Dear friends,
It gives me immense pleasure to welcome you all, as President of Hope 2002, to this International Conference on Substance Abuse and HIV, Information and Education. It is, indeed, a great honor for me to address such a distinguished group of guests who have made pioneering contributions in these fields.

I hope that the forum of discussions, will lead to the creation of a more streamlined approach towards finding workable solutions to the twin evils of Substance Abuse and HIV.
Despite the widely acknowledged severity of the international HIV crisis, resources available to contest the epidemic are drastically inadequate. The combined contribution of official international aid for HIV prevention and treatment from the 22 rich nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is well below 3% . Because resources are at present so constrained, it is imperative that existing funds be spent for interventions that are cost-effective.
Most studies on the cost-effectiveness of HIV prevention highlight the superior efficiency of targeting high-risk groups over nontargeted interventions. Examples of high-risk groups include sex workers and their clients, others with multiple sex partners, men who have sex with men, and intravenous drug users.
The results of cost-effectiveness analyses are driven mainly by the assumptions that underlie them, such as intervention effectiveness or baseline HIV incidence. A jaundiced extension of this truism is that one can therefore use cost-effectiveness analyses to dispute anything. The best protection against the manipulation of cost-effectiveness analyses is complete and clear presentation.

President of Hope 2002,
Dr.Yusuf Merchant

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