The White House Office on National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP -- the drug czar's office) has failed on its own terms when it comes t

The battle over harm reduction in Vancouver just gets uglier all the time:

VANCOUVER -  The Pivot Legal Society has asked federal Auditor-General Sheila Fraser to examine whether the RCMP exceeded its law-enforcement mandate by commissioning studies into Vancouver's supervised injection site.

Pivot lawyer and spokesman Doug King on Wednesday revealed RCMP e-mails indicating the national police force commissioned reports researching Insite.

"The RCMP Act gave the RCMP a mandate to act as peace officers for the citizens of Canada. Using public funds entrusted to them to fund a cynical critique of health-based research clearly does not fall within this mandate," King said. [Vancouver Sun]

Indeed, police are responsible for enforcing the law, not shaping social policy. Law enforcement’s backhanded attempt at inserting itself into the academic debate over harm reduction is completely inappropriate and disturbing. Does anyone believe that police-sponsored research will ever reach conclusions other than the need for more police power?

RCMP now claims that it conducts research all the time, which may be true, but misses the point. Police research should focus on measuring the effectiveness of their own programs, not producing political ammunition against non-police programs that police don’t like.

Correctional physicians care for a population with a burden of infectious diseases disproportionate to their numbers in the community.

Check out this interesting logic from the FDA:

WASHINGTON - A top government health official rejected the idea of an immediate ban on cough and cold medicines for young children, saying it might cause unintended harm.

Food and Drug Administration officials at a public hearing Thursday said they need to gather more data on whether over-the-counter remedies are safe and effective for children ages 2 to 6.

The FDA is also worried that a ban — as sought by leading pediatricians' groups — might only drive parents to give adult medicines to their youngsters. [MSNBC]

Well, that sounds like a logical concern. People tend to make safer choices when available and more dangerous ones when their options are restricted. Yet federal law still blocks funding for needle exchange and criminalizes people who use marijuana as an alternative to powerful opioid-based pharmaceuticals.

                                                                                                                                                                              {Thanks, Caryn]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 1, 2008
Contact: Reena Szczepanski (505) 699-0798 or Jeanne Block (505) 983-3277

Innovative Drug Prevention DVD, Just4Teens, Now Available to Teachers, Counselors, and Prevention Specialists in New Mexico

Community Comes Together to Address Methamphetamine and Other Drugs at Santa Fe DVD Premiere Event on October 8

Video, Facilitator’s Guide, and Upcoming Statewide Trainings to Focus on Effective Drug Prevention Strategies for New Mexico

Santa Fe - Drug Policy Alliance New Mexico (DPANM) is proud to announce the release of Just4Teens: Let’s Talk about Meth and Other Drugs, an innovative drug education DVD that serves as a tool for teachers, counselors, prevention specialists, and parents to initiate an open, honest discussion with young people about drugs and drug use. The video will premiere October 8 at Warehouse 21 in Santa Fe. Doors open at 6 p.m. Following the video screening, a panel of DPANM staff, local youth, and adults working with young people will discuss drugs, drug prevention, and resources available in Santa Fe.

“DPANM is offering educators and teens an innovative drug prevention resource with the Just4Teens video and Facilitator’s Guide,” said Reena Szczepanski, director of DPANM. “For over 25 years drug prevention has meant using scare tactics and ‘just say no’ messages. These strategies are failing our young people, and it is time for our community to embrace effective drug prevention.”

The Just4Teens DVD includes a 15-minute video and a 14-page Facilitator’s Guide. The DVD and Guide can be used to supplement current prevention programs. Teachers and other adults can use this tool to start in-depth conversations about drugs and drug use in their after school program, classroom, or other youth group.

In addition to providing the video for free to residents in New Mexico, DPANM will be conducting free train-the-trainer drug education workshops in 2008 and 2009 around the state.

“Effective drug prevention is more than just showing a video,” said Jeanne Block, Methamphetamine Project coordinator with DPANM. “The trainings will provide people who work with youth the tools, resources, and strategies they need to make a difference in the lives of young people.”

DPANM will be hosting Just4Teens video premiere events in communities around New Mexico, including Albuquerque, Alamogordo, and Farmington. The educational DVD was produced through the support of a U.S. Department of Justice grant championed by Sen. Jeff Bingaman.

According to a Zogby/Inter-American Dialogue poll released Thursday, more than three-quarters of likely voters polled said America's

Despite having nearly a million heroin addicts, with HIV spreading rapidly through that population, Russia's government has very tragically said no to methadone maintenance. According to a short video posted by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU), 80% of all new HIV cases in Russia are due to needle sharing by injection drug users.

Check out the video here:

Check out HCLU here.

George Michael’s latest drug arrest has reduced Ross Clark at The Times Online to a sputtering mess. In an embarrassing editorial entitled It's just as wrong to use drugs as it is to sell them, Clark compares drug use to child pornography and calls for casual users to serve long sentences:

With stolen goods, illegal weapons and child pornography, the law is clear: the user is as guilty as the supplier. The police didn't let Gary Glitter off with a little rap on the knuckles and the rest of us didn't shake our heads and say: “Poor Gary, how sad that he has fallen victim to these evil porn dealers.”

He was prosecuted, quite rightly, on the basis that those who provide the market for child porn are implicated in its production. So why then do such different attitudes persist in the case of drugs? If it is wrong to produce and trade drugs, then it is equally wrong to use them.

Clark goes on explain that drug addiction doesn’t happen to intelligent people:

…Among drug users and drug peddlers alike, there are, of course, sometimes mitigating circumstances. If you have been brought up by drug addicts, beaten and abused, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise if you grow up with a somewhat confused sense of right and wrong.

But none of this applies to George Michael, who is intelligent enough to know that taking crack is not just an issue of personal liberty: there is a clear association between use of the drug and propensity to commit violent crime. If caught with illegal drugs he should be treated to no less a punishment than if he had smuggled them into the country and sold them on the streets.

Dude, chill out. No one wants to spend $250,000 imprisoning a guy for $20 worth of dope. I’m sure you had fun writing this, but do you actually agree with your own idea? Did you know that it costs money to keep people in jail? If you hate drug users so much, do you really want to pay for all their food and clothes and healthcare for 10 years every time we catch one? No you don’t, so shut up before we lock George Michael in your pantry and make you take care him forever.

The Brown University Distance Learning Program and the Addiction Technology Transfer Center of New England are offering a credited, on-line course on confidentiality issues in substance abuse treatment beginning on September 22, 2008..Individuals should be able to expect that information they have given in confidence to a treatment provider will be kept private unless there is a compelling reason for it not to be. The principle of a confidential relationship between a patient and a clinician is an ancient one, shared by many cultures. Nowhere is that expectation more vital than in substance abuse treatment. This course will introduce the learner to ethical and legal issues bearing on the confidentiality of patient information in substance abuse treatment. It will introduce the student to confidentiality provisions under the federal regulations on Confidentiality of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Patient Treatment Records (42 CFR Part 2) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) as well as special concerns relating to child protection issues, underage patients, patients involved with the criminal justice system, and HIV infected patients. This course will serve to alert the student to concerns and provide a basic grasp of the issues but is not a substitute for legal advice from an attorney or consultation with federal and state regulators. 

Instructor

David F. Duncan, Dr. P.H. is President of Duncan & Associates, a consulting firm providing consultation on research design and data collection for behavioral and policy studies. He is also Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health at Brown University School of Medicine. His education included an undergraduate major in psychology, with minors in sociology and education at the University of Missouri at Kansas City , and graduate work in criminology at Sam Houston State University in Texas . He earned the degree of Doctor of Public Health (Dr.P.H.) from the University of Texas at Houston with an interdisciplinary program in behavioral sciences, epidemiology, biostatistics, and program and policy evaluation. He earned a postdoctoral diploma in alcoholism early intervention and treatment effectiveness research from Brown University . He has over thirty year’s experience in the substance abuse field, including direct service provision and direction of treatment and rehabilitation services. 

Course Objectives

• Describe the three most common ways in which patient confidentiality is violated.
• Define informed consent, patient health information and client identifying information.
• Describe who is covered by the confidentiality rules in 42 CFR and in HIPAA respectively.
• Discuss the exceptions to confidentiality permitted under 42 CFR and under HIPAA.
• Name the three purposes of the administrative simplification provisions of HIPAA.
• Discuss the special problems and issues of confidentiality involved in providision of substance abuse treatment to minors.
• Discuss reporting requirements in child abuse related cases and the “obligation to warn” under the Tarasoff decision.
• Discuss the issues a patient’s HIV positive status may raise concerning confidentiality.

Course Requirements

This is a three-week course requirements are:

• Required on-line reading (one hour per week)
• Completion of pre and post test
• Completion of weekly homework assignments (one hour per week)
• Participation in the weekly course forum
• Completion of an on-line course evaluation

*Please note that there are no real time events associated with this course. Lessons will be posted on the class home page on Tuesday and responses are due the following Monday. With the exception of the first weeks lesson which will be posted Monday with the responses due the following Monday. Assignments can be accessed at the participant's convenience.The total cost of this course is $60.00 the course payment is due by the start date of the course. A full refund is available up until the posting of the second lesson, after which there will be no refunds. 

Accredation

This three-week course, has been approved by the National Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors (NAADAC) for 6 educational credits. It is being provided by the Brown Distance Learning program, which is accredited as a NAADAC Approved Education Provider (#000151). This course meets the qualifications for 6 hours of continuing education credit for MFCC's and/or LCSW's as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (PCE#1917). This course is approved by the Connecticut Certification Board (CCB) for six Category 1 continuing education for Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselors (CADC's). The CCB is an IC&RC affiliate. The New York State OASAS does accept distance learning CEUs provided by institutions of higher learning for individuals pursuing or renewing a CASAC, CPP or CPS. Certificates will be mailed within two weeks to participants in the program for its duration who submit all required materials. Please contact your local certification board to verify reciprocity or acceptance of Brown Distance Learning contact hours. 

To participate, you must have:

• An E-mail address and the capacity to retrieve and send E-mail;
• Access to World Wide Web (the following programs provide WWW access: Netscape, Apple CyberDog, and Microsoft Explorer)
• Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher is the preferred browser for Brown DLP online courses
• The ability to navigate the World Wide Web
• A basic understanding of how to use a computer and send and receive email

PLEASE NOTE NETWORK AND COMPUTER TECHNICAL SUPPORT WILL NOT BE PROVIDED. REGISTRATION DEADLINE: September 22, 2008 or when the course limit is reached.  To register for this course please log into your account or create your account then log into your account and click the Enroll in a New Course link at the bottom of your account page. On the Enrollment page select the course you wish to register for using the pull down menu and click on the enroll button. Having enrolled into the course you will be prompted for payment. You may make your payment online or by regular mail. To view payment information please use the payment policies. For a list of current Brown University Distance Learning courses, please go to the following site: http://www.browndlp.org/. Please Bookmark this site for future references. Course announcements will be made via the Brown University Online Course Announcement Listserv 6-8 weeks prior to the start of each course. If you would like to be subscribed to this list, please contact Monte Bryant, Program Administrator, at Monte Bryant, or (401) 863-6606.

With election day less than two months away, the battle over California's groundbreaking "treatment not jail" initiative is heating up.

Anti-drug activists in the Orissa state city of Kendrapara attacked and drove off opium addicts near the Balababa Shiva temple recently, garnering sympathy from the newspaper

• read full post
• 1 comment

Cato Unbound has a wonderful piece, Towards a Culture of Responsible Psychoactive Drug Use, by Earth and Fire Erowid, the founders of Erowid.org. The article provides a rational discussion of why people use psychoactive substances and what can be done to minimize the harms and maximize the benefits of such use. Over the next week, Cato will post responses from Jonathan Caulkins, Jacob Sullum, and Mark Kleiman.

I read the piece last night in its entirety and don’t recall finding a single word I disagree with. What struck me is how far removed modern drug education is from even discussing these commonsense principles. Do this information sound dangerous to you?

Fundamentals of Responsible Psychoactive Use

* Investigate the health risks and dangers of the specific psychoactive and of the class of drugs to which it belongs.
* Learn about interactions with other recreational drugs, medications, supplements, and activities.
* Review individual health concerns, predispositions, and family health history.
* Choose a source or product carefully to help ensure correct identification and purity
(avoid materials with an unknown source or of unknown quality).
* Know whether the drug is likely to reduce the ability to drive, operate equipment, or pay attention to necessary tasks.
* Take oneself "off duty" from responsibilities that might be interfered with (job, child care, etc.), and arrange for someone else to be “on duty” for such responsibilities.
* Anticipate reasonably foreseeable risks to oneself and others and employ safeguards to minimize those risks.
* Choose an appropriate occasion and location for use.
* Select and measure dosages carefully.
* Begin with a low dose until individual reactions are known and thereafter use the minimum dose necessary to achieve the desired effects: lower doses are safer doses.
* Reflect on and adjust use to minimize physical and mental health problems.
* Note changes in health over time that may be related to use.
* Modify use if it interferes with work or personal goals.
* Check in with peers and family and accept feedback about one’s use.
* Track reactions to specific drugs and dosages in order to avoid repeating mistakes.
* Seek treatment if needed.
* Decide not to use when the time isn’t right, the material is suspect, or the situation is otherwise problematic.

Anyone who has a problem with any of this should contemplate the consequences of allowing young people to learn these lessons the hard way. The fact that these ideas might be considered controversial should serve to remind us how badly our society has demolished its own ability to discuss drug use with people who use drugs.

Phillip S. Smith, Writer/Editor

Responding to recent data suggesting that young Queenslanders are switching to ecstasy in the wake of a steep increase in the state government's tax on popular "alcopops," a leading drug researcher

Australia's 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, in which more than 23,000 people ov

Eight months after Congress voted to end a decade-long ban on the use of federal funds for needle exchange programs (NEPs) in the District of Columbia, money is starting to flow to the programs in

The latest outrage in Canada's heated harm reduction debate came at the hands of Health Minister Tony Clement who went off the rails by questioning the ethics of doctors who practice harm reduction:

MONTREAL — The association representing Canada's doctors rapped Health Minister Tony Clement on Monday after he questioned the ethics of physicians who support the use of supervised injection sites for drug addicts.
…

"Is it ethical for health-care professionals to support the administration of drugs that are of unknown substance, or purity or potency, drugs that cannot otherwise be legally prescribed?" Clement said.

He said that in any other medical setting, supervised overdoses would be considered "highly unprofessional." [Canadian Press]

Canada's doctors beg to differ:

The Canadian Medical Association's president responded to Clement by saying 79 per cent of members agree that safe-injection sites and harm-reduction programs work.

Dr. Brian Day said sites that allow addicts to inject their own narcotics under the supervision of medical staff have been successful in curbing illegal drug use and slowing the spread of disease.

"We specifically take issue with the minister using that phrase," Day told reporters after Clement's speech.

"The minister was off base in calling into question the ethics of physicians involved in harm reduction.

"It's clear that this was being used as a political issue."

Doctors are not politicians. They work to save lives and they are the experts on how to do that. If they all agree that existing programs are working, and some politician disagrees, then he is just wrong and he should shut up.

The drug war debate is ugly and that's not gonna change anytime soon. But one thing we can do without is politicians feigning moral superiority over the doctors who are saving lives every day. That's what this is about. Harm reduction shouldn't be a political issue and if you succeed in politicizing it for the wrong reasons, people will die.

Indonesia's harsh drug laws have not succeeded in stopping illicit drug use in the Southeast Asian archipelago, and now some of the people those laws are aimed at are speaking out.

You Can Make a Difference

Dear friends,

Several months ago my colleague Naomi Long and I had an op-ed in The Washington Post calling for a repeal of the federal prohibition that blocks states from using their share of HIV/AIDS prevention money on syringe exchange programs. We had a hard-hitting conclusion: “As many as 300,000 Americans could contract HIV/AIDS or hepatitis C over the next decade because of a lack of access to sterile syringes. This essentially makes the national syringe ban a death sentence for drug users, their partners and children.”

Take action now to support a bill in Congress that would repeal the ban.

Last year my colleague Jasmine Tyler lost her father to HIV/AIDS that he contracted from injection drug use and it really hit our D.C. office hard. She had this to share: “From the time he found out he was HIV-positive until the day he died in April of 2007, he suffered greatly and so did our family.  Every day I know that the hell he lived through could have been avoided if only he had had access to sterile needles all the time.  It’s too late to bring him back, but every other life that can be saved should be.”

While our country spends billions of dollars on efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C and other infectious diseases, the U.S. prohibits the use of prevention funds to support syringe exchange programs. This robs cities, states and private organizations of the right to do what’s best for the people, and costs taxpayers a lot of money. It’s far cheaper to distribute syringes and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis than it is to treat people who contract those infectious diseases after it's too late.

Last year, District of Columbia Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and New York Congressman Jose Serrano successfully repealed a federal ban that prohibited D.C. from spending its own budget money on syringe exchange programs. This week Rep. Serrano introduced a bill that would repeal the national syringe funding ban. If enacted, it could save hundreds of thousands of lives and millions in taxpayer dollars. Please urge your representative to support this urgent, life-saving bill.

Take action now.

Want to do more? Set up a meeting with your representative when he or she is in your district during Congress's August recess. Learn how.

Sincerely,

Bill Piper
Director of National Affairs
Drug Policy Alliance

More Information

--According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), of the 415,193 people reported to be living with AIDS in the United States at the end of 2004, about 30 percent of cases are related to injection drug use, either directly (sharing contaminated syringes) or indirectly (having sex with someone who used a contaminated syringe or being born to a mother who used a contaminated syringe).

--Each year, approximately 12,000 Americans contract HIV/AIDS directly or indirectly from the sharing of dirty syringes. About 17,000 people contract hepatitis C.
 
--The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), American Medical Association, National Academy of Sciences, American Public Health Association, and numerous other scientific bodies have found that syringe exchange programs are highly effective at preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases. Moreover, seven federal reports have found that increasing access to sterile syringes saves lives without increasing drug use.

--Increasing the availability of sterile syringes through exchange programs, pharmacies and other outlets reduces unsafe injection practices such as syringe sharing, curtails transmission of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, increases safe disposal of used syringes, and helps injection drug users obtain drug education and treatment.

--The lifetime cost of treating just one person who contracts HIV/AIDS can be as high as $600,000. This cost is often borne by taxpayers. In contrast, syringe exchange programs can prevent thousands of new HIV/AIDS cases at very little cost. Funding syringe exchange programs saves both lives and taxpayer money.

--A federal appropriations rider in the annual Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies spending bill prohibits states from spending their share of federal prevention money on syringe exchange programs. H.R. 6680 would repeal that provision.

Faced with an intractable and growing opiate addiction problem, in recent years Iran has increasingly embraced the principles of harm reduction.