Drug Abuse As a Health Issue

by Alanna Shaikh · 2009-06-05 09:17:00 UTC
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(photo credit:UNODC)

In the acronym post, I mentioned my issue with treating drug abuse as a crime issue and not a health issue. Today I ran into a post from the Open Forum blog which gets into some of the factors involved in looking at drugs as a health problem.

Open Forum has links to a number of articles and reports about Portugal, which decriminalized all illicit drugs in 2001. This has reduced the number of HIV infections resulting from drug use. The country has also seen a decrease in drug abuse.  Portugal's results may be exceptional, or impossible to replicate, but I think it provides some major food for thought.

It also looks like I may have unfairly slandered UNODC. While their acronym remains annoying, their approach to drug abuse is surprisingly reasonable. They talk about rehabilitation and treatment for drug users on their site. For a more traditional example of UNODC's work, they've got a new article out about drug control in Tajikistan.

Alanna Shaikh
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