The Committee recommends that the State party undertake a comprehensive approach to combat its serious drug problem. In order to achieve the progressive realization of the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health for people who inject drugs and to ensure that this group may benefit from scientific progress and its applications (art. 15, para. 1(b)), the State party should implement in full the recommendations made by the World Health Organization in 2009 designed to improve the availability, accessibility and quality of harm reduction services, in particular needle and syringe exchange and opioid substitution therapy with methadone. People who use drugs should be a key partner in this initiative. As a matter of urgency, the State party should: (a) Scale up needle and syringe programmes to all geographical areas. The Government should amend the Dangerous Drugs Act of 2000 to remove prohibitions on distributing or carrying drug paraphernalia as these impede HIV prevention services; (b) Implement pilot prison needle and syringe exchanges and opioid substitution therapy programmes based on international best practice standards; (c) Remove age barriers to accessing opioid substitution therapy and develop youth-friendly harm reduction services tailored to the specific needs of young people who use drugs; (d) Remove restrictions on access to residential shelters for women who use drugs; (e) Make hepatitis C treatment freely available to all injecting drug users; (f) With regard to addicted persons, consider decriminalization and public health-based measures such as prescription of buprenorphine.
- Harm reduction
- Human rights