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UN: DRUG USERS SHOULD NEVER BE IMPRISONED FOR CONSUMPTION



  • Delivered by Marco Perduca, Main UN Representative

    The Transnational Radical Party wishes to address the issue of imprisonment of drug users. In the early 1990s, the TRP was at the forefront of legislative reforms in Italy promoting policies that would have allowed the medical treatment of individuals using illicit narcotics through, among other things, substitution substances, mobile clinics and needle exchange. Those policies, also known with the term "harm reduction", proved to be very effecting in the medium long term curbing the number of overdoses and limiting HIV/AIDS. We welcome the fact that they are at the center of today's debate.

    The TRP has always been particularly concerned by policies that pretended to deal with the consumption of narcotic and psychotropic substances through penal measures. In fact, as a general principle of criminal law, the TRP firmly believes that there should be no crime without victim, and that, therefore, individual behaviors should be sanctioned only when causing harm to other individuals.

    Drug users - any type of drug users - should never be imprisoned for consumption. As individuals with a health problem, they should rather be treated in public or private structures that are run by doctors and not prison guards. Incarceration often acts to accelerate HIV epidemics, placing individuals in settings where HIV risk behaviors continue unabated, but where means of HIV protection are unavailable.

    To reduce the double harm that is caused to people that are incarcerated for taking illicit narcotics, over the last decade, dozens of countries have started to implement pilot projects, including those that provide sterile syringes to intravenous drug users to inject their doses in clean and protected environments also inside densely populated prisons. Those programs eventually became an important component of those countries' health policies within and outside prisons.

    With time passing, and the refining of the various techniques, those policies have been able to contain the spread of HIV/AIDS also in developing countries. The TRP believes that those initiatives should be internationally acknowledged, accurately studied and scientifically evaluated in fora such as this one in view of developing models of real best practices to be shared to face the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide.