LEWIS PRAISES DRUG PROGRAM

More Municipalities Should Follow City's Lead, UN Envoy Says

Drug-related harm-reduction efforts in Vancouver, including the
city's supervised injection site, should be applauded, not
criticized, if HIV/AIDS infection rates among intravenous drug users
are to be lowered, says Stephen Lewis, United Nations Special Envoy
for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

"The results of the safe-injection site in Vancouver are so obviously
first-rate," Lewis said in an interview Monday. He said he hopes more
municipalities in North America will follow the city's lead as a
"beacon of reform."

"Good things can happen ... [but] it takes political courage. It
takes the recognition that criminalizing drug use seldom works," he said.

Lewis, who, for years has pounded the drum on a global need to
address the spread of AIDS/HIV worldwide, was in Vancouver to deliver
the keynote address at the 17th International Conference on the
Reduction of Drug-related Harm.

He said drug use is a public health issue, not a criminal matter, and
he urged the public to fight to secure that distinction "with
passion, principle and uncompromising tenacity.

"There are millions of lives to be saved," he said.

In his address, Lewis had no mercy for governments and political
leaders, both in Canada and worldwide, in the battle against HIV/AIDS.

"We have an apocalypse in our presence," he said, referring to the
global rate of HIV/AIDS infection, which continues to rise.

Embracing harm reduction methods are necessary, and can be done
quickly, he said.

"This is not something that is complicated. Not like in Africa, where
we need to change male sexual behaviour," he said.

He called for harm reduction programs in a variety of forms from
needle exchanges, opiate exchanges, and increased access to condoms.
He said, curbing the infection rate of HIV/AIDS should become a
"cause celebre" worldwide.

In Canada, he said, "There is a tremendous ambivalence around drugs,
and the constant tendency to treat drug use as a crime and the
anxiety rooted everywhere that if you treat it as a public-health
issue primarily that somehow you're going to win the antagonism of
the public and cause great problems for the politicians.

"Everybody is sort of cautious and frightened and worried."

"I really think that political leadership could turn this around."