The International journal on drug policy
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In the last 20 years, China has seen a resurgence in drug use, particularly heroin, and with it a growing epidemic of HIV/AIDS. Faced with this dual epidemic, the government has begun testing harm reduction strategies in recent years. These have included methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) programmes, needle-syringe programmes (NSP), outreach, and increasing access to HIV testing. ⋯ Management of scale-up and reaching China's vast and dispersed drug-using population remain key challenges. The introduction of harm reduction has been a massive turn-around in thinking by the government, particularly law enforcement agencies, and achieving this has required considerable cooperation and understanding between the Ministries of Health, Public Security, and Justice, and the Food and Drug Administration. With their support, rapid scale-up to effectively reach a majority of drug users can be achieved in the coming years.
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In Malaysia the response to illicit drug use has been largely punitive with the current goal of the Malaysian government being to achieve a drug-free society by 2015. This paper outlines the results of a desk-based situation assessment conducted over a 3-week period in 2004. Additional events, examined in 2005, were also included to describe more recent policy developments and examine how these came about. ⋯ Harm reduction initiatives have only recently been introduced in Malaysia. The successful piloting of substitution therapies, in particular methadone and buprenorphine, is cause for genuine hope for the rapid development of such interventions. In 2005 the government announced it will allow methadone maintenance programmes to operate beyond the pilot phase and needle and syringe exchange programmes will be established to serve the needs of IDUs.
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Int. J. Drug Policy · Mar 2007
EditorialTobacco harm reduction: how rational public policy could transform a pandemic.
Nicotine, at the dosage levels smokers seek, is a relatively innocuous drug commonly delivered by a highly harmful device, cigarette smoke. An intensifying pandemic of disease caused or exacerbated by smoking demands more effective policy responses than the current one: demanding that nicotine users abstain. ⋯ Yet, numerous alternative systems for nicotine delivery exist, many of them far safer than smoking. A pragmatic, public-health approach to tobacco control would recognize a continuum of risk and encourage nicotine users to move themselves down the risk spectrum by choosing safer alternatives to smoking--without demanding abstinence.
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Int. J. Drug Policy · Mar 2007
How the harm reduction movement contrasts itself against punitive prohibition.
On the basis of the harm reduction movement's founding texts from the beginning of the 1990s, this paper reflects the movement's self-understanding in contrasting itself with the system of punitive prohibition. Following this is a discussion of the implications for drug users of harm reduction claims-making. The paper concludes that the principles of the harm reduction movement resonate extremely well with the moral sensibilities of our contemporary societies, and but that the movement's claims for an amoral, rational, just, and emancipating approach to drug use are to be seen rather as a powerful rhetorical intervention in the highly moralised landscape of drug debate than something that would be achieved in practice.