International support and opposition to harm reduction

Harm Reduction is currently supported by the UN through the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) 2001 Declaration, and related bodies such as WHO, UNAIDS, the World Bank and UNODC. A UN report following up the UNGASS meeting states " The limited information obtained from countries where injecting drug use is an established mode of HIV transmission reveals that fewer than 5 per cent of injecting drug users receive the recommended prevention services."The latest International Narcotics Control Bureau report addresses harm reduction as essential for the first time, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has featured it in the 2004 World Drug Report.

Despite this apparent international acceptance of harm reduction as a strategy to prevent HIV, there is still much opposition to implementing harm reduction policies.

The United States, which is the only country in the world to explicitly ban use of federal funds for needle exchange, has recently increased pressure on the United Nations to stop promotion of this HIV prevention strategy. As a result, a group of HIV and AIDS organisations, human rights groups, scientific researchers and policy analysts from 56 countries have written an open letter to the delegates of the 48th Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), arguing that harm reduction programmes continue to be supported.

More recently, a report published in February 2007 by the Open Society Institute - Closed to Reason - accuses the International Narcotics Bureau, a UN-funded body responsible for monitoring compliance with the UN drug conventions, of blocking evidence-based efforts to address the epidemic of HIV among injecting drug users.