Report Finds UN Policies on Illicit Drugs Fuel Global HIV Infections

A new report concludes that United Nations policies on illicit drugs and wholesale criminalization and imprisonment of drug users at the national level are fueling HIV epidemics across Asia and the former Soviet Union.

The study, Illicit Drug Policies and the Global HIV Epidemic: Effects of UN and National Government Approaches, was commissioned by the UN Millennium Project and published by OSI's International Harm Reduction Development Program (IHRD). It was released at the 47th session of the UN’s Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), one of the UN entities the report says should play a leading role in healthy reform of international drug policy.

The report calls for a new UN drug convention to explicitly acknowledge that harm reduction measures to reduce HIV without requiring abstinence from injection drug users (IDUs) are permissible under international law. It also urges an end to forced drug treatment and indiscriminate imprisonment that can accelerate rates of global HIV infection without effectively addressing problems related to illicit drug use.

"While much is said about how injection drug use spreads HIV, little attention is paid to the role of drug policy in accelerating HIV epidemics," said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of IHRD and one of the report’s authors. "Governments from Thailand to China to Russia look to the United Nations to justify jailing thousands of drug users, or to excuse their own failures to offer public health services proven to save lives."

Read a press release about Illicit Drug Policies and the Global HIV Epidemic: Effects of UN and National Government Approaches. The full report is available in PDF format below.

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