Editorial:
Falling
Behind
the
Ayatollahs
and
the
Communists
7/8/05
David Borden, Executive Director, [email protected], 7/8/05
This week the Washington Post reported on yet another culturally conservative Asian country, Iran, taking this and other steps. According to a Tuesday article by Karl Vick, "Fearing an AIDS epidemic, Iran's theocratic government has dropped a zero-tolerance policy against increasingly common heroin use and now offers addicts low-cost needles, methadone and a measure of social acceptance." Actually, Iran already has an AIDS epidemic, partly due to ill-conceived drug policies (some now former) that increased the sharing of syringes by injection drug users. But better late than never. As I began to read the article, I thought to myself, "I hope someone in here points out how Iran is now ahead of the US on this" -- ahead of our federal government, anyway. I was pleased to see, halfway through, harm reduction stalwart Bob Newman do the honors. Newman, who among other things directs the Baron Edmond de Rothschild Chemical Dependency Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York -- and who provided testimony supporting harm reduction at the Souder hearing -- was quoted saying that Iranian policies are "in very dramatic contrast to what has been happening with increasing frequency in America, where the judiciary and the criminal justice system in general... does not let the patients receive the treatment that the physician says is necessary." But Newman wasn't the only one. Azarakhsh Mokri of Iran's National Center for Addiction Studies, a government agency, described how he encountered no official resistance when asking to be able to begin a pilot program dispensing actual opium to addicts instead of methadone. Mokri contrasted this with a bill currently before the US Congress that would create prison terms for Americans who fail to report marijuana dealers to the police. "Sometimes I think the ayatollahs are more liberal" than the Americans, he told the Post. With regard to marijuana, at least, even the Mullahs were more liberal. According to a New York Times article published December 2001, the Taliban's penal code in Afghanistan specified that "A person who cultivates marijuana will be jailed until his family members get rid of the plant." As we expressed it in this newsletter, a marijuana grower would have faced fewer sanctions in Kandahar than in Kansas City (5 to 15 years for any amount), less trouble in Mazar-e-Sharif than Memphis (1 to 5 years for growing more than a half ounce), and fewer headaches in Tora Bora than Tulsa (2 years to life for any amount). Progress in drug policy by no means excuses the human rights abuses committed by repressive governments, which certainly includes the ones mentioned here. We condemned the Taliban in this newsletter in 1998 when they first showed up in the drug war radarscope, for example. Iran's treatment of women is deplorable. And it is scarcely a week since China perpetrated its usual raft of drug executions as part of its "celebration" of the UN's yearly International Anti-Drugs Day. Malaysia also executes people for drug offenses. But all the more stark, then, is the failure of the US to rationally deal with the tragedy lying at the intersection of AIDS and the drug war. I have previously written that the US government in its drug policy has aligned less with its allies in the free world and more with those nations where democracy, human rights, and rule of law are weak. But now it seems even theocratic Iran and communist China are beginning to see the light faster than Souder and his powerful allies on Capitol Hill. Freedom is only a word if it isn't realized in practice, and there's no appropriate exception for that in drug policy. We are the world's leading jailer, and that undermines our standing in the world court of public opinion when we take on all the other necessary human rights battles. Bans and biases against needle exchange only take it further over the top. Let's try not to get too much further behind the Ayatollahs and the Mullahs and the autocrats in the ways we deal with the drug issue. It's embarrassing.
|
