china626 (2008-10-30)

Written by Wang Wen¡¡Translated by Junbin Luo

Prologue: The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific carried out the construction plan of drug-prevention in Yunnan province and Mekong region such as Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, to tackle the problem of rampant drug-taking among youth. The plan includes two parts, which are the training of living skills and peer education. The injection of international fund and the implementation of measures and strategies aiming to reduce the harm bringing by drugs are of significant help to slow the extension of HIV among IDU groups in China, however, as time goes by, some challenges are still emerging.

Challenge 1: The fund for this project is not transparent enough which still lacks of the supervision from the society. At present, most funds for harm-reducing in drug-preventing programs are of non-disclosure, so are those groups. Few insiders of those groups know the funds and the information is only available to several managers of the project. Few of those managers are from IDU groups. Many managers are hostile to IDUs who join the project and not willing to let them know the exact amount of the fund. Therefore, there is always a lack of supervision from groups when administers use the fund. They even extort the fund on all sorts of pretexts and divert it in private. An IDU member once advised in an exchange meeting on certain project in Yunnan that the use of fund needed the participation of group members and supervision, however, this advice was refused by administrators with ingenious excuse.

Challenge2: IDUs are merely treated as peer educators in the program and they lack a sense of belonging. During the running of the program aiming to reduce harm bringing by drugs, most joint institutions and NGO look these IDUs only on the peer educator level. Therefore, core IDU members of the program will always find that they lack of belongingness and sense of responsibility, for they are out of the decision-making of the program and can only accept their work passively. So their work becomes a formality and skin-deep.

Challenge 3: Backwardness of idea in the executive level and narrow space for expanding of the project. Most managers or administrators of the project are not IDU group members, and they are lack of understanding to IDU groups, even the little they know is what has been already stigmatized in the society. So executives of the project genuinely believe that just asking several IDU members to hand out some injection tools and organizing some activities are ok. Having this notion in their mind, they only consider the social demand form the angle of public health and the need of the executive level (by doing this, they can get the fund), rather than consider the basic need of IDUs from the angle of their living, working and curing with clear-eyed realism and humanism. Therefore, there are little expansion room and after-service for those harm-reducing projects, according to which, the bad effect can be predicted.

Challenge 4: The core IDU members grow slowly and therefore the GIPA principle can not be carried out efficiently. Because IDUs are merely treated as peer educators in the program, so they can not join the planning and decision-making process. Many participants feel uncertain about the outlook of the drug harm controlling work they are doing, and only see projects as a temporary harbor for themselves. At the same time, IDU core members have little room for progress in these institutions and projects, and some of them are even abandoned to learn outside. Moreover, many of them lack of consciousness of active self-teaching. These subjective factors have badly confined the improvement of IDU core members and the situation is seriously worrying comparing this in foreign countries. It¡¯s a long way to go to carry the GIPA principle among IDU core members. It¡¯s a dream that seems far off!

Challenge 5: The grass root of IDU groups is short of environmental support. In recent years, with the emerging of grass root of other groups, some active members are active in promoting the development of their own grass root. However, because of the suppression, discrimination and imputation from the society, bad supportive environment and their own problems make IDUs out of the harm-reducing project. These factors make it sure that the IDU grass root can not hold on but abort during its birth. So the future way for IDU gross root will be surely long, hard and full of twists and turns.
Concluding remarks: Many problems are emerging in the work to reduce the harm of drugs in China, which need the whole society and all institutions, IDU core members to rethink, and the whole international community and foundation participating in this area to exam their work again.