Organizations working on drug use have shown their disagreement with the decision of the National Commission Against Addictions (Conadic) not to carry out the National Addiction Survey (Encodat) that should be carried out this year.
The latest is Mexico United Against Crime, which issued a statement calling on the federal government to reconsider its decision. Political Animal revealed last week that the administration had no intention of re-editing the survey, which has been done every five years since 1998, alleging budget problems.
“This decision would cancel the possibility of obtaining relevant information on the trends, magnitude of use and profiles of people who have some consumption of drugs, alcohol and tobacco in Mexico,” the statement said.
“The importance of this survey is that it provides information on users, the initial substance of use, the initial age of use, as well as data on risk and protective factors. Its cancellation would imply running out of information on how drug use has changed in the country in recent years, especially how the pandemic affected substance use, and would leave us with one last cut of the survey conducted in 2017,” he adds.
“With this measure we will lose the possibility of obtaining updated data, minimizing the possibility of being able to generate national and local public policies that are efficient, effective and based on facts. Also allowing the reproduction of stigma on substance users, as well as ignorance of consumption by each entity in the country. At the same time, by not updating ENCODAT information, the federal government would be failing to comply with the recommendation to collect data every three to five years issued by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD), of which Mexico is a member,” says MUCD.
For the NGO, “the information generated allows us to build strategies based on facts, free of stigma and break with the dichotomous paradigm of user-addict that some government strategies maintain.”
“We urge the Ministry of Health and CONADIC to reconsider their decision and carry out ENCODAT 2022. Only in this way will we be able to obtain current information that allows us to build better public health policies free of stigma for users and non-users of psychoactive substances,” he says.
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