The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria welcomes the UN General Assembly Special Session on the world drug problem as an opportunity to bring public health and human rights concerns to the center of drug control policy.
This article outlines the elements of the Bolivian initiative that ensure its continued successful functioning, and explores to what extent this model can be translated to other Andean contexts.
A Release Drugs acaba de lançar uma nova edição do seu relatório A Quiet Revolution (Uma revolução silenciosa), sobre experiências de países que já experimentam algum tipo de descriminalização dos usuários de drogas.
Em sua mais recente edição, a revista Lancet, uma das principais publicações do campo médico mundial, publicou um editorial a respeito da urgência de se pensar novos paradigmas no campo da política de drogas.
The Johns Hopkins–Lancet Commission on Drug Policy and Health has sought to examine the emerging scientific evidence on public health issues arising from drug-control policy.
People who inject drugs will be cut off from life saving treatment after drug programmes are finally closed in areas of the country affected by the war in eastern Ukraine.
The Alliance for Public Health (APH) has announced that the last 64 patients in the occupied area of Donetsk who receive Opioid Substitution Therapy (OST), will be cut off from treatment within days.
It comes as civil society organisations gather in Vienna at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) ahead of the first UN General Assembly Session on drugs (UNGASS) for nearly 20 years.
Since the outbreak of war in 2014 APH has struggled to maintain harm reduction services to people who inject drugs, particularly in areas of the country annexed by Russia, such as Crimea and conflict areas in eastern Ukraine under the control of separatist forces.
Overall around 50,000 people receive HIV prevention services in occupied areas of Ukraine. But since the start of the conflict in 2014, more than 900 patients have lost access OST in the war zone area. The last remaining 64 patients still receiving treatment in Donetsk will run out of supplies (methadone) by the end of March.
When people have their methadone services cut their health rapidly deteriorates as they go into withdrawal. Many drug users, in desperation, will seek out replacement illicit drugs. HIV and overdose risks often rise dramatically as a result. In the Donbas area that includes Donetsk, an extra 495 new cases of HIV were detected in 2015.
Click here to access the statement online.
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This report documents both the wastefulness of ineffective policies and the missed opportunity of failing to invest in policies and programs that embody good public health practice and human rights norms.
