HEROIN ADDICTION IN EUROPE/3rd EUROPEAN METHADONE AND OTHER SUBSTITUTION TREATMENTS CONFERENCE TOGETHER WITH THE REGIONAL MEETING OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES ON TREATMENT WITH EMPHASIS ON OUTREACH AND COMMUNITY APPROACHES

17-20 September 1997

Ljubljana - Slovenia

Congress centre Cankarjev dom

STATEMENT BY THE TRANSNATIONAL RADICAL PARTY

by Marina SIKORA

First of all, I would like to thank the organizers of this Congress for giving the opportunity to a political organization, even if transnational and non electoral, to intervene in this occasion.

The Transnational Radical Party since many years struggles in order to obtain a reform of the legislation on drugs in an antiprohibitionist way, and for the revision of the International Conventions that today discipline the production, the trade and the consumption of the so-called "forbidden substances". Thanks to its recognition as NGO I category member by the United Nations, the Transnational Radical Party is today the only international organization which has been given the possibility to intervene supporting antiprohibitionist positions - also if only on a consultative basis - during the preparatory works for the Special Session of the UNGA which will take place in June 1998.

We support the necessity of the legalisation of drugs to rescue some millions consumers all around the world from the contact with the clandestine market and to subtract to the organized crime the enormous power of corruption and pollution of society, politics, and economy, that it runs thanks to the profits granted by the illegal trade of drugs.

At the same time, we believe that prohibitionism constitutes a factor of dramatic health emergency, much more than the effects of forbidden drugs, and that it is the one to blame for the social and health risks and wastes which derive from forbidden drugs, much more than the substances themselves.

We have never shared the view - so in fashion in the European political and scientific community - which makes differences between policies of legalisation and policies of harm reduction, not withstanding the fact we understand the strategically usefulness and the minor resistance that it produces by the politicians; as well as if we promote and support also the initiatives which can be defined as those of harm reduction, we believe that legalisation of forbidden drugs and of their therapeutically use constitutes under every aspect a factor of reduction of social and health risks deriving from the consumption of drugs; on the other side we think that no policy of harm reduction could solve the problems without contending for or subtracting to the organised crime the control over substances, of their composition and of their effects. We refer in fact to those few and limited international experiences of harm reduction: what did they consist of, if not of a substitution of the illegal supply with forms of lega

l distribution or prescription of illegal substances?

This model of supply substitution does not apply only to drugs, but also to medicines, as methadone. This medicine, which from the scientifically point of view is acknowledged to be an indispensable instrument in the treatment of drug addicts, has been almost completely forbidden for many years because it has been considered equal to a drug of the state; it has been for a long time refused because not adherent to that model of intervention which imposes to recognise the rights to drug addicts only in the case they would have been ready to accept drug free programmes and therapies, and has lived the same fate as drugs: that of nourishing the criminal market.

The story of methadone shows how prohibitionism is not only a system of forbidden drugs, but also of forbidden treatments, that is to say a systematic violation of the rights of doctors to therapeutically autonomy and of the rights of drug addicted patients to be treated. To limit the possibilities of treatment simply means letting grow the risk factors, for the consumers and for the whole society. There is a direct linkage between the limits of substitution medicines and the rise of AIDS cases. A connection as much as certain is that of the reduction of the

"pharmacological cover" of the drug addicted population and the increase of the acts of micro-criminality. Therefore the antiprohibitionist reform of drugs and treatment laws and policies is a reasonable answer to the problems of order, health and security induced by a legislation - the prohibitionist one - which produces crime and pathology.

The CO.R.A., the Radical Antiprohibitionist Co-ordination federated to the Transnational Radical Party, which promotes in Europe the reform of the policies on drugs, has assumed on its last Congress the engagement of denouncing the inaccessibility of medicines, of therapies and of methods in the treatment of drug addiction; in order to change the situation, the CORA has promoted a petition to the European Parliament, the "Paris Appeal", a copy of which you can find in your folder. The appeal adopts the name of the French capital because it was launched at the same time with the Paris Conference on Harm Reduction on March 1997, and asks for the therapeutically freedom to become a fully recognised principle in the legislation of all European states. This appeal has been signed by hundreds of doctors and drug addiction operators all around Europe, and will be presented before the end of October to the Strasbourg Parliament in order to be discussed. Here we set it out to your attention, asking you to sign it and

hoping you will find it as an object of reflection and an engagement for your initiative.

As well known, some big European cities have already decided to experiment a different policy of intervention. These are very important "institutional" exceptions compatible with the prohibitionist legislation. England, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have produced experiences of social intervention and general health prevention that cannot be obstructed by any international convention. Their statistical results support the antiprohibitionist and harm reduction approach, and demonstrate the necessity to revise the UN Conventions, the latter being an obstacle in the way to solve problems and an alibi for the failure of the current health policies.

Harm reduction has to foresee the extension of the health supply to programmes of drug distribution under medical control, in particular heroine, in accordance with the model tested in Switzerland successfully and that Holland will start next year. The "street units", the "counselling" initiatives or the food and house assistance, of course very useful, are only some of the aspects of a policy of harm reduction. They cannot have an effective incidence on the reduction of the submerged if at the same time the services do not increase at the maximum their accessibility and do not yield effectively available and free all the therapeutic alternatives to accept all the demands of treatment. The widening of the health offer is, in practice, imposed by the circumstances: the range of treatments has been till today built on the demand of "drug free" programmes which not only involves minority if not marginal quotes of the drug addicted population, but is also on a certain scale "obligatory" for those who want to avo

id the administrative or penal sanctions that almost all European legislation foresee for the consumption of illegal drugs. The system of treatments cannot only consist, as often happens, in a set of "abstinence strategies"; neither is acceptable that, as it happens more and more often, the recidivist, which is a common event in a pathology such the dependence on opium by-products, they are sanctioned through the suspension of the pharmacological treatments, as if it was a "voluntary" interruption of the therapeutic pact.

We still have to stress the hypothesis of "therapeutically" of our political approach, that is legal and non-violent (this is absolutely original and linked to the nature of our organization) to the issue of the "right to the treatment" raised by the drug addicted citizens that turned to us.

We have chosen since always not to be and not to act as a drug addicts union, but to fight politically in order to reform the policies on drugs and to get to the point that also in the case of drug addiction for everybody are valid the same rights and the same duties which society and states recognise and respect in other situations. Quoting Ilja Prigogine, Nobel Prize for Chemistry, we try to put the policies on drugs in the set of democratic policies and to free them from the logic of emergency, exception and break of the basic principles of law, which can only lead to failure and defeat. We have verified that this approach has contributed by many drug addicts to relieve and reinforce the sense of human and civil dignity, of responsibility, of the consciousness to be animated, in their sickness, by an instinct of life and not of death. We have never protected anybody, but we have conceived our role towards drug addicted people as of intermediates of their rights to health and to treatment. We have informed

them about their rights, we have offered them the instruments to claim them directly and personally. And we have the impression to have helped them as much as we could, with our energies, to reach some autonomy in their dependence. It is finally the same goal that the policies and the laws on drugs should pursue and not hinder. These are the reasons why we would be thankful if some or better many of you will choose to add their name and their work to the effort towards reducing, at the European level, the harm that these laws keep on inflicting.

Thank you very much for your attention and I wish you all success in your work.