As Australian politicians continue to rule out pill testing at music festivals, New Zealand appears to be embracing the controversial practice.

The country's Police Minister Stuart Nash said on Tuesday the idea of independent pill testing tents was "a fantastic idea and should be installed at all our festivals".

"The war on drugs hasn't worked in the past 20 years, so it's time to change to a more compassionate and restorative approach," Mr Nash told New Zealand outlet stuff.co.nz.

"We know young people are taking them, so we have to be pragmatic about it and not bury our head in the sand," he said.

New Zealand embraces pill testing as Australian politicians resist

Thousands of people with misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions will be pardoned in Washington state, Gov. Jay Inslee said.

Washington voters approved legalizing marijuana as a tax revenue measure in 2012. Initiative 502 legalized and regulated the production, possession and distribution of cannabis for people ages 21 and older.

Now, Inslee has announced the Marijuana Justice Initiative, a plan to expedite record clearances for thousands of citizens who were convicted of small-time possession charges before the law came into effect. About 3,500 people could be pardoned by the Marijuana Justice Initiative, according to the governor's office.

Inslee said he hopes the change will alleviate undue burden on those previously convicted.

"We shouldn't be punishing people for something that is no longer illegal in Washington state," Inslee said. "Forgiving these convictions can help lessen their impact and allow people to move on with their lives. It's a small step, but one that moves us in the direction of correcting these injustices."

Washington state to pardon 3,500 drug convictions, governor says

A scientific committee convened by the French government has concluded that it might be “appropriate” to legalise cannabis for therapeutic use in a report made public on Thursday.

The committee, convened by France's ANSM (the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products), stated that it would be “appropriate to authorise the use of therapeutic cannabis […] in certain clinical situations and in cases where [existing] therapies provide insufficient relief or are not well tolerated”.

According to the committee, the law should authorise the use of the plant in cases of severe pain, for certain types of epilepsy, as part of ancillary care for cancer patients, in certain “palliative situations” and for the muscular contractions linked to multiple sclerosis.

The committee ruled out recommending that cannabis be administered by smoking, given the associated health risks.

French study recommends legalising therapeutic cannabis

As 2018 comes to an end like the lives of thousands of our family members, friends and co-workers, it seems there may be hope in the fight against the overdose epidemic. Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, has publicly stated that developing a "safer supply" of regulated opioid drugs is being actively reviewed with Canada's provincial and territorial governments.

What Dr. Tam is referring to leads us to something people who use drugs have been asking for for a long time — "safe supply." It means providing people using contaminated drugs with legal, pharmaceutical-grade alternatives that provide the euphoria that drug consumers seek when using heroin or fentanyl. It means providing people their substance of choice, giving a person back their autonomy and allowing them to use by their preferred method of administration. This eliminates the stigma and inherent dangers of being forced into the black market, and in many cases can produce a domino effect of personal growth and independence. This is an approach grounded firmly in the voices of people who use drugs that keeps their human rights of paramount interest.

This approach is not a treatment for people who use drugs, but a treatment for the toxicity of Canada's drug supply and a century of criminalization. This is harm reduction in its purest form, protection from the drug policy that is lowering life expectancy across Canada.

Safe supplymeans those in the position of making literal life and death decisions, politicians and bureaucrats alike, listen to what drug users need and act on it. It means not seeing us in dire need of rescue or receiving ineffectual treatment, but as humans being systemically poisoned to death at a rate of 11 each day.

Ending the overdose epidemic in Canada starts with a safe supply of drugs

Authorities in Saudi Arabia executed three people for non-violent drug offences on the first day of 2019, highlighting the continuation of brutal drug policies under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Two Egyptian nationals, Ataiwi Suleiman and Sobhi Ouda, were executed for smuggling cannabis, as well as illegal opiates and amphetamines, while Pakistani national Nizar Ahmad Qal Ahmad was executed for trafficking heroin. The legitimacy of their convictions is highly disputable due to the prevalence of corruption, and the known use of torture, among Saudi authorities.

Saudi Arabia’s approach to drugs is based on a strict interpretation of Sharia law, meaning that drug offences are considered to be a crime against God. The Ministry of the Interior cited verse 5:33 of the Quran as justification for the executions: “[those] who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be [...] killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land".

Saudi Arabia traditionally executes people by beheading, although the state occasionally kills prisoners via firing squad.

As a report by Harm Reduction International has shown, Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most prolific executioners, with drug-related executions making up a significant proportion of these deaths. The report warns of the likelihood of abuse and corruption within the Saudi judicial system; "one of the main concerns remains the extraction of ‘confessions’ under torture, duress or coercion, which are often the sole evidence used in death penalty cases".

Saudi Arabia begins 2019 with three executions for drug offences

In 2018 the highest courts in countries across three continents have asserted that state intervention in the private life of their citizens who wish to (grow and) use cannabis is not always justified.

In Georgia, on 30 July, the Constitutional Court decided that punishment of use of cannabis in private without a doctor’s prescription was in breach of Article 12 of the Constitution, which states ‘Everyone has the right to the free development of their personality’. The court found that the aims of protecting public health or public security could not justify state punishment of cannabis use in private. Penalising cultivation and possession for personal use were not contested in this case, and therefore not considered.

In South Africa, on 18 September, 10 judges of the Constitutional Court ruled that it was not reasonable to penalise an adult who cultivates, or uses, or possesses cannabis for personal consumption in private. The laws were incompatible with Article 14 of the Constitution, which states that ‘Everyone has the right to privacy which includes the right not to have […] their possessions seized’.

In Mexico, on 31 October, the Supreme Court gave its fifth judgement since 2015 stating that penalising private cultivation, possession and use of cannabis (and tetrahydrocannabinol) was unconstitutional, against the principle of free development of the personality. Other courts are obliged to follow Supreme Court judgements once five similar rulings have been delivered.

All three courts emphasised that any private use of cannabis should not be in the presence of children. The courts also commented on trends in international developments in cannabis policy and use. The Georgian court noted the increasing application of human rights law in modern legal standards, and the South African court ruled that such state interference is not justified ‘in open and democratic societies’.

In the 1988 UN Convention against trafficking, Article 3(2) states that a country should criminalise possession and cultivation for personal use ‘subject to its constitutional principles’. The court in Mexico stated that it upheld the constitutional principle of free development of personality and considered it was still in line with the Convention.

The European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8(1), states that ‘Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence’, with limits, and the ‘private life’ has been interpreted to include the right to develop one’s own personality.

Cannabis control and the right to privacy

The problem of opium should not be perceived only as a simple, black-and-white, law enforcement problem. To address problems related to opium cultivation, substantial socio-economic development is required to provide meaningful alternatives for farmers, and to ensure that a humanitarian crisis will not occur as the consequence of repressive drug control policies.

This simple question requires a comprehensive and long explanation. First, we need to understand all those factors that push farmers in remote, mountainous villages to rely on income derived from opium-growing to support their families’ basic needs, health care and education for their kids. The cultivation of opium as a cash crop seems to have entered what is present-day Myanmar from the north. Although there is no written record of how and when opium was introduced into the country, it is generally accepted that cultivation spread from the neighboring Chinese provinces. The “Opium Wars” in China (1839 – 1842) not only increased the opium demand in Chinese coastal towns, but also escalated its production in highland territories, such as Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces in China, and the adjacent Shan and Kachin States of Myanmar. By 1898, opium had become “almost the standard medium of exchange in trade” in southern Yunnan and Upper Myanmar. Opium cash-cropping was thus introduced to Myanmar more than a century ago. Since then, the cultivation of opium has become the major livelihood of the peoples who live in the highland areas of eastern and northern Myanmar: i.e. Shan and Kachin States. The inaccessibility of these mountainous regions, combined with extreme weather, make it difficult to grow other cash crops in these areas. However, the scattered fertile spots of limestone soil in these areas are an ideal terrain for poppy cultivation. 

Opium farmers in Myanmar: The lives of producers of prohibited plants

By the Editorial Board of the New York Times

Legislative intrusion into the womb has a long history in the United States, and nowhere is this paternalism more forceful than when illegal drugs are part of the equation. If the country’s war on drugs functions as a system of social control, that control is doubly exercised when a fetus is involved.

Today, with some notable exceptions, the nation is reacting to the opioid epidemic by humanizing people with addictions — depicting them not as hopeless junkies, but as people battling substance use disorders — while describing the crisis as a public health emergency. That depth of sympathy for a group of people who are overwhelmingly white was nowhere to be seen during the 1980s and 90s, when a cheap, smokable form of cocaine known as crack was ravaging black communities across the country.

News organizations shoulder much of the blame for the moral panic that cast mothers with crack addictions as irretrievably depraved and the worst enemies of their children. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and others further demonized black women “addicts” by wrongly reporting that they were giving birth to a generation of neurologically damaged children who were less than fully human and who would bankrupt the schools and social service agencies once they came of age.

Slandering the unborn

By Patpicha Tanakasempipat, Panarat Thepgumpanat

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand approved marijuana for medical use and research on Tuesday, the first legalization of the drug in a region with some of the world’s strictest drug laws.

The junta-appointed parliament in Thailand, a country which until the 1930s had a tradition of using marijuana to relieve pain and fatigue, voted to amend the Narcotic Act of 1979 in an extra parliamentary session handling a rush of bills before the New Year’s holidays.

“This is a New Year’s gift from the National Legislative Assembly to the government and the Thai people,” said Somchai Sawangkarn, chairman of the drafting committee, in a televised parliamentary session.

While countries from Colombia to Canada have legalized marijuana for medical or even recreational use, the drug remains illegal and taboo across much of Southeast Asia, which has some of the world’s harshest punishments for drug law violations.

Marijuana traffickers can be subject to the death penalty in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Thailand approves medical marijuana in New Year's 'gift'

The New Zealand government will hold a referendum on personal cannabis use at the 2020 general election - and it will be binding.

Justice Minister Andrew Little announced Cabinet had made the decision on Monday on his way into caucus on Tuesday morning.

"It will be held at the 2020 general election. The agreement is that it will be binding. There is a bit of detail to still to work through," Little said.

National Leader Simon Bridges suggested that the government was attempting to distract from the general election itself, but said he didn't have a problem with the referendum being binding.

"I'm pretty cynical that you've got a government here that wants to distract from the core issues of a general election," Bridges said.

He suspected two other discussed referendums would also be included on euthanasia and electoral reform, although Little has talked down those prospects.

Bridges would be voting against cannabis legalisation and said he hadn't smoked marijuana at any point in his life.

Little said he would not be using a mooted "citizens assembly" for policy development, something the Green Party had pushed for.

The Green Party negotiated the referendum during 'confidence and supply' talks to form the government.

New Zealand to hold cannabis referendum in 2020

An article published December 7 by the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington, DC think tank, is under fire for promoting the idea that harm reduction approaches—like syringe exchange and naloxone—may encourage “riskier opioid use” and increase rates of opioid-related deaths.

The focus of the criticism is the choice of which articles to cite—and which not to cite—by the authors of the Institution’s “research roundup.” The paper was written by Jennifer L. Doleac, an associate professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, Anita Mukherjee, an assistant professor of Risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Molly Schnell, a postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

“New work by Packham and Wells (2018) suggests that syringe exchange programs—a staple of harm-reduction efforts—reduce HIV rates as intended but unintentionally increase opioid-related mortality by making it easier, cheaper, and safer to use heroin” the authors state.

But as many readers pointed out, the Packham and Wells article is a 

meaning it has not yet been subjected to peer review, nor published in any journal. The authors simultaneously 

cite decades of existing peer-reviewed studies that show syringe exchange programs do 

Public health experts call for retraction of Brookings Institution opioid “research roundup”

Despite nearly a half-century of destructive and ineffective policy initiatives, the “war on drugs” rages on.

In Afghanistan and Colombia, opium poppy and coca cultivation are at some of the highest levels on record. Traffickers and other high-ranking actors in the illicit markets are as wealthy and powerful as ever. Meanwhile, the already-marginalized people who grow these plants—who are mostly peasants and small-scale farmers—continue to be the ones bearing the weight of criminalization.

The situation in the United States is hardly better. According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 72,000 people died because of an overdose in 2017 alone. For perspective, that is a higher death toll than all U.S. military casualties in the Vietnam and Iraq wars, combined. Yet many legislators in places such as Ohio and Maine are still resistant to the kind of public health interventions—such as supervised injection facilities—that have a proven track record of saving lives.

In countries such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, meanwhile, policymakers aren’t merely accepting a failed status quo—they’re actually going backward. Following the example set by the Philippines’ “war on drugs,” some nations are responding to policy failure with little more than vicious and deadly brute force.

Discouraging as this backsliding is, it isn’t the whole story. Positive changes are underway in the most unlikely of places. South Africa recently decriminalized the consumption of cannabis at home. Citizen action and grassroots mobilization in the United Kingdom lead to the government legalizing medical marijuana, and a range of countries, such as Ireland and Ghana, are considering the benefits of the decriminalization of drugs following the documented successes of Portugal’s progressive policies.

As the number of human rights abuses in name of the “war on drugs” have risen, so, too, has a robust network of drug policy reform advocates from around the world, all of whom are ready to challenge these human rights violations and push for better, smarter, and more humane solutions.

Over the last decade, the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program and its grantees have proudly supported these brave individuals and civil society groups. And together, we’ve won significant victories for the reform movement—and for the larger project of reducing the role of criminalization in drug control policy as much as possible while simultaneously advancing public safety and health.

In the face of backlash, in other words, the reform community is stronger than ever. And as we look back over the last 10 years of global drug policies, we can see four crucial areas where great strides have been made which the movement can build on in the years to come.