Spreading Propaganda And AIDS
Why stop at removing condom information from federal Web sites, and insisting (contrary to data) that abstinence-only sex ed makes sense? Apparently, the Bush administration is more concerned with spreading their "just say no (to data)" drug ideology than stopping the spread of AIDS:

Shown in dozens of studies in America and elsewhere to reduce transmission without increasing drug use, needle exchange is perhaps the most effective of all strategies to prevent the spread of HIV. Yet in a pattern familiar from debates over sex education, Washington conservatives seem eager to hold up distortions of science as a model for the rest of the world. At last year's meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Europeans and Australians watched in amazement as American delegates declared the evidence for needle exchange "unconvincing."

U.S. representatives also blasted as a "counsel of despair" the harm-reduction approach, which recognizes that even drug users unable or unwilling to stop using drugs can be helped to avoid the AIDS virus and other problems. Backed by a coalition of prohibitionists that included Russia, Sweden and Japan, the United States ensured that the resolutions adopted by last year's commission were stripped of every mention of harm reduction. Any discussion of human rights of drug users was similarly excised.

This year the United States has not waited for a global gathering to force the UN to pledge allegiance to "zero tolerance." American officials have put significant back-channel pressure on the UN Office on Drugs and Crime - the current chair of the UN's joint program on HIV/AIDS - to retreat from needle exchange and other harm-reduction measures.

After a November meeting with Robert Charles, an assistant secretary of state in charge of the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, the director of the Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, promised that he would review all of the office's printed and electronic statements to remove references to harm reduction. Costa also pledged that the office would be "even more vigilant in the future." As a start, a senior staffer directed subordinates to "ensure that references to harm reduction and needle/syringe exchange are avoided in UNODC documents, publications and statements."

More than semantic sanitation is at stake. In Russia, where estimated HIV cases now surpass those in all of North America and where 75 percent of new infections are attributable to intravenous drug use, officials have long pointed to the proceedings of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs to justify misgivings about needle exchange and refusal to treat addicts with noninjectable opiate substitutes like methadone.

What America is doing is setting up a major international public health crisis -- one that's unlikely to affect only drug users in faraway places, thanks to the invention of the airplane. When people pooh-pooh the danger of putting fundamentalists in charge in our country, it's clear they don't understand the costs of electing people whose intellectual foundation is largely based on embracing emotionally held beliefs and a rejection of the value of proof and data. What shocks me lately is how unshocked I am at reading this story above, and so many others in the same vein.