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Communities are well-informed about the harms of illicit drugs and empowered with anti-drug strategies

FLAWED REPORT EXAGGERATES BENEFITS OFNEEDLE EXCHANGES

The Return on Investment 2 Report, launched today by the FederalDepartment of Health and Ageing, contains serious flaws thatexaggerate the financial benefits of operating needle exchanges forillicit drug users. The report claims that for the $243,000,000 spent by AustralianGovernments on needle exchanges over the last decade, there hasbeen a healthcare saving of $1.28 billion. But a preliminaryinvestigation of the 204 page report by Drug Free Australia hasrevealed serious flaws in the report, which when corrected wouldconsiderably reduce any proposed financial benefit.Gary Christian, who coordinates the input of 28 national andinternational Drug Free Australia Fellows – epidemiologists, addictionmedicine practitioners, doctors and social researchers - is concernedby the faulty assumptions driving the calculations. “In 2005, theprestigious US Institute of Medicine, which has always been positivetowards needle exchanges, looked closely at the scientific evidencefor the effectiveness of needle exchanges in preventing HIVtransmission. They returned a verdict that the science wasinconclusive on the matter after being shown that the World HealthOrganisation’s 2004 paper on the subject, which claimed that thescience was in fact conclusive, had serious and fatal errors. Itappears that the Return on Investment researchers have assumedthat needle exchanges have a proven effect on HIV when in fact thiscannot be demonstrated. And you cannot manufacture hundreds of millions of dollars of savings to Australians based on an ignorance of the science,” said Mr Christian.Studies show that the provision of education, counseling and freetesting for HIV, rather than needle exchanges, best accounts for lowHIV transmission rates in user populations. In Scandinavia, the twocountries which put their primary emphasis on educating drug usersabout the dangers of HIV, and provided free testing, had less HIVtransmissions amongst their user populations than the neighbouringcountry which put its greater emphasis on needle exchanges.