Who’s Missing from the Global AIDS Conference?

Every other year, AIDS activists everywhere travel far and wide to attend the International AIDS Conference, pushing for access to HIV prevention and treatment for all. The conference hasn’t been in the U.S. for eons, because back in the 80s, a widely reviled individual named Senator Jesse Helms made sure that anyone living with HIV could not enter the country. Two years ago, the HIV travel ban was lifted, and this year, the conference will be in the U.S — in Washington, DC from July 22 to 27.

But this country is still excluding countless people living with HIV.

When people from other countries apply to enter the U.S., even just to attend a conference, they must answer these 2 questions:

1. Are you or have you ever been a drug abuser or drug addict?
2. Are you coming to the United States to engage in prostitution or unlawful commercialized vice or have you been engaged in prostitution or procuring prostitutes within the past 10 years?

If you know how it is that we humans get HIV, you know that drug use and sex work are among the ways. Why talk about fighting a disease without the people who are dealing with it? This policy cuts out a massive number of people around the world who are living with HIV or at risk for HIV, including those working in the field and organizing for an end to this disease, from going to the International AIDS Conference. In response, drug users and sex workers and their allies around the world have set up hivhumanrightsnow.org to educate the world one blog entry at a time. Drug users and people living with HIV in Eastern Europe will have their own conference in Kiev to strategize the fight against AIDS. Sex workers and their allies will meet in Kolkata.

Tune in to @HIVhumanRIGHTS for tweets from sex workers, drug users and their allies about what the world needs to do to fight AIDS, and keep checking the blog at hivhumanrightsnow.org for inspiring updates.

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Follow the Activist Media from the Global AIDS Conference in Vienna!

Global AIDS activists will be blogging from AIDS2010 at Take a Number (in Vienna!), a grassroots activist media site that is being organized by Health GAP.

Be sure to check it throughout the week! The conference only happens every 2 years, and activists fiercely make their presence known while the corporate media is paying attention to AIDS and world public health leaders are assembled. Activists are angry that wealthy nations are using the financial crisis as an excuse to renege on their commitments to make sure everyone in the world who needs AIDS treatment has access to it. Here are some photos from day one of the conference by Kaytee Riek:

“Nothing About Us Without Us”: Drug users around the world organize for HIV and viral hepatitis prevention, healthcare, and human rights

by Suzy Subways, Editor, Solidarity Project

JUNE 2007 • Issue 5

We know that drug use—both legal and illegal—can increase a person’s HIV risk. We also know that just quitting drug use is not a realistic option for everyone. Harm reduction strategies accept that drug use is part of our world and provide effective tools to reduce the harmful effects that drug use can have, such as viral hepatitis, HIV and overdose. HIV, hepatitis C and hepatitis B can be transmitted when people share injecting equipment, so syringe exchanges give people clean, unused works and dispose of people’s used ones. Methadone is a drug that can be prescribed and taken orally so that injection is avoided completely, and many people find they can keep their lives more manageable and healthy with methadone or another type of opiate maintenance therapy. In this issue of Solidarity Project, we explore ways that drug users around the world are organizing to protect themselves and their communities when society won’t.

Spectacular demonstrations took place on World AIDS Day 2006 in Teheran, Iran. More than 800 people visited Persepolis’ programme for reducing HIV among drug injectors.

At the 18th International Conference on the Reduction of Drug Related Harm in Warsaw, Poland in May, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) announced that about a third of people who contract HIV worldwide outside of Africa are exposed through shared syringes during injection drug use or indirectly as sexual partners of people infected through shared syringes. The trend is similar in the United States, where these risk factors account for almost two-thirds of cumulative AIDS cases among women.

Between 50-90%, of active and former injection drug users in the U.S. have hepatitis C (HCV), with most users becoming infected within the first years of beginning to inject. In Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe, injection drug use is a primary mode of transmission for both HIV and HCV. Yet only 8% of injection drug users worldwide have access to prevention services like opiate maintenance treatment and sterile syringes, according to UNAIDS.

The U.S.-led global “War on Drugs”—which puts drug users in the hands of police and prisons instead of serving users’ physical and mental health, housing, and recovery needs—increases the risk of contracting HIV and viral hepatitis, as well as the risk of overdose. Stijn Goossens, Director of Activism for the newly formed International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD) cites an example from his home, Antwerp, Belgium, to demonstrate the absurdity of making particular drugs illegal: “Antwerp jails are full of Moroccans in for the hash trade. How come they’re not full of Scottish people in for the whiskey trade?” Of course, Goossens and INPUD would oppose the incarceration of alcohol vendors from any country, but his point is clear.

Even before the emergence of HIV, drug users organized to provide services for their communities and to defend their human rights. Those who are directly affected by an issue must lead every struggle for justice—and this struggle is no different. As with any movement, drug user organizing faces considerable challenges, but they can be overcome, especially with the logistical support of former and non-users.

A Movement Grows

Drug user organizing started in the Netherlands in the early 1970s to reduce the transmission of hepatitis B, and in 1984, a users’ group in Amsterdam began the first distribution of syringes to prevent HIV. The Drug User Organizing Manual, created by Jennifer Flynn for the Open Society Institute’s International Harm Reduction Development Program (IHRD), observes: “Heavily influenced by the AIDS movement, drug user organizing carries forward The Denver Principles, which rejects victimization and creates a new identity that individuals can call themselves, rather than being given a label by the outside world.”