Invirtiendo en los jóvenes – Reducción de daños en Líbano

HCLU, January 29 2012, by Peter Sarosi

When we speak about injecting drugs use and HIV, we rarely pay any attention to the Middle-East. But if you think that injecting drug use is not prevalent in these countries and young people have no access to heroin or amphetamine – you are wrong. Harm Reduction International – the former IHRA – recognized the gap between the picture shown by governments and the reality of the streets when it decided to organize its latest international harm reduction conference in Beirut, Lebanon in April 2011. Our filming crew was there to explore this gap too. We interviewed drug users,

Lebanon is a low prevalence country in relation to HIV and it is one of the most open and liberal countries of the Middle East. Still, we found there is a huge stigma attached to being a drug user and/or living with HIV. This makes it very hard to speak about the risks of infectious diseases or the human rights of people who use drugs. Because of the low rate of testing and counselling, it is even hard to assess the situation. Stigma is a major barrier to access services. When we attended the conference there was only one NGO providing a full range of harm reduction services: SKOUN. They provide sterile injecting equipment, HIV testing and opiate substitution treatment. Methadone maintenance treatment is not legal but Buprenorphine was made legal last year. A big step forward, although the availability is very limited.

In 1998 the drug law was amended, the country turned from an outright criminalization approach to a certain form of medicalization of the problem. There is still a long way for an effective and humane drug policy to be implemented though. Treatment is not available and the human rights of drug users are systematically violated, police officers often torture or rape offenders. To get into a prison in Lebanon often means that you have to wait for years without a trial in an overcrowded cell with 20 or more people. Illegal drugs are more available in prisons than any legal forms of treatment. When we visited a prison in Beirut it happened to be an uprising among prisoners – no surprise! (We made another movie about that.)

When a young activist confronted a chief police officer at the conference and questioned him about police abuse, he simply slapped the girl in the face. This behavior clearly indicates how hard it is to deserve dignity for any young people, not to mention drug users. Will the Arab spring change drug policies for good? We do not know. Our interviewees were optimistic. We think governments should listen to Nadya Mikdashi, the Executive Director of Skoun and invest more in young people in general - and not slap them in the face.

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