Women and drug policy in Eurasia

The Eurasian Harm Reduction Network (EHRN) has released today, International Women’s Day, an interesting report about women and drug policy in the region. The development of drug harm reduction in Eurasia has seen some progress in recent years, but drug policies and services rarely meet the specific needs of female drug users.

Factors such as drug user registries, the illegal status of drug use and sex work, the lack of access to evidence based drug treatment and stigma and discrimination, obstruct the access of women drug users’ to appropriate medical care exposing them simultaneously to a range of human rights abuses.

The proportion of new HIV cases among women in Eurasia (where there are an estimated 1.5 million people with HIV) is growing steadily. That only indicates the need of a drug policy reform with a gender-sensitive approach to help reduce drug-related harm among female drug users.

Under international law, states are obligated to take measures to eliminate violence against girls and women, to ensure the law protects them equally and to provide them with access to health and social services without discrimination. This obligation is particularly important given that men’s and women’s clinical needs with respect to drug dependence treatment may differ substantially.

For instance, concerns about child custody and the welfare of children are among the most important
obstacles for women seeking care, particularly drug treatment. In the Russian Federation to declare that a person is a chronic drug user is accepted as sufficient evidence to deny parental custody, even if the drug use occurred years ago. In other cases, school places are denied to children of female drug users or regaining custody of a child after a spell in rehab is unlikely to happen.

Another legal vacuum for female drug users in Eurasia is the lack of a comprehensive, evidence-based protocol of medical care and drug treatment for pregnant drug addict women. To that it has to be added the vulnerability of women drug users to police abuse, often as a consequence of the close relation between drug use and sex work, and domestic violence.

Recommendations such as the abolishment of drug user registries, child custody decisions based on parental effective responsibility of their child, rehabilitation programs specially tailored for pregnant women, abolishment of the fines for sex work in order to reduce police abuse, are among the key issues to respond effectively to the epidemics of drug use, HIV and hepatitis among female drug users in Eurasia.

Link to full article: