Drug War Statement Upstaged at AIDS Gathering

[Guest guest]

Drug War Statement Upstaged at AIDS Gathering By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

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...

But the organizers' efforts to get publicity for the Vienna Declaration, which

calls for drug users to be spared arrest and offered clean needles, methadone

and treatment if they have AIDS, have come to naught. Almost no one here talks

about the war on drugs.

Instead, everyone is publicly worrying that the war on AIDS is falling apart...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/health/23aids.html