Is The Choice To Use Drugs A Human Right?

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There's no arguing that every year drug use affects countless lives, and the International Network of People Who Use Drugs (INPUD) is an organisation that has taken up a frontline position in this conflict. Where they stand apart from pretty much every other drug focused organisation on the planet is they're not actively taking part in the global "war on drugs", instead they work in conjunction with United Nations bodies and other institutions to fight for and to promote the human rights of people who use drugs.

You might be rolling your eyes, but since its conception in 2005 by a group of activists at the International Harm Reduction Conference (IHRC) they've been looking at alternative, and more effective ways to work with drug users.

Their executive director Eliot Ross Albers has been an injecting drug user for 25-years; he's been interested in the intersection between drugs and politics for over 15 years. It's worth noting that Eliot isn't exactly shooting up in a cardboard box, he has a doctorate in philosophy (that he stresses he got whilst he, "was an injecting drug user") and apart from the whole love of drugs, he's not that different from most politically activists.

VICE: I noticed you use "people who use drugs" rather than "drug user", why is that?
Eliot Ross Albers: When you just say "drug user" you reduce people to one facet of their behaviour—when you refer to people first and foremost as people you humanise them. It's trying to introduce a more non-reductive approach towards people who happen to use drugs and that language has become pretty universally accepted within the UN system; though sadly not in wider society, and especially not in the media.

When you talk about campaigning for the human rights of people who use drugs what are you referring to?
Well one subject that we're starting to push that's been very much ignored, has been looking at the corollary right to use drugs. This is a fairly contentious issue in human rights discourse.

There was a turn in the harm reduction movement about ten years ago towards starting to introduce human rights discourse into discussions around harm reduction and drugs policy, most of that work is focused on documenting the human rights abuses to which people are subject simply because they use illegal drugs. We do that work as well,  but we're also very interested in looking at the idea that other fundamental human rights are interfered with when you criminalise people's usage of certain drugs. We think that the war on drugs has reached a point that it fundamentally interferes with people's rights to make choices about what drugs they choose to use and that for us is a violation of people's rights to privacy.

The bulk of the work we do is looking at the specific rights violations people who use drugs suffer in regions of the world; principally in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and in Southeast Asia. We're looking at issues like forced detention camps and centres, the denial of access to treatment and healthcare, arbitrary violence by the police and other authorities, compulsory registers, compulsory HIV testing without treatment—there's a whole range.

Is this a human rights issue though? We're talking about voluntary drug users, not people being denied the right to vote or demonstrate free speech.
Human rights are by definition universal, inalienable and indivisible. This means that they belong to every human being without discrimination or discretion—one can no more lose one's entitlement to human rights than one can cease to be human, and finally, one cannot be denied rights because someone, or a government, decides that one group of people is less human or less deserving than another.

But it's not about being less human. Drug laws are there to protect people: users and non-users. Why fight for the right to have access to something that is dangerous?
The laws that are in place have simply not succeeded: drug use has increased exponentially and continues to increase, as does production. In countries that have decriminalised, like Portugal, you have not seen the predicted massive increases of people suddenly using what were previously criminalised drugs—in fact you've seen a decrease.

The harms that are associated with drug products are massively increased by the current legal environment. What has happened is that we have given up control. Tobacco, alcohol are legally regulated. The illegal drugs are simply not. There is no regulatory framework at all and that means that there is no quality control. It means that it's in the hands of organised crime and that ultimately the users are subject to a great deal more harm than is intrinsic to the drugs themselves.

In the INPUD's founding document the Vancouver Declaration you advocate safe injecting rooms, and education about safe injecting. If this is about protection, why are you literally teaching people to use drugs?
The reality is that people do inject drugs. Let's face it, ever since the invention of the hypodermic syringe people have injected drugs. Given that injection brings with it some risks, doesn't it make sense to help people do it in a safer environment and in a safer way? Let's look at diabetics, diabetics inject every single day but don't have injecting harms. They have sterile syringes. They're taught how to inject drugs properly. There are no risks or dangers involved. What we have done is forced people to the margins of society, we don't give people sterile syringes and we don't teach them how to inject safely. We teach people how to drive so they can do it safely. We teach people how to do things that have an element of risk.

How does all this end up with you guys working with the UN?
UN bodies have to embrace the idea that civil society should be consulted on issues that concern it and this principle's been given an enormous push by the AIDS movement. One of the principles that is central to the AIDS movement is the GIPA principle, the Greater Involvement of People Living with HIV and AIDS. It means that people who are living with HIV and AIDS have to be meaningfully consulted upon all areas, all discussions and forum that affect their lives. That principle has been broadened to mean other constituents should be involved in debates and discussions that concern them.

In the AIDS response there are what are called key affected populations, they're the populations where the heaviest burden of HIV sits and those are recognised to be: people who inject drugs, sex workers, men who have sex with men and transgender people. Each of these key communities has a disproportionately high burden of HIV and each of these communities has a UN agency responsible for ensuring its health through the UN system.

Obviously HIV and AIDS are a huge concern and area of your work, but you put a huge emphasis on the spread of hepatitis C—which seems to get a bit eclipsed in these discussions.
Hepatitis is very much under talked about. Hepatitis C primarily has a much heavier burden on the drug using community than HIV does. Whilst we might see rates in the UK of about 1.2 per cent of injecting drug users living with HIV, we have a figure of 54 per cent living with HCV. It's much more prevalent, but has been largely ignored. The reasons why it's so prevalent—same as with HIV—are criminalisation, stigma and discrimination, lack of access to services, and lack of honest education.

One might surmise that one reason for this is that the primary constituency infected by HCV are injecting drug users. We're most disproportionately affected by HCV by a long way—so it's largely gone unnoticed and ignored. That is beginning to change now.

How so?
We've been exerting a lot of pressure on the World Health Organisation to pay attention to hepatitis issues, and they've started to issue guidelines that have involved us. This is one of the ways we influence UN agencies, by being involved in guideline writing processes. We insist that if a guideline is being written around hepatitis—particularly hepatitis C—that people who inject drugs are included and are able to meaningfully contribute to those guidelines. They will contact and ask us to provide somebody to sit in on the guideline writing group.

Let me be honest with you, the real reason why people who use drugs have started to be able to play a role on the global stage is because of HIV. The recognition that a disproportionate burden of HIV is carried by the injecting community has meant that following the principle of Greater Involvement of People Living with HIV the injecting drug community has to be involved. It's really been HIV that has put our movement on the map and enabled us to be funded.

How do you get funding for something as un PC as drug users rights?
There are a number of different funding mechanisms, one of them is a very large project being run by the Dutch National AIDS Foundation. We have another project with the International HIV/AIDS Alliance and money from a new mechanism, it's called the Robert Carr Network fund; it's another HIV fund that focuses upon key affected populations.

Wouldn't the funding used to help people who choose to use drugs in the developed world be better spent on helping people affected by HIV in economically disadvantaged countries such as in Sub-Saharan Africa?
Enormous amounts of resources already go into helping people in economically under resourced countries and within those countries there are also injecting drug users, sex workers, men who have sex with men and transgender people and what's tending to happen is that the epidemics amongst those communities are being ignored and the situation is getting worse for them. So in Sub-Saharan Africa the HIV epidemic is not just about women and girls, it's also about injecting drug users, it's about sex workers, it's also men who have sex with men.

Does INPUD advocate an alternative to the prohibitionist system?
INPUD supports and advocates for the full scale dismantling of the system of global prohibition and its replacement with a regulated market for drug products—in other words we call for an immediate ceasefire in the war on our people. This would ensure that people who use drugs would know that the products that they are consuming are what they claim to be, that they do not contain dangerous contaminants, and that they are of a known quantity. This would immediately cut the ground away from organised crime by denying them the massive profits that they are currently making.

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