A blog about the 16th International AIDS Conference, Toronto, Canada, August 13-18, 2006.
This afternoon, I was lucky enough to get a seat in the overflow area of a session that was dedicated to Sex, Drugs and ARVs behind prison bars. The best talk was saved for last, where Anak Agung Gede Hartawan discussed the launch of the first prison methadone maintenance program (MMT) in Indonesia.
"The AIDS epidemic is growing in prisons at an alarming rate," says Hartawan, who is the program's director. In one prison in Bali, 56 percent of injection drug users were HIV positive. The primary cause of HIV transmission within Indonesian prisons is needle sharing and sexual transmission.
Hartawan says 32 prisoners are currently on methodone and 5 are on receiving both methadone and antiretroviral treatments. The program also includes AIDS education, the distribution of condoms and bleach, and voluntary counseling and testing.
Funding, as usual, is one of the program's greatest challenges. The government spends the equivalent of US $0.50 per prisoner, per year on healthcare says Hartawan. Yet he's pleased with the success of the program to date, which he plans to scale-up to two additional prisons in West Java and Jakarta. And in recognizing that prisoners are frequently left to flounder when they are discharged, Hartawan hopes to expand the MMT program to 7 primary health centers in Jakarta.
News of the program is not without irony. Indonesia is known for its strict narcotics laws, and many of the men enrolled in the MMT program are incarcerated in one of the prisons for drug related offenses.
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