Great news from Vancouver: the city’s safe injecting facility, Insite, is allowed to continue saving lives. For now. It’s the second time that Insite has won a case brought by the right-wing rottweilers of prime minister Stephen Harper. This victory was in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. But Harper may decide to put more [...]
For 20 years, American governments across the political spectrum have ignored a mountain of evidence showing that needle exchanges and other safe injecting programmes are the single most effective HIV prevention tool we have. But just before Christmas, with a minimum of fuss, Congress dropped the ban on federal funding for needle and syringe programmes.
The [...]
As promised, a note on the UK’s latest data on HIV among drug injectors. Some of the US’s battalions of Drug Warriors have been crowing that the new figures show a rise in infection rates among junkies in the UK: clear evidence that the nation’s policy of making sterile needles and injecting equipment available to [...]
Yesterday the US finally dropped its absolutely senseless law forbidding people with HIV from visiting the Land of the Free. (While Saint Obama is getting patted on the back for ending the ban, he was actually signing off on something that George Bush put in motion last year). That’s unmitigated good news for people with [...]
It’s not just because I was in Vancouver last week that I have heroin on the brain. Less than a month after a Canadian team found that prescribing heroin to addicts works where other treatments have failed, scientists in the UK reported the same thing. That stacks more evidence in favour of heroin prescription on [...]
It’s usually safe to take time off in July to move house — in a previous existence in the newroom we used to call the European summer the “silly season”. In the weeks I’ve been painting walls, unpacking boxes and not blogging, we’ve had some HIV silliness, but some good sense too.
The IAS conference on [...]
For a world-renowned centre of epidemiological excellence, the US CDC can do some pretty shonky work. This week, the second week of April, 2009, they have finally published some results from surveillance among drug injectors carried out more than three years ago. And the analysis is so simplistic that it tells us virtually nothing about [...]
The Colombian President says we’ve lost the war on drugs. So does his predecesor. And his Mexican counterpart. Not to mention Harvard economists. Oh, and the editors of The Economist. Is it conceivable that the United Nations and the US government, that have for so long dug their heels into the mud of prohibition as [...]
Stories of kids smoking antiretroviral drugs to get high first surfaced in South Africa last spring. Picked up by the BBC last week, they are now burning through the WTF pages of the blogosphere. Should we give a damn?
Interestingly, I can’t find anything anywhere from anyone who has actually nicked the pills off their [...]
Bhutan is not exactly crumbling under the weight of HIV infections. Between 1993 and 2006, a total of 90 cases were reported. Each is dilligently listed by the Ministry of Health — age, sex, how they became infected, how their infection came to light, whether they are still alive (19 had died by August 2006). [...]
