By Sherry Hussein-Wang

With the member states gathering for the UNí’s General Assembly in New York this week, I thought Ií’d share my favourite UN moment. Without a doubt, Kofi Annaní’s defiant í¢â‚¬Å“Hell, no!í¢â‚¬  was probably the best quote from a UN Secretary-General ever. Annan said it last year when asked by a reporter whether he was going to resign during the ongoing US-led investigation of his involvement in the oil-for-food scandal (no charges were ever brought against Annan, who is resigning soon anyway). It was a great scene: there was the Secretary-General showing the US that they couldní’t intimidate him. Sadly, while he can still get my heart pounding, Ií’m just not as excited about his organization.

The UN has always been a staging ground for diplomatic skirmishes, and it seems that these days things are only getting worse. The reason that the UN caní’t make the big decisions (like on Darfur) seems pretty clear: way too many countries have a presence in the UN, and each wants to guarantee that things will go their way. Thereí’s no sense in complaining too much about it, I guess, because there doesní’t seem to be any way around it.

But whatí’s truly disturbing is that many of the UNí’s failures fly well below the radar. Perhaps the best illustration is in the way that the UN is tackling HIV/AIDS. The UNí’s World Health Organization and its Development Programme, along with a host of other UN organizations, make up an organization called UNAIDS. While this sounds like a good idea in theory, in practice the effectiveness of the program remains undermined by the UNí’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Outside of Africa, one in three HIV infections is caused by someone injecting drugs with a dirty needle. While UNAIDS advocates for clean needle exchanges, these programs are not an essential part of the UNODCí’s recommendations to countries battling HIV epidemics. Ití’s even worse for supervised injection sites í¢â‚¬“ these programs are supported by UNAIDS but characterized as defeatist by the UNODC, and despite having been shown to decrease the risk that a junkie will contract HIV, supervised injection sites are repeatedly trashed by the UN anti-drug agency. It would be funny if it werení’t so awful: every year, a UN board affiliated with the UNODC releases a report in which they often single out countries that are even considering safe injection sites, while praising countries like Thailand where the last phase of the drug war ended with the back-alley executions of over 3,000 drug users.

While this might seem like no big deal (the Canadian government, after all instituted a supervised injection site without really heeding UN scare tactics), it is a lot different for countries that doní’t have the same resources as those in the West. In Russia, a full 88% of all HIV infections comes from people injecting drugs. This in a country where over a million people are infected with the disease and needle exchanges are illegal. In the rest of Asia, more and more junkies are getting infected with HIV and spreading it with alarming speed across populations.

Now, if the UN could just state once and for all that countries should be treating junkies instead of jailing them, a hell of a lot less people might die of AIDS. But that just woní’t happen, as long as the UNODC is around to run interference on other UN agencies by consistently opposing programs that have the potential to significantly limit the harm caused by injection drug use.

But why, you might ask, would this one UN agency be so vociferously opposed to these programs? The answer is simple: ití’s entirely funded by the United States, which uses the full power of its economy to intimidate countries to get in line: basically, the implicit threat is that if you piss the Americans off through your drug policy, your country will stay poor. So even though countries like Tajikistan (right above Afghanistan) have thousands of drug addicts and the means to stop an impending HIV epidemic, these small states doní’t want to piss off the biggest power in the world by actually providing comprehensive services to drug users.

The situation is obviously so out of wack that it seems like it can only be a matter of time before things change. Which makes me hope í¢â‚¬“ though Ií’m pessimistic í¢â‚¬“ that Ií’ll soon have a new favourite UN moment: when the next UN Secretary-General, sick of the US trying to weaken the worldí’s response to junkie-fuelled HIV epidemics, finally tells the Americans, í¢â‚¬Å“Hell, no!í¢â‚¬  and announces once and for all that every country should be giving out clean needles, establishing supervised injection sites, and making sure that instead of jailing them, governments treat their drug addicts.

It would be great and it would save millions of lives. But I think Ií’ll be waiting for awhile.