Fifty-five per cent of the cases handled by the Baltimore state's attorney's office are drug offences. Nevertheless, Baltimore has one of the highest drug incarceration rates in the country. AIDS is now the number one killer of men and women between the ages of 25 and 44. They are intravenous drug users, many of whom are HIV positive. AIDS has become a public health crisis in Baltimore because of our long time refusal to treat drug addiction as a public health problem.
Law enforcement is needed against the highest echelons of drug trafficking.
But it is ineffective against AIDS and addiction. Those problems are best handled by the public health system. That is why I strongly support a policy of harm reduction or medicalisation. For reasons that are obvious, US cities do not have much experience with harm reduction. That is one reason we held the first international network of cities meeting in Baltimore last November.