As world leaders gather this week in Washington D.C. for the 2012 International AIDS Conference, it is impossible to ignore an inconvenient truth: that drug war politics and policies in the United States and many other countries are severely jeopardizing the overall “fight against AIDS.” Simply stated, criminalizing those people who use drugs increases the risk of HIV infection and undermines efforts to protect them, their families and communities.

As world leaders gather this week in Washington D.C. for the 2012 International AIDS Conference, it is impossible to ignore an inconvenient truth: that drug war politics and policies in the United States and many other countries are severely jeopardizing the overall “fight against AIDS.” Simply stated, criminalizing those people who use drugs increases the risk of HIV infection and undermines efforts to protect them, their families and communities.

Roughly 33 million people worldwide are currently living with HIV — and injection drug use accounts for one-third of all new HIV infections outside sub-Saharan Africa. New infections have been falling since the late 1990s but HIV incidence has increased by more than 25 percent in seven countries over this time span, largely as a result of the transmission of HIV through the sharing of needles and syringes contaminated with HIV.

Research from around the world has consistently shown that repressive drug law enforcement compels people who use drugs to remain hidden and stay away from public health services, thereby increasing the risks of HIV infection. Mass incarceration of people for nonviolent drug offenses also plays a major role in spreading the virus, as inhumane conditions and lack of HIV prevention and treatment in prisons leads to untreated AIDS behind bars and the subsequent spread of HIV among families and communities once those who have been imprisoned are released…

If the United States had embraced the sorts of harm reduction programs that Australia and many European countries, including Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom, did embrace during the 1980s, more than a hundred thousand lives would have been saved — not only among people who use drugs but their lovers and children as well. One wishes that those responsible for so many needless deaths in our country could be held accountable - yet the willful ignorance and prejudice that has killed so many of our fellow citizens in decades past still persists. Just a few months ago, Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress re-instated a longstanding ban on the use of federal funds for syringe exchange programs — a move that will cost thousands of lives in years.