KOLKATA: To stem the increasing incidence of HIV among injecting drug users (IDUs) in South Asia, the legal framework in the respective countries has to accommodate the provisions of harm reduction, says a United Nations-commissioned report.

Providing clean needles and syringes to drug users, condoms to prisoners and sex workers and drug substitution treatment are often seen as abetting in drug consumption, amounting to violation of law and thus attracting prosecution.

Releasing the report `Legal and Policy Concerns related to IDU harm reduction in SAARC countries' here on Tuesday, Oscar Fernandes, convener of the Parliamentary Forum on AIDS, said legislators would provide all support to fight the menace. The report was commissioned by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to Lawyers Collective, a non-governmental organisation working in the field of public health, HIV and law in India.

Epidemic proportions

Drawing attention to the epidemic proportions of HIV prevalence among IDUs and the containable nature of that epidemic, Gary Lewis, representative of UNODC, Regional Office for South Asia, said: "The response was not keeping pace with the scale of the epidemic." He estimated that about 10 per cent of IDUs in India, whose numbers might range from 90,000 to 1,90,000, were HIV-positive.

While stringent penalties did not always lead to reduced drug use, these exposed IDUs to riskier practices such as injecting pharmaceutical products, Mr. Lewis said.

The HIV epidemic was also getting increasingly feminised, with women getting affected from their partners as well as through increased drug use.

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