The world’s nations have begun talks ahead of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs in 2016. This is a time of increasing high-level calls for drug policy reform and a sense that policies long dominated by prohibition and law enforcement in many parts of the world have failed miserably. Countries may be better served with a public health policy approach instead.
Canada has long been a world leader in implementing harm reduction policy when it comes to drug use at home.
So it was almost shocking to see it aligning itself to countries such as Russia and China in vocally opposing the inclusion of “harm reduction” in a new a new set of UN principles that will guide talks at the special session in 2016.
It is a disturbing decision, given the international acknowledgment of Canada’s progressive harm-reduction approach to HIV prevention that has successfully saved thousands of lives.
Many of these approaches, such as clean needle and syringe programs and the provision of opioid substitution therapy, are now recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and have become the gold standard for other countries to replicate.
