Taipei Mayor Chiang Wanan has recently questioned the harm reduction policy with statements such as "drug flow" and "blurring the boundaries between drugs and drugs." Meng Fanjia, Taiwan's Hualien County council candidate who has been a social worker for nearly 20 years and has long been involved in drug addiction harm reduction and AIDS services in the east, today criticized Wanan for using drug addicts to manipulate the election campaign and put politics above public health. He called on Jiang Wanan to stop using electoral language to stigmatize harm reduction policies and obliterate the social safety net that countless public health and social workers have worked hard to weave at the grassroots level.
Meng Fanjia pointed out that since the AIDS outbreak caused by the sharing of heroin needles in 2005, Taiwan has learned from the painful experience and promoted clean needles and methadone substitution treatment. According to a study by the National Taiwan University School of Public Health cited by the CDC, the two measures prevented 13,664 intravenous drug addicts from becoming infected with HIV between 2005 and 2020, costing NT$21 billion and saving up to NT$404.1 billion in medical expenses. She said that this is an epidemic prevention fortress built over 20 years of communication between doctors, public health personnel, pharmacists, judicial police personnel and civil society groups, and it definitely does not belong to any political party's political cash machine.
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In response to Jiang Wanan’s assertion that “methadine is different from needle administration of drugs” and “medical units are different from community centers,” Meng Fanjia bluntly said that these two boundaries are not established in practice at all, which further highlights the ignorance of politicians about the current situation at the grassroots level. Methadone itself is an opioid and is legally classified as a Tier 2 drug. The principle of substitution treatment is to provide controlled drugs under supervision to get users off the street from heroin and shared needles.
Meng Fanjia took Huadong’s frontline community care experience as an example and pointed out that cleaning needles and harm reduction services must go deep into community pharmacies, health clinics and civil society organizations, because marginalized groups who really need help dare not go to large hospitals on their own. In Hualien, where resources are relatively scarce, civil society organizations have always been ahead of the government. For example, the "Home of Lord's Love" has been self-funded in the early stages and has become a drug addiction treatment community recognized by the central government; the "Huilan Residence" established by the Lourdes Association in Hualien also provides non-judgmental harm reduction support groups for the diverse gender community and drug addiction families. These community centers use pragmatic companionship to catch the lives of those who have been excluded from the system. This is the strongest line of defense to prevent recurrence.
Meng Fanjia criticized that as the current mayor of Chiang Wanan, the distribution of clean needles and methadone referral in Taipei City are currently implemented by his municipal government; when he served as a legislator in 2021, he even proposed strengthening methadone alternative treatment and treatment resources. It is extremely regrettable that a chief minister who has supported and implemented harm reduction policies has now twisted the same set of scientific concepts into a "toxic trend" for the sake of election.
Meng Fanjia emphasized that whether harm reduction measures should be pushed forward can be discussed based on objective evidence, but "labeling" is definitely not a discussion. The biggest concern for frontline workers is stigma. Drug addicts are afraid to walk into service stations because they are afraid of being seen, and pharmacies are reluctant to set up service stations because they are afraid of neighbors protesting. Every time a politician refers to harm reduction as "condoning drug abuse," these fears are deepened and the case is forced back into the shadows. In the end, it is the helpless family members and the entire society's epidemic prevention network that bear the consequences. Call on politicians to bring policy discussions back to a rational track and return addiction treatment to professionalism.
