It’s time for global leaders and agencies charged with leading the HIV response to call on governments to rethink their approach to drug policy and invest in harm reduction.
According to ANPUD, criminalisation of drug use has fuelled under-resourced infrastructure, lack of service coverage, medicine stock-outs and discrimination towards people who inject drugs.
The Council on Foreign Relations hosted an expert discussion on the challenges of the opioid crisis and the lessons learnt from international experiences
A bill tabled before the Parliament would decriminalise all drugs and establish thresholds for personal use, potentially ending years of State abuse against people who use drugs.
The war on drugs deployed by Cambodia's authoritarian PM Hun Sen has seen more than 13,000 people jailed since January, including pregnant women and mothers with small infants.
According to the study, key interventions to reduce infections are needle and syringe programmes which minimise the use of contaminated equipment, and opioid substitution therapy including methadone, buprenorphine and naloxone.
A lack of training and deliberately excessive obstacles to importation and prescription create structural barriers for patients to access palliative care.