Toronto City Council voted to endorse the Vienna Declaration on Thursday, raising a loud voice against the war on drugs.
“The war against drugs has failed,” said city councillor Kyle Rae, who brought the declaration to council after attending the AIDS 2010 international conference this July, where it was announced. “In every jurisdiction and in every community, we know that policing this issue is not enough.”
The principles of the declaration favour a public health approach to dealing with drug addicts, rather than enforcing ever-stricter drug laws, which advocates say doesn’t work, and in fact can cause greater harm.
The “War on Drugs” has failed, particularly with regard to the spread of HIV in middle-income nations and some developing nations in Asia. The disease is now starting to bleed into Africa as well.
The spread of HIV among injection drug users is a most crucial issue in middle-income countries: poor nations simply cannot afford so expensive a vice on a large scale, and affluent nations often have instituted harm-reduction policies, such as needle exchange and opioid substitution programs, to mitigate the health risks.
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The 18th International AIDS conference was held this year in Vienna, Austria. The Vienna Declaration, which calls for international reform of illicit drug policies, is the official declaration of the conference.
Joining us tonight on Done by Law to discuss the Declaration is Dr Alex Wodak, who has long been an outspoken advocate for a harm minimisation approach to drugs. Dr Wodak is a physician and Director of the Alcohol and Drug service at St Vincent’s Hospital, and President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation.
Embassy – Failed tough-on-crime policies destabilize countries and economies, fuel violence and rates of HIV infection. The Vienna Declaration, the official declaration of the recently completed International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria, seeks to improve community health and safety by calling for the incorporation of scientific evidence into illicit drug policies. The controversial document asks governments around the world to reject the war on drugs, which has cost trillions of dollars, created widespread violence and ultimately killed tens of thousands of people.
Trouw – Hiv hangt samen met seks – het meeste nieuws over de achttiende aidsconferentie in Wenen van afgelopen week ging daarover. Daarmee bleef een ander onderwerp dat daar is besproken onderbelicht: het drugsbeleid.
Wereldwijd komen de meeste hiv-besmettingen – meestal geassocieerd met onveilige seks – voor ten zuiden van de Sahara. Maar in zo’n beetje alle westerse landen, Azië en Zuid-Amerika dreigt, zoals het op de conferentie heette, een ’ongedocumenteerde maar groeiende hiv-epidemie’: onder drugsgebruikers.
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The Body.Com – In a Los Angeles Times opinion piece, Evan Wood, associate professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, writes about the Vienna Declaration, a document he helped to draft, that calls for international leaders to revise drug policies to incorporate greater scientific evidence and promote HIV prevention, treatment and care for drug users.
The Oregonian – If some of the world’s top AIDS researchers sign a radical manifesto linking drug policy to AIDS prevention, and the world shrugs it off, how radical is it, really?
Scientists and other AIDS experts who have signed the Vienna Declaration — 14,756 people in all, as of Friday — appear to have a “tree that falls in the forest” problem. They’re doing their best to shout in the world’s ear, but the world thus far doesn’t seem to be taking much notice.
Like many other police officers, I have witnessed the tragedy of the HIV epidemic first hand. It is one thing to read the statistics demonstrating the connection between illicit drug use and HIV; it is another matter entirely to patrol the streets, day in and day out, repeatedly arresting men and women infected with the HIV virus.
Our country has one of the finest health-care systems in the world, but our laws surrounding drug use result in unnecessary disease and death.
New Strait Times – After nearly three decades of the HIV pandemic and more than 33 million infections worldwide, more than 19,000 participants at the 18th international AIDS conference in Vienna last week were re-energised with some good news and new hopes in the search for effective prevention and treatment strategies.
Unveiled for the first time in Vienna were the results of a study on an anti-retroviral drug containing vaginal gel that could protect women against HIV infection. With up to 50 per cent of the global HIV infection occurring in women and rising rates of women becoming infected in Malaysia annually, this represents the most significant and promising result that will allow women to protect themselves from HIV during sexual intercourse.
Given that abstinence, using condoms and being faithful have been unsuccessful in preventing HIV infection, a vaginal microbicide gel is a critical step forward.
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Last week, Canadians heard howls of protest that Stephen Harper hadn’t attended the World AIDS Conference in Vienna, and that Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq had “failed” to sign the Vienna Declaration on global antidrug policy. This did not speak well of Canadian politics, which can be insufferably myopic. It seems no other G20 leader attended the conference, and certainly no world leader or health minister has signed, or would dare sign, the Vienna Declaration — which essentially calls for a wholesale reassessment of our current approach to fighting drug trafficking and addiction.
That’s their problem, not the declaration’s: We endorse the call for a wholesale drug policy rethink. But until the political zeitgeist changes there’s no point hurling rotten fruit at Mr. Harper or any other cheerleader for the status quo. Far better to persuade them their position is untenable. And the Vienna Declaration does an admirable job of that, in clear, non-hysterical language. “The evidence that law enforcement has failed to prevent the availability of illegal drugs, in communities where there is demand, is now unambiguous,” it reads. “Over the last several decades, national and international drug surveillance systems have demonstrated a general pattern of falling drug prices and increasing drug purity — despite massive investments in drug law enforcement.” The source of these wild-eyed claims? A report from the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy, circa George W. Bush.
The costs of the war on drugs have been staggering to its developing world battlegrounds. Fifteen years ago it was the Colombian cartels battling each other, their government’s forces and Washington, at a cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Now, as Colombia flirts hesitantly with stability, it’s Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s war on his own country’s incredibly powerful, ruthless and corrupting drug gangs, at a cost of 23,000 lives since 2006. Most recently, it was a weeks-long battle in the slums of Kingston between Jamaican forces and the heavily armed supporters of cocaine kingpin Christopher “Dudus” Coke — at a cost of 73 lives on an island where the cocoa leaf doesn’t even grow. All of it to feed the habits of Americans and Canadians, and all backed and financed by their capitals. Statistics suggest rates of drug usage are falling gradually in Canada, and that’s good news –but no one could claim with a straight face that this is down to a lack of supply, or that criminal traffickers are considering going straight en masse.
One doesn’t have to believe drugs are physiologically or morally harmless, or to support harm reduction efforts like Vancouver’s Insite safe injection clinic (about which we are skeptical), or even advocate (as we do) the decriminalization of the marijuana trade, to endorse the declaration’s most basic demand: that governments “undertake a transparent review of the effectiveness of current drug policies” and “implement and evaluate a science-based public health approach to address the individual and community harms stemming from illicit drug use.”
Again, we don’t expect Mr. Harper (who is ideologically committed to prohibition) or Ms. Agluqqak (who is ideologically committed to Mr. Harper) to sign on to such a document. But along with many prominent activists, medical researchers and Nobel laureates, the Vienna Declaration’s signatories include Ernesto Zedillo, Cesar Gaviria and Fernando Henriqui Cardoso, the former presidents, respectively, of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. They know whereof they speak.
Perhaps their fellow ex-presidents, ex-prime ministers and ex-health ministers might consider speaking up. We recall in particular a certain Liberal prime minister from Shawinigan, who used to claim to want to decriminalize marijuana. His successor times three, Michael Ignatieff, now postures as an avid prohibitionist whose public position amounts to “pot is bad, so it should be illegal.” This is not progress.
There’s nothing impossible about adopting a more sensible, less brutalizing alternative to what Conrad Black has called the “corrupt, sociopathic war on drugs.” Impossible would be trying to sell the current approach to the world, knowing what we know now. Important people who realize this must make their voices heard. Enough innocent people have died.