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Tuesday 11 2013 –
Daily Update
– 3
KEEPING IT REEL
: Delegates watch InSite –
not just
injecting but connecting
, a film by the Hungarian Civil
Liberties Union (HCLU) that looks at the only legally
operating injection facility in North America. For a full
listing of all the films being shown, see the booklet in
your delegate bag.
Right time, right place
‘The conference is taking place at the right time and at the
right place,’ executive director of the Eurasian Harm
Reduction Network, Sergey Votyagov told delegates in
Sunday’s opening session.
Despite increasing wealth,
most governments in the
former Soviet region still did not
invest in harm reduction
programmes, he said, with
international donors often the
only ones providing ‘the
financial and moral’ support. ‘So
this is the right region to hold
the conference, although
regrettably for the wrong reasons,’ he said. ‘Lack of investment in
harm reduction costs lives.’ Lack of money was not the only
structural barrier, however. ‘Money follows priorities and the
money is spent on a wasteful law enforcement approach.’ Now
was the time to make the transition from donor funding to
investment by domestic governments, he said.
‘Our long-term slogan is “nothing about us, without us”, Eliot
Albers told the conference. ‘For us the centrality of meaningful
participation is not negotiable, and a fundamental principle that
should lie at the heart of all work.’ No process, document or
service could be said to embody this unless ‘our community’s
input has been built in from the start’, he stressed. ‘It’s not about
being asked to endorse a document we haven’t even seen.
‘Some of us have been told we’re troublemakers,’ he
continued. ‘But our principles are non-negotiable. We are more
than aware of the fact that our community is diverse, and you
need to be able to bring that to the table. If you are committed to
meaningful participation, you will find us a very willing partner.’
Changing core beliefs
‘My belief is that the drug policy of any society is decided by
the taboos and morals of the civil population,’ Sean Cassin of
Ireland’s Drug Policy Action Group told Monday’s
Evidence is
not enough
session. ‘The big challenge for harm reduction in
the future will be to interfere with the core beliefs that exist
there in terms of disease and morals and harm.’
He had established, and still managed, Ireland’s first church-
owned services for drug users, based at an inner-city Franciscan
friary in Dublin. ‘To be truthful, the founder was actually a drug user
who would come into the church in the early ’90s, because the
police usually wouldn’t follow him in there,’ he said. ‘He started to
bring his friends because it was a safe place, and we would distribute
needles and syringes before the health services were doing that.’
In terms of public perception, the 12-step model had also
helped to propagate a notion of powerlessness, he said, ‘even
though there is no basis in science or fact for the disease model’.
Worldwide there were 230m drug users, of whom just 27m were
problem users, he said. ‘There are massive markets for drugs and
a perception about harm that is worldwide and the biggest
obstacle to initiating harm reduction policies.’
Harm reduction ‘purists’ tended to avoid any debate ‘that gets
into the moral poles about decriminalisation or prohibition’, he said,
and ‘they’re able to operate effectively because of that’. There was
also an accusation of ‘surveillance medicine’ levelled at some
workers – ‘why are medicine professionals getting involved in the
area of pleasurable drugs?’ Most deaths by overdose had to do
with the context of the market, meanwhile – ‘the illegality of drugs,
the rushing to use, lack of control over content’.
Many harm reduction services operated a ‘field hospital’ model,
he said. ‘While the war goes on around us and the bullets are
flying, the hospital does its work but doesn’t comment or raise any
moral issues. But my worry about that is that the underlying moral
belief that drug use is evil goes unchallenged.
‘We could do no better than to shift our ethos to that of John
Stuart Mill’s “greatest happiness” principle,’ he concluded – that
actions are right in proportion to how much they promoted
happiness, and wrong in proportion to how far they produced the
opposite. ‘Happiness means pleasure – and the absence of pain.’
‘This is the
right region
to hold the
conference...’
SERGEY VOTYAGOV