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David Gilliver
talks to International Drug Policy Consortium
executive director Ann Fordham about raising awareness and
the changing course of the global drug policy debate
and we did a lot of advocacy work with a strong focus on UNODC because
they’re the global lead on HIV among people who inject drugs,’ she says. ‘Mr
Fedotov, for a long time, did not come out and make any strong statements
about harm reduction or how a punitive approach fuelled the HIV epidemic, but
we do think that’s shifting.’
While he made ‘some quite supportive statements’ at the Commission on
Narcotic Drugs (CND) this year it’s important to remember that it was ‘on the back
of sustained advocacy from civil society, and some very concerned donor
governments saying that UNODC had to show political leadership on this issue
and that Mr Fedotov must not be swayed by the Russian government,’ she states.
*****
IDPC recently published a well-received report in partnership with Chatham
House and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) on different
approaches that law enforcement agencies could take in managing drug
markets – shifting the emphasis from arresting users to problems like violence,
corruption and HIV. ‘It sits alongside the drug policy reform work, but it’s also
about what we can do today to understand where resources can be best spent
and where we’ve perhaps been pursuing wasteful strategies that have actually
created more harm,’ she says.
IDPC is also coordinating the
Support. Don’t Punish
campaign (see next
page), which aims to highlight how criminalisation of people who inject drugs
increases risks around HIV/Aids and other blood-borne viruses, part of a project
to boost harm reduction services in Africa and Asia. ‘The idea is that to scale up
harm reduction services you have to address the policy and legal environment in
which those services operate,’ she says.
As well as raising awareness, the campaign is calling for more money for
‘grossly underfunded’ harm reduction services. ‘Globally, people who inject
drugs have access to an average of two needles each per year, which is
absolutely appalling coverage, so this is a call on donor governments to make a
strong commitment. That’s the ‘support’ aspect, and the ‘don’t punish’ element
is about removing the criminal sanctions associated with drug use. People are
stigmatised and put in prison, where they’re extremely vulnerable to HIV
infection because there’s even less coverage of needle and syringe exchange and
opiate substitution therapy.’
IDPC’s network of member organisations gives it global coverage, but there
are still regions where it feels it needs to reach out to more members, such as
Africa, where issues around drug use and trafficking are becoming increasingly
important and the response ‘is still quite nascent,’ she says.
With a steering group made up of representatives from across ten regions,
how easy is it all to coordinate? ‘It is a challenge, but IDPC is first and foremost
May 2013 |
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Profile |
Ann Fordham
a network, and we really believe in the value of having a global coalition of
organisations working together. As with any network, there’s a challenge in
terms of communications and coordination but we’re living in the age of very
good social media and other communications, and there is usually a regional
lead to coordinate.’
One key role is to develop advocacy tools for use by partners and members,
and regular requests for advocacy training have led to the creation of a toolkit
that will be launched at the Harm Reduction International (HRI) conference next
month – ‘a set of tools that you can take off the shelf and develop your own
advocacy training,’ she says – and IDPC also collaborates with partners to mount
drug policy seminars. ‘Local civil society organisations get to sit at the table with
the key decision makers in their country. It’s a very important way to ensure that
dialogue happens, because it can be difficult for civil society to get in the room
with the right people.’
In addition to all this, IDPC actively disseminates the work of its member
organisations, helping to increase visibility and build capacity, as drug policy
debates have ‘traditionally been quite opaque and complex’, she says. ‘One of
IDPC’s key mandates is to try to support to our members and other civil society
partners to be able to engage effectively in drug policy advocacy in some of
those more complex debates.’
She’s been executive director since 2011, having joined the organisation
three years earlier from the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, where she did
policy work around injecting drug use and HIV at the same time as studying for
a master’s in human rights at Sussex University.
‘It was the confluence of the two that got me interested in the drugs issue,’
she says. ‘I wanted to write my final dissertation on a really pertinent human
rights issue when it came to the HIV/Aids epidemic – understanding the issue of
injecting drug use as a human rights issue as much as anything else.’
After learning about IDPC at IHRA’s 2008 conference in Barcelona, a job came
up as coordinator and although she was the only staff member for the first year,
the organisation has now grown from a network of 30 members to 97, with five
full-time and two part-time staff. ‘It was incredibly fast-paced and rewarding,
but it has been a total rollercoaster,’ she says.
So what are her ambitions for IDPC now? ‘In addition to the very important
aspects of the networking and civil society visibility, we’re already focusing on
2016 and the next UN General Assembly special session on drugs. We want to
increase our reach and our influence in terms of the global debate, because we
feel that coming out of 2016 there will definitely be some governments who
will clearly have made a break with the current regime.
‘We want to be able to play a constructive role in those discussions, and support
the member states that are moving quickly towards more serious reform.’
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