CITY'S CLOUD OF AIDS HAS SILVER LINING

One of the world's leading addiction warriors thinks Vancouver's epidemic
HIV and injection drug use represents the "silver lining" of the AIDS
crisis.

Ethan Nadelmann, director of Manhattanbased Lindesmith Center for drug
policy research, said the social decay, disease and rampant crime have a
positive side effect: they are forcing municipal, police and public health
officials to work together.

"AIDS and HIV is this horrible black cloud over our societies with just
devastating consequences, but there is a silver lining," he maintained in
an interview Thursday.

"The silver lining is it requires government and others to prioritize
something over stopping people from using drugs. Stopping the spread of HIV
is more important than stopping drug abuse."

He said that he hoped within two years to have a trial heroin maintenance
program under way in perhaps as many as six Canadian and U.S. cities,
including Vancouver.

The "harmreduction" program would include needleexchanges, health rooms
for addicts to fix in, and free or nominally priced heroin, Nadelmann said.

The Lindesmith Center is the driving force behind needleexchange and
antiAIDS programs in the former Soviet Union and eastern bloc.

Health concerns have forced western politicians and police to become more
pragmatic, Nadelmann believes, and so they are beginning to abandon their
drugwar rhetoric in favour of common sense.

Nadelmann explained that most people separated crime control from public
health problems, but it's time to bring them together.

"You need to get the law enforcement, prosecutor officials sitting down
with the public healthmedical types and the political, the city hall
types," he said.

"We have to do something about this and the drug war rhetoric isn't
working. It seems to me the public health types haven't been very effective
in bringing the cops in. We must appeal to cops. They need to own these
issues as well. This is about quality of life in North American cities."

Nadelmann toured the Downtown Eastside and is meeting with local
researchers in part because Vancouver has become the focus of international
attention.

Of the world's major cities offering a needleexchange program, Nadelmann
said only Vancouver has not seen infection rates lowered or rising crime
rates slowed.

In Swiss cities, for instance, Nadelmann said the heroinmaintenance
program is a huge success.

"They did a costbenefit analysis and estimated that for every day someone
was in the program it was saving the government $30. There was a $30 net
benefit, the costs of the program more than outweighed by the savings in
criminal justice costs."

Vancouver, however, has become an example for drugwar proponents
advocating prison time and coercion, he said.

"The opponents [of maintenance and other public health programs] are
grasping at straws and the principal straw they are grasping is Vancouver."

"They pull out the study done here that shows escalating rates of HIV
despite the needle program," he said. "They say this shows the needle
program doesn't work in Vancouver.

"But if you read the study, it says the needle program is not enough . . .
that a needleexchange program is an integral component of any HIV
prevention efforts."