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| April 18, 2007 | Wednesday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 29, 1428 |
Drug abuse major source of HIV/Aids
RAWALPINDI, April 17: The current drug abuse level and trends in the country have raised fears of increasing transmission of HIV/Aids, while results of an ongoing national drug-abuse assessment study will help the government to formulate a policy to tackle the menace of drug abuse, informed sources said on Tuesday.
Pakistan is facing a serious HIV/Aids epidemic driven by a combination of injecting drug use and commercial sex, when a major epidemic was detected among injecting drug users in Karachi, 26 per cent of whom were found to be HIV-positive. Results of the national drug-abuse assessment study being jointly carried out by the UN Office of Drug Control (UNODC) in collaboration with the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) were currently being evaluated and would be released before June this year, the sources said.
The study will help shape up a policy and determine where to allocate resources, the sources told Dawn. A Steering Committee formed under the overall scope of the Second National Drug Control Master Plan for 2007-2011, comprising ANF and UNODC was finalizing a plan, which would be submitted to the federal government for approval. The plan deals with law enforcement, drug demand reduction and HIV/Aids prevention.
Pakistan is one of the countries hardest hit by narcotics abuse in the world. According to national drug abuse surveys, the number of chronic abusers of heroin increased from about 20,000 in 1980 to more than 1.5 million in the late 1990s.
Drugs in the region are mostly ingested orally; heroin is usually smoked or the smoke is inhaled. In Pakistan, a small number of heroin injection cases have begun to emerge in the Karachi area.
This practice — previously unknown in the sub- region — has been observed in recent studies and raises concerns about the increase in risk of transmitting blood-borne diseases, such as hepatitis and HIV/Aids, through the process of needle sharing.
According to ANF, an amount of Rs1072 million has been allocated and approved for demand reduction programmes under the Drug Abuse Control Master Plan (1998-2007) keeping in view the increasing number of drug addicts and problems associated with the drug abuse.
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