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.

Malaysia plans to decriminalize drug use to battle addiction

A government-tasked commission has advised France to legalise cannabis to “take back control” of the black market, calling prohibition an abject “failure”.

In potentially explosive conclusions, two experts for the economic analysis council, or CAE, an influential advisory body to the prime minister, urged the government to end a blanket ban of the recreational drug.

In their report released on Thursday entitled “Cannabis: how to take back control”, the two CEA-mandated economists wrote: “The system of prohibition promised by France for the past 50 years has been a failure.”

State-controlled cannabis stores would be the best way to control drug trafficking and “restrict access” to younger would-be users, they argued.

By their calculations, cannabis could bring up to €2.8 billion (£2.5bn) per year into state coffers and create up to 57,000 jobs.

France urged by government experts to legalise cannabis and 'take back control' of black market

The 11th state to defy federal marijuana prohibition ranks first in social equity ideas to actually address the War on Drugs.

Illinois will forever be 11th on the list of American states to legalize marijuana. But it’s got a good shot at the number one spot on any list of inclusive, socially therapeutic cannabis industries.

The law Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) signed Tuesday legalizing and regulating recreational marijuana for adults borrows much of its technical, scientific, and economic detail from states like Colorado and Washington, where lawmakers essentially wrote the pioneering legislative texts which largely eschewed decades of cannabis policy rooted in “Reefer Madness” for the first time.

Illinois lawmakers, however, have cut a new trail on policy questions that have bedeviled legalization-minded legislators elsewhere. Low-income communities of color that have borne disproportionate shares of the social and fiscal costs of the War on Drugs will have a dramatic leg up in the race for dispensary and grow-shop licenses in Illinois ahead of the law’s primary implementation date of January 1, 2020.

Those same communities will be first in line for direct investment from the new tax revenues cannabis will generate for Illinois. A full 25 percent of that new money is required to be set aside for the new “Restore, Reinvest, and Renew Program,” colloquially known as “R3.”

The R3 program’s community reinvestments are only one part of what state Rep. Jehan Gordon-Booth (D) termed the bill’s “reparations.” The high economic barriers to entry to legal cannabis sales around the country have already created an industry where profits are largely extracted by people already rich enough to be professional investors.

“What we are doing here is about reparations,” Gordon-Booth said. “After 40 years of treating entire communities like criminals, here comes this multibillion-dollar industry, and guess what? Black and brown people have been put at the very center of this policy in a way that no other state has ever done.”

The law will wipe out arrest records for possession of small amounts of cannabis semi-automatically. State police officials have until the end of the calendar year to gather a list of everyone arrested for having less than an ounce of pot on them going back to 2013. Those arrests will be automatically expunged at year end, and the agency will then set about gathering such records from earlier years.

Illinois’ cannabis bill is first to incorporate reparations

Study looked at the period after public health emergency declared in B.C., when 2,177 people died.

The overdose crisis has killed an astonishing number of people across Canada, and British Columbia has been hit especially hard. A new study published Wednesday in the journal, Addiction, found that without harm reduction efforts, the death toll would have been more than twice as horrific.

Researchers looked at nearly two years of data, beginning when the public health emergency was declared in B.C. in April 2016 and ending in December 2017.

According to the study led by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), there were 2,177 people killed by overdose in the province in that time.

But more than 3,000 deaths were prevented.

"It was one of these things that — you almost had to go back and check the numbers to make sure they were correct — that they actually were that high," said Mike Irvine, a post-doctoral fellow at BCCDC who works with the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions and the Mathematics Institute at the University of British Columbia.

Irvine said the impact of widely distributed take-home naloxone kits was the most significant, in terms of lives saved.

"In 2017, there were 60,000 kits that had been distributed, so this is paying tribute, really, to how much that program had ramped up and rolled out across the whole province," he said.

Overdose crisis death toll in Canada would be more than double without harm reduction, study says

The China Drug, Crime and Detention Database Project is the first open access quantitative database focused on Chinese government drug policy and the country's justice system. It is an open access resource for researchers, advocates, journalists and organisations engaged in the study of drug policy, criminal justice, policing and detention in China.

Spanning 500+ categories and drawing on data from more than 200 publicly available sources, the database presents quantitative data on a range of topics, including: illicit drug use; drug harm reduction programs; criminal and administrative offenses; criminal and extrajudicial detention; judicial sentencing; and policing.

As an open access resource, the China Drug, Crime and Detention Database Project addresses a common issue faced by researchers: access to data. Today more quantitative data on drugs, crime and judicial sentencing in China are available than ever before. Unfortunately, government data are often scattered across numerous sources, with indicators appearing in earlier ministerial reports but disappearing from later editions. Other figures only appear in news reports or scholarly works. Although these sources are public, collating data drawn from them requires considerable time and effort. By providing a centralised repository for these data, the China Drug, Crime and Detention Database Project will address these problems.

Data visualisations will be produced in the future, and research findings will be released through 

The Journal of Illicit Economies and Development

.

The database is the creation Mr. Emile Dirks, a research associate at the London School of Economics and Political Science's International Drug Policy Unit and a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.

The China drug, crime and detention database

Naomi Burke-Shyne became executive director of Harm Reduction International in September 2018 – a few months before she had to oversee the organising of the largest harm reduction conference on earth. Read our interview below!

I am sure you have attended many harm reduction conferences before but this was the first one you attended as the lead organiser. How was this experience for you? Any lessons learnt?

: The conference (HR19) was a reminder of how inspiring and resilient the global movements for harm reduction, human rights, and drug policy reform are. It is unique to be able to bring together community leaders, healthcare providers, scientists, human rights lawyers, researchers, and activists from around the world.
Our community faces ongoing – and significant – opposition to their everyday work for rights-based, health-based approaches to drug use. The conference is a useful space to remind us of both the pockets of success and the urgency of our work.
We learned plenty of lessons at HR19, and will always strive to improve and ensure the Harm Reduction International Conference is impactful for attendees and local advocacy. Our conference partner this year, APDES, was successful in securing increased national and local political support for harm reduction, particularly with the Mayor of Porto committing in his opening ceremony speech to opening a drug consumption room.
Outside of the domestic, the Portuguese government announced an increase in their pledge to the Global Fund at HR19. We hope that future conferences are able to provide moments like this and bring together years of hard work for harm reduction.

 a decade of growth, funding and support for harm reduction seems to be stagnating or declining in most parts of the world. Why do you think people with power still resist harm reduction so much?

I was shocked by our research findings last year, that there is a nearly 90% gap in funding for harm reduction in low- and middle-income countries. The fact that this funding has stagnated over the past decade, when there is overwhelming evidence of the public health and societal benefits of investing in harm reduction, is nothing short of disgraceful.
I can only hypothesise why political leaders remain resistant to supporting health and social services for people who use drugs, and it certainly varies between countries. An overarching reason is likely to be that harm reduction is still incorrectly seen as controversial. Few leaders are willing to be bold and admit past policy failures, even when faced with evidence that investing in harm reduction would bring innumerable benefits to their communities. It remains politically expedient to continue demonising and criminalising people who use drugs.

“It is politically expedient to demonise drug users” – An interview with Naomi Burke-Shyne

Billions are spent by governments to curb the spread of drugs around the world.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP) report, illegal drugs including cocaine, heroin and cannabis should be reclassified to reflect a scientific assessment of harm.

The GCDP has condemned the way in which drugs are scheduled is criminalising the poor.

To discuss the report, Bongani Bingwa chats to United Nations Vienna NGO Committee on Narcotic Drugs deputy-secretary Shaun Shelly.

"The classification of illegal drugs is based on politics"

LONDON [27 JUNE 2019] – Harm Reduction International and almost 120 human rights organisations from around the world – including Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists – published open letters today calling on the United Nations’ major drug control bodies to intervene and help stop Sri Lanka’s move to resume executions after 43 years.

President Maithripala Sirisena signed the execution warrants this week for four people convicted of drug-related offences.

The letters – sent to the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) and UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) – underscore that the death penalty for drug offences violates international human rights law. The signatories state that “Remaining silent as Sri Lanka puts an end to a 43-year de facto moratorium on executions would strike a blow to the INCB’s and UNODC’s commitments to human rights compliance as a core principle of international drug policy.”

Giada Girelli, human rights analyst at Harm Reduction International, said: “There is simply no evidence that the death penalty is an effective deterrent against the drug trade. President Sirisena’s move is a gross violation of human rights – UN bodies must urge authorities in Sri Lanka to reverse this and work to consign the death penalty to the history books.”

Harm Reduction International’s latest research shows that global executions for drug offences fell by almost 90% from 2015-18, in large part because of judicial reforms in Iran. Of the 35 countries that retain the death penalty for drug offences, only four carried out executions in 2018 (China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Singapore).

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