Even in countries with very high rates of HIV and AIDS, there may be very few AIDS Golden Triangle? As rural populations in the Mekong delta are forced to cut opium production, scarcity causes local modes of consumption to switch from traditional smoking, to injection of the "valueadded" heroin, often with shared and contaminated injecting equipment. The most dynamic axis of the epidemic is a South-Éast Asian "corridor" stretching from North East India, across Burma (where 70% of drug injectors are HIV positive), Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Yunnan and Vietnam. This HIV axis thrives on two economies, the trafficking in opiates and in women.
International and domestic political pressures have led several countries to intensify repression of drug-using groups. In Vietnam, the "struggle against social evils" targets drug abuse, prostitution, pornography and gambling as the unwanted side-effects of the reintroduction of capitalism.
The strategy in Ho Chi Minh City, where most HIV in Vietnam in centred has been to round up all drug users and sex workers, confining them to two large "rehabilitation" and detention centres. Inmates are HIV tested, and those found positive cannot be released. Many are newly infected through sexua people publicly known as HIV+, and those suspected of HIV may be subject to extreme measures of rejection and persecution in their communities.
Supportive self-organisations of people with HIV are well-established in Thailand and some countries of East Africa, but weak or absent in other Asian and African nations.
Organisations of people with HIV in Asia and Africa, dedicated to exercising leadership in AIDS education, or to fighting for basic rights, are even more fragile, despite the efforts of the Global Network of People with HIV (GNP+), the International Council of AIDS Service Organisations, and the repeated manifestos of international conferences since 1983. [KD] * or drug using activities inside the centres. For the majority of people detected with HIV in Vietnam, the future holds only incarceration until death.
Yet also in Vietnam there have been experiments in allowing the training and development of peer education programs for injection drug users, sex workers and gay men — though more recently these peer groups have become more controlled by local Party cadre. There are trial needle exchange schemes in three districts of Hanoi, and pilot projects in care of HIV positive drug injectors in their family homes.
Similar "harm minimisation" and peerorganising projects for drug injectors have been operating in Nepal, Manipur, Cape Town, Malaysia and Thailand. Even in Yunnan, where China's HIV epidemic is centred, highly repressive responses alternate and co-exist with some more effective and pragmatic interventions.
Minimising HIV transmission through drug injection is largely incompatible with the application of repressive measures against drug users, because repression prevents the creation of a civil space in which users can organise and inform themselves. *
April 1997 #287 27
The "War on Drugs" makes HIV spread faster, argues Ken Davis
The "War on Drugs" makes HIV spread faster, argues Ken Davis
OUTAGE!
AIDS