The Voice of Reason in the AIDS Crisis

I will second David Ng's plea for everyone to watch or read the farewell speech of the outgoing UN ambassador for AIDS, Stephen Lewis. It's a rare combination of passion and reason, one that should leave every civilized person seething at what can best be described as a colossal failure of democracy's promise.

Lewis' speech is a 16-part list of axioms that too many politicians and bureaucrats have ignored for years. Each one is there primarily because public and government sentiment have abandoned the accomplishments of science and rationalism in favor of prejudice and dogma.

At the top is an indictment of the religious extremism that pretends abstinence is in any way useful when it comes to slowing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Abstinence-only programmes don't work. Ideological rigidity almost never works when applied to the human condition. Moreover, it's an antiquated throwback to the conditionality of yesteryear to tell any government how to allocate its money for prevention. That approach has a name: it's called neo-colonialism.

Next comes similar disdain for the right-wing's insane "war on drugs" and the refusal to admit that drug use is a first and foremost a health problem, not a crime:

One has to wonder about the minds of those who would so readily punish injecting drug users rather than understanding the problem for what it is: a matter of public health.

And so on through a litany of embarrassment, including the relative pittance it would cost to supply proper medical treatment to Africa's AIDS victims -- a fraction of what we're spending waging a war on Iraqis, and far less even than what it will take to rebuild New Orleans.

Lewis ends by reminding us of the need to end the madness of keeping women down.

I challenge you, my fellow delegates, to enter the fray against gender inequality. There is no more honourable and productive calling. There is nothing of greater import in this world. All roads lead from women to social change, and that includes subduing the pandemic. For my own part, when I leave my post of Envoy at the end of the year, I have asked that my successor be an African, but most important, an African woman.