-
-
Ban on Allowing States to Use HIV Prevention Money on Life-Saving Syringe Programs was Overturned in 2009 After 20-Year Struggle
Reinstatement of Ban will Lead to Thousands of New HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C Cases Annually
As part of the 2012 spending package being voted on today, Congress is restoring a ban on using federal funding for syringe exchange programs that reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and other infectious diseases. The ban, enacted in the 1980s and repealed in 2009, was largely responsible for hundreds of thousands of Americans contracting HIV/AIDS directly or indirectly from the sharing of used syringes. Advocates warn that restoring the ban will result in thousands of Americans contracting HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C or other infectious diseases next year alone.
-
By George Murkin
Far from eliminating drug use and the illicit trade, prohibition has inadvertently fuelled the development of the world’s largest illegal commodities market – a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, controlled solely by criminal profiteers. Produced in collaboration with project supporters Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, Transform Drug Policy Foundation, Release, the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy and Harm Reduction International, the latest Count the Costs briefing outlines how this illicit, unregulated market generates:
Organised crime
Street crime
Mass incarceration
Violent crime
Crimes perpetrated by governments/states
Vast economic costs in terms of drug war-related enforcementThe briefing will form a key part of our outreach to mainstream NGOs working in the criminal justice sector, building on the endorsements Count the Costs has already received from organisations such as the Howard League for Penal Reform and Make Justice Work.
-
-
But NIDA’s 2011 Monitoring the Future Survey also shows continued high levels of abuse of alternate tobacco products, marijuana and prescription drugs
Cigarette and alcohol use by eighth, 10th and 12th-graders are at their lowest point since the Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey began polling teenagers in 1975, according to this year’s survey results. However, this positive news is tempered by a slowing rate of decline in teen smoking as well as continued high rates of abuse of other tobacco products (e.g., hookahs, small cigars, smokeless tobacco), marijuana and prescription drugs. The survey results, announced today during a news conference at the National Press Club, appear to show that more teens continue to abuse marijuana than cigarettes; and alcohol is still the drug of choice among all three age groups queried.
MTF is an annual survey of eighth, 10th, and 12th-graders conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The survey was conducted in classrooms earlier this year.
Read more: http://www.nida.nih.gov/newsroom/11/NR12-14.html
-
by Craig Jones Former Executive Director, The John Howard Society of Canada.A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America / By Ernest Drucker, The New Press, 2011, pp. xiv, 211
Every student of epidemiology learns the story of the Broad Street pump (London, Summer 1854), which marks the birth of epidemiology. In A Plague of Prisons, Ernest Drucker uses that story as a metaphor to explain the explosion of incarceration in the United States that followed the 1973 enactment of the Rockefeller drug laws and to illustrate how political decisions act as vectors – pumps – and how these vectors create a social epidemic of gargantuan proportions. Drucker is professor emeritus of family and social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He was present at the creation of the AIDS epidemic in the Bronx in the early 1980s and watched how politics, ignorance, homophobia and racism facilitated the transmission of disease from certain neighborhoods and populations to a much larger population via the Riker’s Island prison.
-
Professor Nutt is currently the Edmund J Safra Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology and director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit in the Division of Experimental Medicine at Imperial College London. He received his undergraduate training in medicine at Cambridge and Guy’s Hospital, and continued training in neurology to MRCP. After completing his psychiatric training in Oxford, he continued there as a lecturer and then later as a Wellcome Senior Fellow in psychiatry. He then spent two years as Chief of the Section of Clinical Science in the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in NIH, Bethesda, USA. On returning to England in 1988 he set up the Psychopharmacology Unit in Bristol University, an interdisciplinary research grouping spanning the departments of Psychiatry and Pharmacology before moving to Imperial College London in December 2008 where he leads a similar group with a particular focus on brain imaging especially PET. He broadcasts widely to the general public both on radio and television including recent BBC Horizon on drug harms and their classification. He also lecturers widely to the public as well as to the scientific and medical communities; for instance has presented three time at the Cheltenham Science Festival and several times for Café Scientifiques. In 2010 he was listed as one of the 100 most important figures in British Science by The Times Eureka science magazine.
-
By Tony Newman, Director of Media Relations, Drug Policy Alliance
2011 has been a watershed year for the movement working to end our county’s disastrous war on drugs. Below are the top stories of the year that exemplify the momentum and give us hope that we can find alternatives to drug war madness.
-
New Coalition calls for a public health approach to alcohol, tobacco and drug controls
Vancouver (BC), November 26, 2011: The Health Officers’ Council of BC (HOC) and the Canadian Drug
Policy Coalition (CDPC), http://drugpolicy.ca/, have called for a fundamental shift in Canada’s approach to alcohol, tobacco, illegal and prescription drug controls.The HOC study released today, “Public Health Perspectives for Regulating Psychoactive Substances,” describes how public health oriented regulation of alcohol, tobacco, prescription and illegal substances can better reduce the harms that result both from substance use and substance regulation, compared to current approaches.
“This paper highlights the large number of needless and preventable deaths, hospitalizations and human suffering consequent to our current approaches”, Dr. Richard Mathias of the HOC said. “The Health Officers’ Council is inviting feedback on its ideas and requesting that organizations and individuals join with us in a call for immediate changes to put the public’s health first.”
Dr. John Carsley, a public health and preventive medicine specialist and Medical Health Officer for the region
added: “The harms associated with psychoactive substances are a major public health and social problem.
Progress will require strong partnerships and frank discussion between all levels of government, non-government organizations, and civil society.”The CDPC is a new national coalition of front-line harm reduction and treatment providers, HIV/AIDS service
organizations, people who use drugs, researchers and public health officials. The Coalition launched today in
Vancouver, BC through its partnership in the release of the paper.
