The cancellation by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria of all new programming until 2014 is unacceptable. This decision will cost lives and cripple international efforts to deliver on health-related goals, breaking promises made to some of the world’s most vulnerable people, and punishing the Global Fund's success of the last ten years.

During the holding of its 102nd session, the INCB reviewed efforts to implement the international drug control conventions and declared that "efforts in drug control must be sustained in order to prevent the suffering caused by drug abuse and inadequate access to internationally controlled medicines for medical purposes."

The city of Quincy, Massachusetts is part of a pilot programme launched in 2007 involving 12 Massachusetts communities in opiate overdose prevention. The project involves distributing and training people to use free nasal Narcan, a non-addictive substance that binds to opiate receptors in the brain.

GPs across the UK will soon be able to prescribe life-saving injecting kits pioneered nationally by Scotland’s ground-breaking Take Home Naloxone programme.

Cambodia has opened the country’s first methadone-treatment programs/centers in September 2011, in approach to help heroine users. The methadone program will be strictly voluntary.

The President of the INCB emphasized that millions of people around the world are afflicted by mental illnesses, which are non-communicable diseases and which include substance use disorders. Substance abuse requires prevention and treatment and is a contributing factor to some other non-communicable diseases.

The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria has raised concerns over the high prevalence rate of these infections among intravenous drug users, despite continuously supporting harm reduction programmes. The concern was raised during a recent visit by a Global Fund executive to follow the progress of an Aids prevention programme in Thailand.