Vietnam Launches Methadone Clinics to Fight HIV/AIDS

Vietnam's launch of two new methadone clinics has won praise from the UN. The agency today declared it is pleased to work with the Southeast Asian nation on "effective harm reduction approaches ensuring a comprehensive response to HIV in Vietnam," said Eamonn Murphy, UNAIDS country chief.

Two clinics have opened in Haiphong, a northern port city dealing with high levels of heroin use and HIV infection. These will treat users with the substitute drug from now through December. Next month Ho Chi Minh City -- Vietnam's biggest city and the location with the highest HIV rates -- will also open clinics.

UN experts say heroin, chiefly from nearby Myanmar and Laos, is the most popular illegal drug in Vietnam. Opium cultivation, long a fact of life in Vietnam, greatly expanded under French colonial rule, and heroin exports grew further during the Vietnam War. Anti-drug efforts launched after the war resulted in the near-eradication of the poppy crop but did little to alter the country's status as a major shipping route for heroin.

"Heroin continues to be the preferred drug among younger drug abusers," particularly in the cities, according to the UN Office for Drugs and Crime Control. Heroin injection is thought to be the cause of 60 percent of HIV cases in Vietnam, which are now believed to number almost 300,000. While intravenous drug users, prostitutes and men who have sex with men make up the majority of cases, experts worry that the virus is quickly spreading into Vietnam's general population.

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