Is the war on drugs crippling the war on AIDS? And might the AIDS epidemic make governments more willing to treat drug abusers as suffering patients rather than as hardened criminals? Those questions came to the fore last week because of a fumbled news story. It was announced - incorrectly, it turned out - that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which oversees the fight against cross-border drug trafficking, was about to do a startling about-face and advocate ending penalties for personal use of all drugs. [continues 864 words]
The United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime said Monday that an "unfortunate misunderstanding" had led to the impression that it would advocate the legalization of all drugs for personal use. A briefing paper to be presented at a conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, by the head of the agency's H.I.V. division was sent last week to a few journalists by conference organizers and misrepresented as a major policy change. But the paper had never been cleared by the agency's executive director, the agency said, and was meant to describe only how legalization was permitted under existing international drug-control treaties and how it would benefit the fight against AIDS. [continues 85 words]
All over the world, the heavy heads of opium poppies are nodding gracefully in the wind - long stalks dressed in orange or white petals topped by a fright wig of stamens. They fill millions of acres in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Laos and elsewhere. Their payload - the milky opium juice carefully scraped off the seed pods - yields morphine, an excellent painkiller easily refined into heroin. But very soon, perhaps within a year, the poppy will no longer be the only way to produce heroin's raw ingredient. It will be possible for drug companies, or drug traffickers, to brew it in yeast genetically modified to turn sugar into morphine. [continues 1060 words]
Fewer people are being infected with the virus that causes AIDS than at the epidemic's peak, but progress against the disease is still halting and fragile, the United Nations' AIDS-fighting agency reported Tuesday. In its new report on the epidemic, Unaids said 2.6 million people became newly infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, in 2009 -- almost 20 percent fewer than in the late 1990s. But progress is spotty. About 25 countries are doing better at prevention, including several in southern Africa with sky-high AIDS rates. [continues 620 words]
VIENNA -- Some of the world's top AIDS experts issued a radical manifesto this week at the 18th International AIDS Conference: They declared the war on drugs a 50-year-old failure and called for it to be abandoned. No one heard. Officially, the theme of the AIDS meeting, the world's largest public health gathering, is the need to attack the rapidly growing epidemic among addicts in Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia. It was held in Vienna because this city is the doorway to the East and, in this German-speaking country, all the conference signs are in English and Russian. [continues 1124 words]
Desperate heroin users in a few African cities have begun engaging in a practice that is so dangerous it is almost unthinkable: they deliberately inject themselves with another addict's blood, researchers say, in an effort to share the high or stave off the pangs of withdrawal. The practice, called flashblood or sometimes flushblood, is not common, but has been reported in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the island of Zanzibar and in Mombasa, Kenya. It puts users at the highest possible risk of contracting AIDS and hepatitis. While most AIDS transmission in Africa is by heterosexual sex, the use of heroin is growing in some cities, and experts are warning that flashblood - along with syringe-sharing and other dangerous habits - could fuel a new wave of AIDS infections. [continues 848 words]
President Bush's $15 billion plan to fight AIDS globally is seriously hampered by restrictions imposed by Congress and the administration, a panel of medical experts said yesterday. The country's most prestigious medical advisory panel, the Institute of Medicine, was asked by Congress to assess the five-year plan at midway. The 13 members of the panel praised the efforts, saying the plan had "demonstrated what many doubted could be done." But it needs to move from an emergency response to a long-term battle plan, the panel said, and its members listed these three restrictions that they felt were the most hindering: [continues 791 words]
In September, the journal Science issued a startling retraction. A primate study it published in 2002, with heavy publicity, warned that the amount of the drug Ecstasy that a typical user consumes in a single night might cause permanent brain damage. It turned out that the $1.3 million study, led by Dr. George A. Ricaurte of Johns Hopkins University, had not used Ecstasy at all. His 10 squirrel monkeys and baboons had instead been injected with overdoses of methamphetamine, and two of them had died. The labels on two vials he bought in 2000, he said, were somehow switched. [continues 1997 words]
Brain Damage Claims Created by Error in Study A leading scientific journal on Friday retracted a paper it published last year saying one night's typical dose of the drug Ecstasy may cause permanent brain damage. The monkeys and baboons in the study were not injected with Ecstasy but with a powerful amphetamine, Science magazine said. The retraction was submitted by the team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine that did the study. A medical school spokesman called the mistake "unfortunate" but said Dr. George A. Ricaurte, the researcher who made it, was "still a faculty member in good standing whose research is solid and respected." [continues 343 words]
The amount of the drug Ecstasy that some recreational users take in a single night might cause permanent brain damage and lead to symptoms like those of Parkinson's disease, a study in primates has found. But critics say that the monkeys and baboons in the study were given huge overdoses of the drug and that the kind of damage the researchers found has never been found in autopsies or brain scans of humans who took large amounts. Dr. George Ricaurte of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who led the study, said its most disturbing finding was that just two or three Ecstasy tablets can damage the cells that produce dopamine, a brain chemical that helps control movement, emotions and the ability to feel pleasure. [continues 199 words]
The amount of the drug Ecstasy that some recreational users take in a single night may cause permanent brain damage and lead to symptoms like those of Parkinson's disease, a study in primates has found. But critics say that the monkeys and baboons in the study were given huge overdoses of the drug and that the kind of damage the researchers found has never been found in autopsies or brain scans of humans who took large amounts. Dr. George A. Ricaurte of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who led the study, said its most disturbing finding was that just two or three Ecstasy tablets can damage the cells that produce dopamine, a brain chemical that helps control movement, emotions and the ability to feel pleasure. [continues 766 words]
PARIS, Oct. 23 -- The price of Afghan heroin has dropped, but police departments across Europe say that is unlikely to affect street prices much and has not done so to date. British police intelligence sources said the price at the Afghanistan- Pakistan border had dropped since Sept. 11 to $200 a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, from $400. Europe gets the bulk of its heroin from Afghanistan while American dealers buy from Colombia, Mexico and Southeast Asia as well. A spokesman for the British National Criminal Intelligence Service noted that the border price for heroin was $100 a kilo until July 2000 when the Taliban banned the cultivation of opium poppies. The price then shot up to $400. [continues 614 words]
Tolerant. Within limits. How very Dutch. - - Rule No. 6: PROSTITUTION. No pictures of the women. - - Rule No. 8: Soft drugs, NOT UNDER 18. - - And No. 10: Parking is NOT FREE. "This brochure is NORMAL," insisted Superintendent Klaas Wilting, chief police spokesman, who must have repeated the word "normal" 30 times in an hourlong conversation about the brief brochure. He denied that the police felt defensive about publishing it. But he was distinctly irked that the FOREIGN press had taken such an interest. Here we go again, he implied: the old stereotype of Amsterdam as SIN CITY. [continues 975 words]
