The oppression of people of colour in the name of the "war on drugs" has long been associated with mass incarceration and the overuse of stop-and-search.

Of those incarcerated for drug offences in US federal prisons, nearly 80 percent are black or Latino. In state prisons, these groups account for almost 60 percent of the prison population. Cannabis laws in the US also heavily fall on the black community, with African-Americans nearly four times more likely to be arrested for possession of the drug compared to the white population, despite using cannabis at roughly the same rate as the white population.

The issue of race and drugs is not just a problem in the United States. Around the world we see people of colour being subject to police harassment, arrest, imprisonment and even, in some countries, the use of extrajudicial killings – all under the guise of repressing the drugs trade. This is why there is a need for people of colour to come together to discuss the impact of drugs policy, policing and enforcement on themselves and their communities.

The UK needs to take a racial justice approach to drug policy

The world over, communities of people who use drugs experience endemic violence, abuse, stigmatisation, and discrimination. In the last year alone, tens of thousands of people who use drugs have died as a result of prohibition, as a result of criminalisation, and as a result of the social exclusion they suffer for nothing more than their status as drug users. All over the world, people who use drugs are incarcerated and imprisoned; they are incarcerated without due legal process in forced labour camps; they are tortured and executed; they are denied access to healthcare, service provision, and harm reduction; they are harassed and assaulted by the police. This is a time of humanitarian calamities for our communities. Huge numbers of people continue to die from avoidable opiate overdose as a result of using heroin that is contaminated or of unknown purity and strength, due to the unregulated black-market of prohibition. Overdose mortalities are rising exponentially globally. Overdose deaths are now the most prevalent cause of death of under 50s in the USA. Further to this tragic and unnecessary loss of life are the tens of thousands of drug users murdered in state-endorsed killings. Tens of thousands have been killed by the police in numerous contexts in only the last year.

INPUD: International drugs users' day 2018

Mexico’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that an absolute ban on recreational use of marijuana was unconstitutional, effectively leaving it to lawmakers to regulate consumption of the drug.

Announcing it had found in favor of two legal challenges filed against prohibition of recreational marijuana use, Mexico’s top court crossed the threshold needed to create jurisprudence: five similar rulings on the matter.

That creates a precedent other Mexican courts will have to follow.

“This is a historic day,” Fernando Belaunzaran, an advocate of drug reform and member of the opposition leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), said.

The Supreme Court made its first ruling to allow a group of people to grow marijuana for personal use in November 2015.

Mexico Supreme Court says ban on recreational marijuana unconstitutional

GENEVA (1 November 2018) — The UN Human Rights Committee, which monitors implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, today published a new general comment: a comprehensive text providing legal guidance on article 6, the right to life.

“The right to life is the prerequisite for the enjoyment of all other human rights,” explained Yuval Shany, Chair of the Human Rights Committee. “The general comment provides a rich and authoritative statement of the obligations deriving from the right to life, which the Committee defines as ‘the supreme right.’”

The Human Rights Committee, made up of 18 independent experts, is charged with watching over the Covenant by examining the human rights situation in each of the 172 countries that ratified it. Those countries are also referred to as States parties. In addition to reviewing the human rights situation in the States parties, the Committee also examines, discusses and writes guidance on how States parties ought to interpret and apply the Covenant on a practical level. The Human Rights Committee speaks for itself, not for the United Nations.

UN Human Rights Committee publishes new general comment on the ‘right to life’

The Zimbabwe Civil Liberties and Drug Network (ZCLDN) has this year held two capacity building workshops on promoting harm reduction in the country’s prisons. The two workshops held in August and October were attended by senior Zimbabwe Prison and Correctional Services officers and middle management officers.

The capacity building workshop was attended by senior officers from the Harare Metro province based at the Harare Central, Chikurubi Maximum, Women and Farm prisons. ZCLDN director, Wilson Box said the workshops were meant to enhance knowledge of drug and substance use among prison officers and change attitudes and values towards drug use and reduce risk behavior associated with substance use among key populations including drug users. “Prisoners are key populations and they are vulnerable to be infected by diseases. Therefore, there is need for humane treatment of prisoners including those who use drugs and we need to introduce the concept of harm reduction and drug policy reform,” Box said. The prison officers went through the process of implementing and disseminating drug use and harm reduction strategies to inmates

Zimbabwean prison officers undergo training on promoting harm reduction

Ontario’s corrections ministry says it does not track the number of opioid overdoses in its jails, even though prisoners have died and staff are routinely treating inmates for overdoses.

That has observers of the jail system wondering how the province expects to combat a major health crisis and keep people safe without a full statistical picture of the drug overdose problem.

Last May, this newspaper sent a freedom-of-information request to the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, asking how many overdoses there have been in provincial jails, and how many times staff have administered the antidote naloxone.

Five months later, the answer has arrived.

The number of overdoses and cases where naloxone is used are “not maintained in a central databank,” the ministry says in a letter.

As a result, counting up the totals would require “an extensive manual search within each inmate’s file in each provincial jail covering the specified time period.”

We also asked how many drugs seizures there were in jails during two six-month periods in 2017 and 2018. The ministry says it seized suspected drugs 206 times from May to October on 2017, and 111 times in the five months after that (with figures not available for the sixth month).

Even then, it cautions that jail staff can’t really say whether the seized materials are drugs, since this would require testing.

Ministry spokesman Brent Ross sent a statement Monday saying that “the ministry is developing a tracking system for naloxone use, which will act as an indicator of the number of overdoses taking place.” He said he can’t speculate when the tracking system will begin, “but work is ongoing.”

Drugs in jails: Canadian ministry says it doesn't keep track of overdoses and naloxone use

By Heather Knight, San Francisco Cronicle

San Francisco likes to think of itself as on the cutting edge of everything. If it’s smart and compassionate public policy, the thinking goes, it probably started here.

But any quick walk around downtown - with widespread human misery on full display - makes it obvious our city doesn't have all the answers. So who does? When it comes to drug policy, experts from around the world are looking to Portugal.

Portugal? It doesn’t come up in most San Franciscans’ daily conversations, but maybe it should.

On Monday morning, I got the chance to interview Dr. Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, a physician and Portugal’s national drug coordinator. He helped his country craft its drug policies — which are widely praised as both humane and effective.

Neither adjective would be used to describe San Francisco’s drug policy, which seems to revolve around looking the other way as users inject in public, toss their dirty needles on the sidewalks, and become sitting ducks for dealers who flock to the Tenderloin and South of Market, where they find ready markets.

Portugal’s drug policy shows what common-sense approach looks like

In June, the Chinese government hosted a delegation of East African government officials and HIV and drug treatment workers to share their experience of innovative harm reduction techniques being implemented in Yunnan province. The African delegates observed and learned about local approaches to needle and syringe exchange, community-based drug treatment, and take-home methadone treatment.

The take-home methadone programme was initiated by AIDS Care China (ACC, the Alliance Linking Organisation in China), which has advocated effectively to gain government support to scale up this model and for implementing other innovative harm reduction interventions.

Tina Luo, Executive Director of ACC, described her organisation’s approach to advocacy in China, and how it differs from the approach of its counterparts in other countries: “What AIDS Care China does is very innovative. Our approach is to lead from behind, not with protests or direct action, but rather work with the government.”

ACC partners with communities and government to develop and pilot innovative methods that are responsive to both the programmatic needs and political imperatives at play in China. They then use the results from the pilots to gain buy-in from municipal, provincial, and national officials. Once the higher echelons of the government are convinced of the interventions’ effectiveness, they are scaled up, funding is allocated, and policies are changed. The good practices are then promoted within China and abroad to consolidate support throughout the government and in communities.

Promoting harm reduction in China by sharing good practice abroad

Global Drug Survey (GDS) runs the world’s largest drug survey. GDS is comprised of a network of international experts in the field of drugs, health, epidemiology and public policy. GDS uses an encrypted, online survey platform to conduct annual anonymous surveys. Over the last 6 years over 550,000 people have taken part in our surveys.

Now in its 8th year, our latest survey GDS2019 which launches in November 2018, will be translated into 23 languages with partners in over 35 countries. Partnering with global media and news networks from across the globe and working with harm reduction organisations and the entertainment industry, GDS focuses on issues that are often ignored by traditional research organisations and government funded centres.

Because we are independent we are free to explore issues of relevance to people to use drugs and can focus our attention on achieving our mission of making drug use safer regardless of the legal status of the drug. All our research is approved by university ethics committees and to date has led to 50 peer reviewed publications in the last 6 years.

Global Drug Survey 2019

On October 28, repressive drug policy secured a powerful platform in Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest democracy, with the election of far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. He raked in 55 percent of the vote.

Bolsonaro’s military background informs his violent approach to drug policy. The former artillery unit captain has frequently expressed support for police killings of people merely 

 of drug trafficking. This position echoes that of Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, who is currently conducting a large-scale drug war that has killed, without trial, over 12,000 people suspected of drug-law violations.

Bolsonaro’s potential drug policies are ideologically rooted in broader social bigotry. He has a long track record of advocating a military dictatorship, publicly disparaging women, gay people and Afro-Brazilian and indigenous communities. Indigenous leaders in Brazil have expressed fears of genocide, at the prospect of Bolsonaro’s election. Bolsonaro has also suggested that drug use causes people to become gay, and that drug legalization "benefits" traffickers, rapists and hostage takers.” He offers no evidence for these beliefs.

Though some US publications repeat Bolsonaro’s message that he is like Trump, some experts in Brazil warn that, given the context, Bolsonaro may be even more dangerous.

Brazil heading for an even deadlier drug war after election of president Jair Bolsonaro

LONDON (29 OCTOBER) – Bangladesh’s parliament passed a bill on 27 October that expands use of the death penalty for drug offenses in the country. The Narcotics Control Act 2018, an update to the 1990 Act, now makes the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine pills – known as ‘yaba’ – punishable by death.

Crimes related to other illicit substances, such as heroin and cocaine, already face the death penalty in Bangladesh under the 1990 Act. It is unclear if the country has ever executed anyone for drug offenses. Bangladesh’s government launched a brutal crackdown on the drug trade in May, which has resulted in the possible extrajudicial killings of over 200 people, and imprisonment of more than 25,000.

Naomi Burke-Shyne, executive director of Harm Reduction International, said: “There is no evidence that imposing the death penalty for drugs offences has any impact on the drug trade. This punishment is in clear violation of international human rights law, and most often impacts upon the most poor and vulnerable people. Bangladesh’s violent drug war and regressive move to expand the scope of its death penalty laws will only lead to a further breakdown of human rights in the country.”

According to Harm Reduction International’s research, at least 33 countries have the death penalty for drugs in law, though only a handful – such as Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, Indonesia and Singapore – have carried out executions in recent years. This year has seen a marked decline in the number of executions carried out for drug offences, primarily due to a 2017 law reform in Iran.

Burke-Shyne added: “There is a clear trend globally toward ending use of the death penalty for drugs, highlighted by Malaysia’s recent announcement of plans for total abolition. Our research shows that only those countries on the extreme fringe of the international community remain committed to executing people for drugs. Bangladesh’s move bucks the trend toward abolition, and risks placing the country firmly in the category of pariah state.”

Over 4,000 people have been executed for drugs in the past decade, while the UN Office on Drugs and Crime admitted in 2018 that “both the range of drugs and drug markets are expanding and diversifying as never before.”

Harm Reduction International condemns new Bangladesh law expanding use of the death penalty for drugs

For decades poor farmers in countries like Jamaica and Morocco have risked the wrath of governments and gangsters to grow cannabis as a cash crop.

But as Canada becomes the first country in the Group of Seven leading industrial nations to fully legalize marijuana, those countries where the crop has traditionally been grown risk losing out on new legal markets worth billions of dollars.When people think of cannabis production in developing countries, they tend to picture drug cartels and bandits.The truth, says Martin Jelsma of the Transnational Institute (TNI), a Dutch drug-policy research organization, is that most growers are poor farmers, often women, who cultivate marijuana on small holdings in the hills and mountains.

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