Rudd's opium campaign 'risks HIV plague'
Annabel Stafford
April 10, 2008
KEY POINTS
■Cutting opium supply could result in switch to heroin.
■Rising price of opium could prove windfall to terrorists.
■Drug and HIV researchers say Rudd plan is badly focused.
KEVIN Rudd's plan for a bail-out of opium farmers in Afghanistan would lead to an explosion of HIV cases in the war-torn country if it was successful, one of the men credited with halting the spread of HIV in Sydney warns.
Alex Wodak, who has travelled to Afghanistan three times in the past 18 months as part of the World Bank's efforts to prevent an outbreak of HIV, said the Prime Minister's plan to eradicate opium poppy crops was a "high-risk strategy" that would push up the price of opium and lead many users to inject heroin.
"The 200,000 Afghans who smoke and eat opium would shift to inject heroin and then we would inevitably have an HIV epidemic among drug users (and beyond)," Dr Wodak said.
Dr Wodak, director of the alcohol and drug service at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital, risked arrest by setting up in 1986 an illegal needle exchange program that was later credited with curtailing the spread of HIV in that city.
Dr Wodak told The Age a strategy like Mr Rudd's was unlikely to work, because of the global demand for opium. But if even partly successful, it would drive up the price of opium and prove a windfall for terrorist groups, which are believed to be sitting on large opium stockpiles.
Dr Wodak said the Rudd Government and its allies should instead focus on stopping the spread of HIV in Afghanistan with measures such as clean-needle programs.
The number of injecting drug users in Afghanistan was still low at about 19,000, but had increased rapidly in recent years, Dr Wodak said. There was a significant risk that HIV could spread among injecting drug users if it was introduced to the group by expatriates returning from Pakistan and Iran.
Before last week's NATO summit, Mr Rudd said opium poppy crops should be destroyed to cut funding to terrorists and cut the global supply of heroin. If need be, opium poppy farmers should be offered cash incentives to move to other forms of farming.
Opium production in Afghanistan has increased rapidly since the fall of the Taliban. In 2006, the area under poppy cultivation grew 59% to 165,000 hectares and in 2007 it increased by 17% to 193,000 hectares, according to the 2007 report of the United Nations' International Narcotics Control Board.
Nick Crofts, a senior research fellow with Melbourne University's Nossal Institute for Global Health, echoed Dr Wodak's concerns.
In many countries where plans similar to Mr Rudd's had been pursued "there has been a shift to the use of heroin and that is very rapidly followed by a shift from smoking to injecting", he said. "And everywhere that's happened it's been followed by massive outbreaks of HIV."
If a plan to move people to other forms of farming was not part of a whole program of socioeconomic development "then it fails", he said. A comprehensive program of development would mean developing access to education, universal health system, stable government and a stable economy.
