000 people have signed the so called Vienna declaration, including Nobel Laureates, former heads of state, religious leaders and experts in science, medicine and law.
In Canada, five provincial medical officers of health and the Canadian Public Health Association have endorsed the statement. So have past presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, as well as the wife of the president of Georgia, the deputy chair of the Georgian parliament and that country’s minister of labour, health and social affairs. Georgia is one of the hardest hit countries in eastern Europe in terms of the spread of HIV.
In Mexico, about 23,000 people have been killed since Mexico launched its anti-drug campaign in 2006. The drug war is getting more violent in North America as well.
But both the U.S. and Canada have shied away from taking a stand on the declaration.
Maxine Davis, head of Vancouver’s Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation, says she asked Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq at the AIDS conference if she agreed clean needles can prevent HIV.
“She repeatedly failed to confirm her support.”
If the Canadian health minister can’t summon up enough courage to acknowledge the importance of clean needles in the fight against HIV, what hope is there for intelligent debate? Reason, it seems, has been strangled by political intransigence.
The declaration calls for a review of the effectiveness of drug policies and a science based public health approach to the harms stemming from illicit drugs. It also urges the decriminalization of drug use.
The drug war has wasted billions of dollars, fuelled rising HIV rates and destabilized countries such as Colombia,
Mexico and Afghanistan, the statement points out.
Countless lives have been lost and drug lords are laughing all the way to the bank.
Meanwhile, your taxes are going up to pay for all that useless drug law enforcement. “This is something that conservatives should identify with — lack of government accountability (and) the wasting of tax dollars,” says Dr. Evan Wood, founder of the Vancouver- based International Centre for Science in Drug Policy.
“You’d think that (the federal government) would change policy if there was something that showed that public health can be improved and tax dollars can be saved.”
Each case of HIV costs Canadian taxpayers about $250,000, notes Wood, who chaired the committee that wrote the Vienna declaration.
“At the end of the day,” he says, “any effort to reduce the supply of drugs has the perverse effect of making it that much more profitable for someone else.”
Wood’s centre recently did a review of studies on the effect of drug enforcement on drug-related violence.
The vast majority of the studies concluded that increased enforcement leads to greater drug-related violence.
“We’re in a fight between science and ideology,” says Wood.
Perhaps it’s our politicians — not our drug addicts — who should be in jail.
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