Reducing the Incidence of AIDS

The Obama administration has announced a plan to reduce the negative impact of AIDS:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says the United States is committed to stopping the scourge of HIV/AIDS and helping those afflicted lead a better life.

Said the president: “The question is not whether we know what to do but whether we will do it.”

Obama spoke as his administration released a new national strategy to combat the disease. It sets a goal of reducing new infections by 25 percent over the next five years.

The key question is how the administration plans to reduce the number of new infections.

One method is to expand access to clean needles and/or moderate-priced heroin and other injected drugs. Sharing dirty needles is a major source of HIV transmission in the United States, and this results from a combination of prohibition-induced restrictions on clean syringes and prohibition-induced high prices, which incentivize injection because this produces a big bang for the buck.

Providing better access to clean needles just means repealing laws that require a prescription to buy a syringe.

Providing better access to opiates need not consist of outright legalization (although that would be fine with me). Instead, it could mean expanding methadone clinics or allowing doctors to treat addicts via maintenance, i.e., by providing them with medical supplies of opiates.

At one level, this sounds idiotic: it is “treating” addiction by supporting addiction.

But past experience suggests it “works” in the following sense: addicts who get access to reliable, moderatedpriced supplies of opiates consistently reduce their criminal activities, increase their legitimate income, and experience better health outcomes. That is, much of the negative of being an addict arises from being addicted to a goood that is difficult to obtain.

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