War on drugs puts profits before people

Residents of Darwin will smoke a giant joint today to symbolise their ongoing resistance to the US led wars on drugs and “terrorism”.

The joint will be lit at Raintree Park at 12noon at the Network Against Prohibition’s 19th Community Smoke-In on the final day of the 3rd Darwin International Syringe Festival.

NAP spokesperson Strider said “The war on terror would have been intellectually unacceptable had the population not been softened up to accept such a logical absurdity, by the so-called war on drugs.”

“There can of course be no war on drugs or terrorism, only on people.”

“It is a human rights issue and we are a human rights organisation.”

“Because we provide needle and syringe programs in Australia we have been lucky enough to avoid the catastrophic situation now developing in Eastern Europe and across Asia, where lack of access to clean injecting equipment has resulted in a staggering 90% of people diagnosed with HIV in Russia being injecting drug users.”

In the United States, another country that fails to provide needle/syringe programs, 25% of injecting drug users are HIV positive. In 2000, HIV/AIDS was among the top three causes of death for African-American men ages 25-54.

This catastrophe could be stopped in its tracks if injecting equipment was provided to those people that need it. Countries that fail to provide injecting equipment to drug users rely on the moral authority of the 1998 UN General Assembly on Drugs declaration aiming for a drug-free world by 2008. Following the US experiment with the prohibition of alcohol this seems to be a very unlikely outcome.

This is in direct contrast to resolutions of the UN General Assembly on AIDS held in 2001 that called for the establishment of needle and syringe programs.

This needs to be evaluated in the light of the wider AIDS pandemic. Dr Ninkama Moiya, Director of PNG’s National AIDS Council Secretariat told delegates at the 16th Annual Australiasian Society of HIV Medicine conference, held in Canberra earlier this month, that AIDS is the leading cause of death in the wards of Port Moresby General Hospital amounting to 50% of all deaths.

Dr Moiya said “Poverty increases HIV transmission.”

This analysis was supported by Dr Mary Crewe from the Centre for the Study of AIDS in Africa, who also identified racism and global capitalism as factors increasing HIV transmission.

Strider said “The so-called war on drugs is unreasonably complicating the so-called war on AIDS. What we are seeing is unconscionable profiteering by pharmaceutical and medical technology companies. Western governments are bowing to these commercial pressures.”

Costing ten times as much as a conventional device, the retractable syringe is one example of this profiteering.

In PNG and Africa, where sexual activity, not unsafe injecting, is the leading cause of HIV transmission, hospitals are being forced into spending aid funding on retractable syringes. 100,000 retractable syringes are being sold to PNG hospitals every month.

It is significant that President George Bush appointed former Eli Lilly CEO, Randall Tobias, as head of the US Global AIDS initiative. One of his first acts has been to award a massive contract to a Texas based syringe manufacturer to provide retractable syringes to Botswana, Cote D'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria.

Strider said “Governmment and industry leadership is clearly taking us to a place where the Network Against Prohibition does not wish to go. We identify a crisis in leadership.”

“The voice of the users should be listened to. We know something that well meaning non-users in government don’t know. We know that using drugs is a part of life and protected by the universal declaration of human rights on any reasonable interpretation of the document. It is wrong to criminalise people who think this way.”

For more information contact the Network Against Prohibition on 0415 16 2525 or see the following links:

Syringegate – the real story behind the retractable syringe http://www.napnt.org/arse/syringegate.html

UNAIDS 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic http://www.unaids.org/bangkok2004/report.html

US Global AIDS initiative http://www.cdc.gov/nchstp/od/gap/

The 3rd Darwin International Syringe Festival http://www.napnt.org/sf/2004contents.html