Statement of Nikolaj Khramov, coordinator of the Transnational Radical Party for Russia.

Moscow, November 27, 1998. ``As Moskovskij Komsomolec informs today with the reference to the Sanitary Watch Department of Russian Ministry of Public Health, the basic way of AIDS transfer (90%) in our country remains intravenous drug use. This is our difference with civilized world, where harm reduction programs providing, in particular, exchange of syringes, for a long time have reduced to a minimum this way of distribution of infectious diseases.

In the whole Russia there are working only two buses of Doctors Without Frontiers, where drug addicts can exchange syringes: in St. Petersburg and Yaroslavl (and these programs are under constant and increasing pressure from side of Interior Ministry). The methadone therapy widely distributed all over the world, is prohibited in Russia, without even speaking about controlled distribution of heroin among drug addicts on the Swiss model.

The direct responsibility for this - alas, yet not criminal one - belongs to the Russian government (both to the previous right, and to the present left), which stands staunchly against medical and social programs of harm reduction. As a matter of fact, it means, what exactly the government of Russian Federation in a most direct way is guilty of HIV infection of at least 9,250 persons among 10,283 registered HIV-infected people.''