By Alfredo Pascual, Marijuana Business Daily

A draft decree in Colombia is in the works that could substantially modify certain aspects of the current medical cannabis framework.

Among other things, the proposed changes would make Colombian medical cannabis companies more competitive internationally by allowing flower to be exported into free trade zones.

Another proposal is aimed at making it easier for small- and medium-sized cultivators to participate in the nation’s legal cannabis industry.

But other proposed changes would impose stricter controls on medical cannabis companies.

One, for example, would require applicants for cultivation licenses to ensure their operations won’t produce fallout for local “ethnic communities.”

The Ministry of Health published the draft for public consultation at the end of May, and the comment period ended in June.

The timeline for the publication of the final version is uncertain.

But those interested in Colombia’s medical cannabis industry should follow this development closely, because some of the proposals would impose significant changes for newcomers and already licensed companies.

Big changes in store for Colombia cannabis regulations, but final rules and timeline uncertain

In April of this year, Portugal, a country well known for having decriminalized all drugs in 2001, got its first safe consumption site—on wheels. It’s a brand-new, shiny white Peugeot Boxer van.

 video, I spoke with Adriana Curado, a psychologist from Grupo de Ativistas em Tratamentos (GAT; Group of Activists in Treatment) and Diana Gautier, a social worker with Médicos do Mundo (MdM; Doctors of the World). The two women are co-coordinators and staff members of the Lisbon-based van, and believe that their mobile safe consumption site is a vital way to meet people who use drugs “where they’re at.”

The van is stocked with all the supplies needed to inject safely. Inside are two stations with a table and chair for injecting drugs and a private space where people can meet with staff. Hepatitis C and HIV testing and a “

” are available to everyone in the community where the van parks.

Inside Portugal’s first mobile safe consumption site

Amidst media furore over illicit drug use, Tory leadership favourite Boris Johnson dodged questions today over past drug use, whilst the wheels of Michael Gove’s campaign for the premiership are careering to a halt. Eight of the eleven candidates have admitted to some form of drug consumption, from Hunt’s cannabis infused lassi, to Rory Stewart’s opium smoking in Iran.

Quite rightly, Gove has been taken to task for advocating policies which saw teachers banned from their profession for taking class A drugs while he was education secretary and for upholding a justice system which incarcerates people for up to seven years for the very behaviour he previously engaged in. Despite the political elite’s refusal to deviate from the party line that 

prohibition is essential to create a ‘drug free world’,

 the evidence from around the world is clear - more people now produce, sell and consume illicit drugs than ever before.

Undoubtedly, the scandal has shone light on the hypocrisy of the so called ‘war on drugs’ in the United Kingdom, particularly, the highly racialised and class based dimensions of its application. It is clear this is not a war on illicit substances, but on racialised and working class people.

Yet the scope of drug policy discourse rarely turns to the people whose livelihoods depend on the production of plants which go on to be consumed by the political elite as illicit drugs. Indeed only Rory Stewart made passing reference to this when he referred to the communities he smoked with in Iran, saying “the family may have been so poor that they put very little opium into the pipe.”

Despite the dominant narrative of the drugs trade painting a picture of assumed wealth, violence and organised crime, the majority of people involved tend to be poor and otherwise marginalised due to their race, gender, indigenous status and/or lack of formal land rights. The global commitment to prohibit drugs at all costs means that rural and indigenous communities involved in the cultivation of prohibited plants such as cannabis, coca leaf and opium poppy are routinely targets for repression and suffer from discrimination, stigmatisation, criminalisation, imprisonment, and the destruction of their livelihoods.

Ending the ‘war on drugs’ requires justice for the impoverished communities who grow them

In the long-running television drama “Breaking Bad,” viewers watched the moral devolution of Walter White, a cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher who tried to provide for the financial future of his family by cooking methamphetamine. He changed from a good man caught in a bad situation into a sociopathic offender who ruled over a crystal meth empire.

Walter White represents the sort of drug offender who justifies serious punishment. He earned enormous amounts of money by producing and distributing vast amounts of harmful drugs.

U.S. drug laws are designed as if every offender was a dedicated criminal like Walter White, treating the possession or sale of even small quantities of illegal drugs as a serious crime requiring serious punishment.

I have studied the war on drugs for a number of years. Last December, my colleagues and I published a study on U.S. drug arrests, showing that roughly two out of every three arrests by state and local law enforcement target small-time offenders who are carrying less than a gram of illegal drugs.

Most US drug arrests involve a gram or less

A survey of music festival revellers indicates first time ecstasy users would be the most cautious about taking the drugs if pill testing was carried out at the events.

In contrast, festival-goers who had already used ecstasy would only be more cautious if the ecstasy was found to contain a toxic contaminant, not if the test showed a high dose, or if the test was inconclusive.

Participants in the study also said they would be willing to pay an average $12 to fund pill testing services.

The issue of drug testing at festivals came up several times during the past summer. Back in October Green MP Chloe Swarbrick called for safety testing of drugs to be legalised ahead of the summer festival season.

It was clear recreational drug use at festivals was not going to stop no matter how hardline the approach, she said.

"This has resulted in unnecessary tragedy, with unknown users ingesting unknown substances, at times costing emergency health sector resources, at worst costing lives."

Drug testing had taken place at some Kiwi festivals but in something of a legal grey area, as the Misuse of Drugs Act makes it illegal to knowingly permit drug use in any premises.

Study conducted in New Zealand suggests first timers most cautious after pill tests at music festival

By Ju Nyeong Park, Susan G. Sherman, Saba Rouhani, Kenneth B. Morales, Michelle McKenzie, Sean T. Allen, Brandon D.L. Marshall, and Traci C. Green.

A large majority of people who use heroin and fentanyl would be willing to use safe consumption spaces where they could obtain sterile syringes and have medical support in case of overdose, suggests a study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

, the researchers surveyed 326 users of heroin, fentanyl and illicit opioid pills in Baltimore, Boston and Providence, cities hard-hit by America's ongoing opioid overdose epidemic. About 77 percent of participants reported a willingness to use safe consumption spaces--sanctioned locations which have been set up and evaluated in other countries such as Canada and Australia but not yet in the U.S. Willingness to use safe consumption spaces was even higher, at 84 percent, among people who relied on public spaces such as streets, parks and abandoned buildings to use drugs.

The results indicated that 84 percent of the Boston participants, 78 percent of the Baltimore participants and 68 percent of the Providence participants were willing to use a safe consumption space--the overall rate coming in at 77 percent.

"On the whole, we found a strong willingness to use safe consumption spaces. This is important because often the voices of people who use drugs are not always included in policy debates or in the implementation of public health interventions," says study lead author Ju Nyeong Park, PhD, MHS, an assistant scientist in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Bloomberg School.

Safe consumption spaces, also called safe injection facilities and overdose prevention sites, represent a "harm-reduction" approach to the public health and social problems stemming from drug addiction.

In the U.S., safe consumption spaces would be welcomed by high-risk opioid users

‘J,’ a 28 year old single mother of six, agreed to carry drugs into a Costa Rican prison in exchange for money to feed her family.

“If I didn’t provide for my children, they would have died of hunger. It’s the easy money that always conquers you, because you never think about the consequences in the moment. You only think of what you’re going to bring home and give to them,” she said.

She changed her mind at the last moment and gave the drugs to prison guards instead. She was arrested, tried, and sentenced to more than five years in prison.

Sadly, J’s experience is far from an isolated incident. For the past several decades, many governments have waged an increasingly punitive—and futile—war on drugs. Punitive approaches to the drug trade are often based on ideology, not evidence; ultimately, they have not significantly reduced the drug trade. In the words of the late UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; “Drugs have destroyed many lives, but wrongheaded governmental policies have destroyed many more. I think it’s obvious that after 40 years of war on drugs, it has not worked.”

The consequences are deep and far-ranging: more violence, more human rights abuses, and an erosion of public health. The people most affected are the ones who are already the most marginalized: rural inhabitants, indigenous peoples, racial minorities, young people and women.

Some women living in poverty become involved in the drug trade because gender discrimination limits their opportunities for education and jobs.

Many are employed on the lowest rungs of the drug trade, transporting or selling small quantities; but they often carry the greatest risk, and suffer the worst consequences, including severe criminal penalties, as those with greater involvement.

Changing tactics in the war on drugs

The Cannabis Risk Alliance – a group of doctors – states that they are opposed to the decriminalisation of cannabis on the basis that Ireland is being “led down the path of cannabis legalisation”.

The authors appear to believe that criminalising people who use drugs is an effective way to deter people from using them.

As a group of experts on drug policy, we wish to stress that this is not the case.

Evidence worldwide clearly shows that societies with tougher drug laws do not have lower rates of drug use than those with less repressive regimes. But the damage caused by unnecessary criminal records and the costs of law enforcement and public health working at cross-purposes are now clear.

The ideas underpinning criminalisation came from a different era, one where our understandings of drug dependence and consumption were limited by an absence of science and compassion for individuals who use drugs.

Cannabis, medicine and the law

Drug-related deaths in Scotland have almost doubled in eight years, with 934 recorded in 2017 - up from 545 in 2009.

The Scottish government spent more than £740m on tackling problem drug and alcohol use between 2008 and 2018 but Audit Scotland said "there is still much to do to reduce deaths".

Most drug-related deaths are caused by heroin, according to the findings.

The use of psychoactive substances such as Spice "has largely reduced among the general population" since it was made illegal, Audit Scotland found, although it remains a "problematic" issue in prisons.

More than three-quarters of deaths due to drugs in 2017 were of people aged 35 and over, up from 54% in 2009 to 76%.

Scotland drug death rate highest in Europe and still on rise

Death Sentences for Drug Offences in Sri Lanka

This week, Sri Lanka’s president signed death sentences for four people convicted of drug-related offences. This follows a 43-year moratorium on the death penalty in Sri Lanka, and the decision to reinstate the death penalty seems to have been driven by the hope that this will increase chances of presidential re-election later this year.

The death penalty is the ultimate denial of human rights, to the fundamental right to life. Sri Lanka seems to be following in the steps of other states who are increasingly violating the rights of marginalised communities in order to gain political support. In fact, the Sri Lankan president, Maithripala Sirisena, has previously praised the horrific war on drugs of President Duterte in the Philippines on numerous occasions, a violent war that has seen tens of thousands of people murdered in extrajudicial killings on the streets, a war that has seen mass detentions, human rights violations, and attacks on human rights defenders and civil society.

Opposition of the Death Penalty for Drug Offences

But Sri Lanka and these countries are out of step with other nations who are abolishing the death penalty. There are 1,200 people on death row in Sri Lanka, all of whom are now at great risk of execution, but the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have both clearly opposed the death penalty for drug-related offences, and the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) has explicitly called upon states to abolish the death penalty for drug-related offences.

INPUD and ANPUD emphasise that not only is the death penalty a deplorable denial of the right to life, but international law also prohibits the use of the death penalty for all but the most serious crimes, involving the taking of life. Drug-related offences are not the most serious crimes, and those whose death sentences have been signed have committed no such crime.

If these executions go ahead, and if criminalisation of people who use drugs in Sri Lanka continues, people who use drugs will continue to be driven underground, facing huge barriers in accessing service provision, worsening health and wellbeing, and the welfare of the community at large. These executions will increase harm, threats to wellbeing and health, fear, and social exclusion.

We call for the president of Sri Lanka, Maithripala Sirisena, to immediately call a halt to these executions. People who use drugs are human beings. People who use drugs are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, and grandparents. People who use drugs care for their families and communities, are students, workers, caregivers, doctors, nurses, healthcare providers, artists. We are shocked and saddened to note these regressive trends in countries in South and Southeast Asia, as well as in other parts of the world.

We call on Sri Lanka to call an immediate end to the executions, focussing instead on health, wellbeing, human rights, and service and healthcare provision people who use drugs, and the communities in which they live.

Open letter: death sentences for drug offences in Sri Lanka

Harm reduction facility in Drumheller, Alta. penitentiary could open as soon as end of this month.

There are just a few supervised consumption sites across Canada, most in hospitals or community health centres, but this month one of the harm reduction facilities could open in an entirely new location — a federal prison.

Jeff Wilkins, president of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, says the union has been told by Correctional Service Canada that the facility in the Drumheller penitentiary, in southern Alberta, will open by the end of this month.

"This is a kind of lesser of two evils approach for us," said Wilkins, who added that the prison currently has a needle exchange program — meaning if inmates are using, it's in the privacy of their cells.

The current system sees clean needles handed out to inmates to prevent sharing. The new facility would be a sterile place for people to consume illegal substances under the supervision of health professionals.

Supervised consumption site in federal prison will be 1st in Canada, says union

Malaysia’s government plans to drop criminal penalties for the possession and use of drugs in small quantities to battle addiction, but stressed the move is not akin to legalizing narcotics.

Malaysia has one of the world’s harshest penalties for drug possession. Anyone found with 200 grams (7.05 ounces) of cannabis, 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of opium, 40 grams (1.41 ounces) of cocaine, and 15 grams (0.53 ounces) of heroin or morphine face being charged with drug trafficking, which carries the death penalty.

More than 1,200 prisoners are on death row, most of them convicted of drug crimes.

Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad said in a statement Thursday that the proposal for the decriminalization of drug addiction will be a significant game changer. He said drug addiction is a complex, relapsing medical condition and throwing an addict into jail will not cure them.

“Drug decriminalization will indeed be a critical next step toward achieving a rational drug policy that puts science and public health before punishment and incarceration,” Dzulkefly said. “An addict shall be treated as a patient, not as a criminal, whose addiction is a disease we would like to cure.”

He said the move mustn’t be mistaken as legalizing drugs as drug trafficking will remain a crime.

More than 30 countries have adopted a drug decriminalization policy and research showed that it didn’t increase drug use or drug-related crimes but helped to cut legal cost and improved social outcomes, he said. Officials said the proposal is still in an initial stage and details have not been worked out.

Earlier this week, Home Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said most of the 70,000 prisoners in Malaysia’s jails were drug addicts. With the proposed decriminalization, he said the addicts will be rehabilitated and given treatment, with strong support from family members and the community.

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