This week marks the beginning of the United Nations’ conference on drug policy, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs, in Vienna, Austria. One of the major issues being discussed is the drug-related spread of HIV/AIDS and strategies to combat it. The conference is taking place in a near-media blackout with minimal oversight from the participating delegations’ home countries.
Nevertheless, the international community will be paying close attention to the outcome of the conference, where the major topic of discussion will be “harm reduction:” that is, programs such as needle exchange centers, substitute drug therapies and legal injection centers. Such measures will prove critical in curbing the spread of HIV in large portions of Asia, including the former Soviet Union and China, where intravenous drug use is the primary vector for infection. However, any progress made in implementing such programs will be accomplished despite the financial and diplomatic clout of the United States, rather than because of it.
The problem lies with the Bush administration’s — and its Congressional allies’ — commitment to ideological rigor over science. This antiscientific attitude is already evident in the federal government’s approach to other foreign HIV/AIDS relief programs. Despite the fact that condom distribution programs are the most demonstrably effective (and cheapest) measures for curbing the spread of HIV through sexual contact, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEFAR) mandates that 33 percent of all funds must be spent on programs advocating abstinence as a means of preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS; furthermore, faith-based programs are funded even if they make no mention of contraception to clients. Programs receiving U.S. funds are also required to vocally oppose the legalization of prostitution, even though the stigmatization of prostitution makes relief work and care an incredibly difficult ordeal.
That same penchant for moralizing and the demonization of victims and recipients of aid now appears to have taken hold in federal funding of drug-related HIV/AIDS relief. Last summer, Antonio Maria Costa, the director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), announced that: “the HIV/AIDS epidemic among injecting drug users can be stopped — and even reversed — if drug users are provided with … outreach, provision of clean injecting equipment and … substitution treatment.” A few months later, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Charles used American diplomatic muscle to force Costa to publish a letter affirming that UNODC would “neither endorse needle exchange as a solution for drug abuse nor support public statements advocating such practices.”
Why is the United States so opposed to harm reduction programs in fighting HIV/AIDS and so concerned with “relief” focusing on the behavior of aid recipients rather than their suffering and the medical treatment they require?
Apparently because, in the eyes of the administration and Congress, it is the behaviors themselves, not efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, that matter. In a recent move prominently decried on the op-ed pages of several national newspapers, Representatives Tom Davis, R-Va., and Mark Souder, R-Ind., have begun calling for the withdrawal of U.S. funds to relief agencies that operate or even promote needle exchange programs. Rep. Souder explained his motives in a recent press conference: “These lifestyles are the result of addiction, mental illness or other conditions that should and can be treated rather than accepted as normal, healthy behaviors.” In other words, it doesn’t matter how well methods such as needle exchanges actually work; U.S. aid should only be concerned with encouraging “normal” (read: “moral”) lifestyles abroad. That same twisted logic has rendered the domestic “War on Drugs” the farce it is today, and it is not a little disingenuous of Rep. Souder to argue that foreign drug abusers should be denied compassionate care, because we shouldn’t be encouraging their “abnormal” habits, when the United States is the largest market for illegal narcotics in the world.
Many Americans mistakenly believe that a dramatic portion of the federal budget is given over to foreign aid; in reality, less than one percent of GDP is spent on such projects. Paltry as that sum may be, it should not be held as a club over the heads of international relief agencies which could be making substantial gains in the fight against HIV/AIDS, were it not for the strings the United States is continually attaching to its purse. It is time for the federal government to abandon the self-congratulatory rhetoric of moralizing and to stop castigating aid recipients as immoral and promiscuous, and to start supporting those agencies that are engaged in meaningful care and prevention.
Rob Hunter ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science and philosophy.
