Patterns of the AIDS epidemic

With globalization of the world’s economy making the transfer of money, people and products easier, drugs and disease are also crossing international borders, said Don Des Jarlais, Ph.D., director of research at the Chemical Dependency Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. In a talk to researchers at the Yale AIDS Colloquium Series, Des Jarlais noted that an estimated 10 percent of all international trade is in illicit psychoactive drugs. “We are not going to be able to return to the ’50s, ’40s or ’30s or some other age of innocence when illegal drugs were hard to find,” he said. “We are clearly not moving towards a drug-free world. We are clearly not moving towards an AIDS-free world. Both of these are expanding rapidly.”