 We are going in outage right now and our first stop will be the North Railway station, where you'll see little groups, homeless people, Roma, drug users, injectable drug users and sex workers. You'll see heroin users basically, legal highs users, injectable legal highs users and you'll see sniffers, blue sniffers. In the age range, we have starting with 11-year-old somebody until 35-40 years old in this area. The client will see today, most of them, 90% of them are living in the sewer system and I can even show you the hole that they use as an entrance and as an exit from the sewer system. This is the entrance, but I can't enter, I'm cannot, no? I just went to the competition. This was covered by the city hall, the primarie, no? It's a measure of police to eradicate the street people from Bucharest just to cover with dirt the entrance in the sewer. But not while they are inside? Unfortunately some of them were inside. And what happened? Would they die? No, the ones that were outside somehow knew and they started to dig like in a primitive era. How many people lived in there? A lot of people, it's a huge sewer. In 2009 the legal highs came and the injecting and the use patterns changed totally because the heroin user went for the legal highs. They were cheaper, accessible and so-called legal, so they weren't under the law, so let's risk it for them to use. When they experienced heroin users, they would shoot up to four, five, six times a day. When they went for legal highs they would shoot 10, 15, 20 times a day. In 2009, 2008, even 2010, one client out of 100 clients tested was positive and right now out of 7 or 8 client tested 4, 5 or even 6 are HIV positive to the rapid tests. How do you see the government's reaction to this? There's no reaction whatsoever right now and for example the project that you're visiting right now will end on June 30th and we have right now no hope of continuing this project. Is the government funding any harm reduction program? No, the government isn't funding harm reduction in Romania. The effect of the HIV virus is one of the problems that have had an escalating evolution in the last period of time. For example, in 2008-2009, the incidence of the infection was 1% in the population of injectable drug users. In 2010 it increased to 3%, in 2011 it reached 19% and in 2012 it reached 29%. Nowadays almost 50% of the patients that come for detox are HIV infected. I don't speak of C hepatitis which is 98% huge. We estimate that we have around 27,000 problematic users. Maybe two thirds of them are using legal highs and only one third is still on heroin. At the end of 2010 I saw practically no heroin addicted patients but only these kind of substances with very serious disorders, suicidal attempts, great violence and with psychotic symptoms. I'm talking about MDPV, Matilda and Dioxy-Pirovalerone which was the most dangerous substance. They inject those new substances very frequently. We had an increase in the number of IV users with a halfening in the number of syringes provided through the exchange programs. In 2010 in June the money from the Global Fund were finished because Romania was already a European Union state so we were not more eligible to take these funds. So these funds were providing almost 80% from the needle exchange money. So from a maximum of two million syringes around in 2009, in 2010 we dropped to less than one million. They had to inject themselves a great number of times with the same needle or to share the same needle. It was very clear that something happened and that there was not at all enough injecting materials on the market. We are in a parental neighborhood, it's one of the worst neighborhoods in Bucharest related to drug trafficking and drug consumption. Basically you are volunteers. We understood that it's a need to provide clean needles to drug users and we are trying to stop the HIV phenomenon among drug users. This is the needle exchange room. We give them 30 syringes each day. We are open two times a week for three hours. We also collect the syringes used. Is there any change in the financial situation after the HIV epidemic? Does it convince the politicians to give you money? No, no we don't have any families from this center. What about those people who inject the stimulants and designer drugs? What kind of treatment they can go? Basically they can go to detox. But for detox there aren't many open clinics. There are about 70 places in detox treatment under supervision. In Bucharest you have more than 19,000 drug users and only 1,000 places on opioid substitution treatment. And substitution treatment for legal highs isn't any... it's not developed yet. People don't have any other option than to use or to quit themselves, which is not good. If you are caught with a small quantity of drugs, even if it's 0.001, you get a possession. That's an imprisonment for 6 years, depends on the type of drug. And for trafficking it's 5 to 15 years I think. There are a lot of consumers who consume the drugs. Drug consumption is a normal thing, especially in the last 2-3 years. When the legal drugs came out, they started to consume it. They started to consume it, they started to drink it. SIDA is a disaster. I was sitting at the pub and I saw something. I heard you were sitting at the bottom. I saw you were sitting at the bottom with all your sex videos. I saw you were sitting at the bottom with all your sex videos. I saw you were sitting at the bottom with all your sex videos. When they begin to ban the legal highs, and you cannot find them very easily, the dealers went to the internet cafe and he will have in one syringe 5 doses. So with the same syringe, he was injecting 5 clients. The outreach services tried to convince him, ok, we provide you with 5 free syringes. So we will have 5 syringes with one dose. And they say no, because if someone cuts me, they say I'm a dealer. If I have one syringe, it's only for me and I can get away easier because it's only possession. There should be legal changes in the sense of decriminalization of possession for personal use that would ease the access of people who use drugs to medical and social care. By the end of June, some harm reduction programs might stop. And by harm reduction services, I also understand OP, Substitution Treatment Centers. We run a three-year project founded by European social funds and for three years we were able to provide services for harm reduction services for 3,300 people. In Bucharest, Constanza and Timisoara. But our project will finish in June this year. About 200 or 300 people in Substitution Treatment will be left out. A lot of injectors will no longer have access to clean syringes. And this would be just factors for increasing the epidemic. The experience of other countries like Ukraine and like, I don't know, Estonia I think will be going in that direction, which means up to 70 or 80% of our drug users will be HIV positive, which will mean doubling the number of HIV positive people in Romania. That would mean a big, big, big hole in the budget with treatment for HIV. In order to provide needles for a drug user, the cost per year is 500 euros, whereas the ARV treatment for HIV is 6,000 euros. It's 12 times higher. Also a month in prison costs the state and actually the population 500 euros per month. With the same money you could provide harm reduction services for a much longer time. The government should understand that an effective way to intervene is to support the community-based organizations and grassroots organizations that have the best contact with drug users and to support them in order to provide this HIV targeted intervention. We ask the international community to help us. We found yesterday that Romania, the Global Fund changed their funding system and we are now eligible for Global Fund. If the Romanian government will cover 60% from the total budget, so that can be a possibility. This is the right moment for us to start the negotiations with the Global Fund in order to ease the budgetary problem and with international support to sustain the services that we managed to develop until today. Many people say that Romania is the economical crisis. We do not have money. I can say that the money exists. They are not very well-administrated. This is the situation. We just know what the solutions are, but we are not able to take the right measures to save people's lives. This is not only a national problem. This is a European problem too.