More than 30 activists from Fresno, the Bay Area and Stanislaus County converged outside the downtown Modesto courthouse Monday to protest criminal charges against two people accused of handing out clean syringes and collecting dirty ones from drug addicts in a Modesto park.

Kristy Tribuzio, 36, and Brian Robinson, 37, face up to a year in jail for breaking a law they consider to be immoral.

People held signs reading “Public Health Over Politics” and chanted in favor of dropping the charges. They excoriated local elected officials, pointing to a decision by the county Board of Supervisors in September 2008 to nix legalizing needle exchange over the recommendations of health officials.

“It should be a health issue, not a political issue,” said Dallas Blanchard, 45, whose needle exchange program in Fresno was approved just over a year ago.

“By treating it as a political issue, we’re just allowing people to die,” he added. [via]

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I am not sure that i can even explain how much I love this

Third, the misallocation of aid money creates perverse, possibly lethal, incentives.  Here in Ethiopia the existence of huge amounts of aid money for AIDS chasing too few people with HIV means that there is a kind of welfare state emerging for people with HIV.  It is not perhaps the welfare state we see in many European countries, but it is much better resourced than is available for people without HIV.  As well as free health care, people living with HIV are supported to find work, and their children get free education.  NGOs fall over themselves to get people living with HIV and their families onto their lists.

The result is that some Ethiopians emerge from being told the results of their voluntary HIV tests in tears because they don’t have the disease and so do not qualify for this assistance. The quality of life for them and their families would be better if they did; and their life expectancy could well be higher, given the access to health services that would be unlocked.  There are even rumours here in Addis Ababa that some people are deliberately getting themselves infected, so that they can give their children a better start in life.

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This is interesting, but I am not sure exactly what I think about it yet. more:

Second, we should try to stop earmarking aid; we should make more use of results to demonstrate that aid is effective. The Paris and Accra agendas for aid effectiveness, which have been agreed by all the donor nations, require donors to respect the development priorities of aid recipients.  But there has been almost no change on the ground in this direction.  One step towards doing this is to put in place simple but rigorous ways to measure and attribute results, so that donors can be confident about  (and can explain to taxpayers) how their aid has been used.  If we cannot produce compelling evidence about what aid has achieved, it should be no surprise that ministers and taxpayers want to determine in advance how the money will be spent.

Third, we should stop creating global funds, and merge or close the ones we have got.  The existence of bureaucracies whose raison d’etre is to spend money in a particular sector or in a particular way creates incentives to promote resource misallocation because it protects jobs and institutional budgets.

A lecture by João Biehl [via]