VIENNA - Non-governmental organizations have charged at a UN meeting that US opposition to programs offering needle exchanges to drug users to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS is threatening the lives of thousands.
In an open letter to a UN drug meeting that opened in Vienna Monday, the Human Rights Watch group said the United Nations "under pressure from the United States, is being asked to withdraw support from proven HIV prevention strategies at precisely the moment when increased commitment to measures such as syringe exchange and opiate substition treatment is needed."
"The United States should be encouraging proven HIV prevention strategies, not attacking them," Human Rights Watch said in the letter, written in cooperation with 300 NGO's from 56 countries.
"In most countries outside Africa, the largest number of new infections now occurs among injection drug users," the letter said.
"We must not deny these addicts any genuine opportunities to remain HIV negative," Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) told in Vienna on Monday the 48th session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND).
Costa said that contaminated syringes were a major source of transmission of the HIV virus and other diseases including hepatitis, especially among drug users whose capacity for rational thought was diminished.
"We reject the false dichotomy that either drug control prevails, with no consideration for HIV, or that HIV prevention prevails with no consideration for drug abuse," he added.
John Walters, director of the US Office of National drug control policy disagreed, telling reporters at the commission session that the United States remained "concerned about the global danger of HIV/aids transmission."
"The single greatest way of preventing the spread of HIV/aids through drug users is taking those addicted and get them to recover," Walters said.
The United States thinks the UN body "should not be involved with needle exchange because this is promoting drug use," said an unnamed US government official.
But Walters said that the points of agreement in the fight against drug abuse outweighed the differences, saying "there has been a kind of caricature" of the two sides' positions.
But the influential US newspaper, the New York Times, pointed to stark differences of opinion when it said in an editorial last week that "Washington's antipathy toward needle exchanges is a triumph of ideology over science, logic and compassion."
The Times said such exchanges were "a proven weapons against AIDS transmission" and that the US government's blocking money for such programs as it does for abortion programs, "would be an even more deadly mistake."
Jane Francis, a spokeswoman for the Council of Senlis think tank said "forced abstinence does not work if the drug addicts are not ready to stop."
"Needle exchange is the biggest life saver," she said, adding that the idea that "AIDS is getting spread through drug users" was "totally ridiculous."
Costa had said in a letter sent in November to the US State Department that the controversy over US objections to needle exchanges "continue to place... (Costa's office) in a difficult position," according to a copy of the letter obtained by AFP.
Costa said the United Nations does not "endorse needle exchanges as a solution for drug abuse nor support public statements advocating such practices" and feels such "prophylactic measures to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS should be undertaken only within the overall effort to reduce druge abuse," the letter said.
03/08/2005 12:04 GMT