The United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna is holding a series of intersessional meetings this autumn to discuss how governments are implementing the many policy tasks they set themselves in the Outcome Document (OD) of the 2016 United Nations General Special Session (UNGASS) on the World Drug Problem.

Each intersessional focuses on one of the OD’s seven chapters. The Vienna Non-governmental Organisations Committee on Drugs invited David to serve as an expert panellist for Chapter 2, “Ensuring the availability and access to controlled substances exclusively for medical and scientific purposes, while preventing diversion.” UN member states and organisations (such as the World Health Organization, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), as well as other civil society organisations) reported on progress and challenges in implementation of the recommendations contained in that chapter.

David spoke in his capacity as an EAPC Board Member and representative on the European Union Civil Society Forum on Drugs. Katherine contributed in her capacity as IAHPC Advocacy Officer while other civil society interventions, in the form of video presentations, came from Dr Sunita Panta, from the Nepal Military Hospital in Kathmandu, Dr Sami Alsirafy from the Palliative Medicine Unit at Cairo University, Egypt, and Busi Nkosi from the International Children’s Palliative Care Network.

Improving access to controlled essential medicines – report from the commission on narcotic drugs meeting

For over half a century, various activist groups in the UK have launched campaigns to legalise cannabis, but with little success. One of the most effective arguments used by those opposed to reform is the absence of any existing regulated legal markets for selling cannabis. This is no longer the case. Over the past five years, eight US states (including California) have voted to legalise cannabis. Next July, Canada will become the first country to legislate with a general election mandate to do so.

So this issue will inevitably become more salient in the years to come. What is already clear is that reform takes place within particular social and cultural contexts. Local conditions dictate its priorities.

Here in the UK, the debate around cannabis cannot ignore the issue of mental health. For years, there has been conjecture in this area as the potency of cannabis, its addictiveness, the impact it has on young people, its links with psychosis, and the best way in which to address its illicit market have all been debated at length.

This report provides a concise and compelling new account of the deleterious consequences of leaving cannabis in the hands of the black market. Drawing on insights from world class academics and original research, it was commissioned to stimulate a better informed and more nuanced public debate.

Street lottery: cannabis potency and mental health

Drug laws should be devolved to Scotland so the government in Holyrood can make moves towards decriminalisation, SNP party delegates have said.

Members of the party, which dominates north of the border, have voted for a motion at their conference in Glasgow for a radical shake-up in policy.

The motion calls for drug law powers to be passed to Edinburgh so the Scottish Parliament can consider “all options for harm reduction, including drug declassifcation, decriminalisation and regulation”.

It does not set out any policy on any specific drug.

It says, however, that power-holders should conduct a “comprehensive review of policy” which sees “substance misuse as a public health issue rather than a criminal matter” and works towards “lifting the stigma associated with addiction; remove barriers between police and communities and allow policy to reflect the values of our progressive society.”

Scotland should have the power to decriminalise drugs, Says SNP

So often in Australia, we are astounded to discover that good policy has been subverted by political mismanagement. Think NBN, gas supply, the marriage plebiscite and … medicinal cannabis.

A resounding 85 per cent of Australians support legislation permitting the use of cannabis for medical purposes.

And medical specialists can indeed apply to the Therapeutic Goods Administration to prescribe cannabis-based products to their patients under the Special Access and Authorised Prescriber schemes.

However, the most recent figures show that only 153 patients nationwide have been authorised to receive medicinal cannabis products under the Special Access Scheme. And only about 30 Australian doctors have been granted Authorised Prescriber status, prescribing cannabis products to a further 101 patients.

Why so few Australians are using medicinal cannabis on prescription

More than 25 million people, including 2.5 million children, die in agony every year around the world, for want of morphine or other palliative care, according to a major investigation.

Poor people cannot get pain relief in many countries of the world because their needs are overlooked or the authorities are so worried about the potential illicit use of addictive opioids that they will not allow their importation.

“Staring into this access abyss, one sees the depth of extreme suffering in the cruel face of poverty and inequity,” says a special report from a commission set up by the Lancet medical journal.

More than 25 million people dying in agony without morphine every year

The Australian Capital Territory Liberal party has taken credit for blocking a pioneering pill-testing trial at an Australian music festival after organisers announced it will no longer go ahead.

On Friday ACT Liberals congratulated the shadow attorney general, Jeremy Hanson, for “intervening” to block a pill-testing trial at the Spilt Milk festival in Canberra.

The trial had been approved by the ACT Labor Greens coalition government in September. At the time the health minister, Meegan Fitzharris, had said pill testing would “keep people safe”.

But on Thursday one of the festival organisers told ABC radio the trial would no longer go ahead because the group contracted to conduct the trial, Safety Testing Advisory Service at Festivals and Events, or STA-Safe, a consortium of pill-testing advocates, had not provided the relevant “documentation”.

Australia's first pill-testing trial cancelled – and ACT Liberals take credit

Ghana is poised to become the first African country, and the first country outside of Europe and the Americas, to decriminalise the personal possession and use of all illegal drugs.

Ghana’s Narcotics Control Commission Bill, 2017 (the ‘Narcotics Bill’), which will repeal and replace existing drug offences, is expected to be passed later this year. The proposed legislation seeks to address drug use as a ‘public health issue’.

Implementing it would mark a significant departure from Ghana’s previous drugs policy, which, like those in other West African countries and around the world, wielded punitive sentencing as a key weapon in a ‘war on drugs’. Currently all drug offences in Ghana, including purchase and personal use, are punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence of five years’ imprisonment. This rises to 10 years for possession.

Ghana’s bold step away from the ‘war on drugs’

With the support of the Global Partnership on Drug Policies and Development (GPDPD), a project implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, a team of three Mainline researchers conduct a study into effective harm reduction interventions for stimulant users. The study includes a detailed description of eight best practices in different world regions.

As most harm reduction interventions are funded under the umbrella of HIV, most of the research and project funding also goes to analyse the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS strategies. This means that both programmes and the evidence focus on those drug users who inject their drug and they leave out those who smoke, snort or swallow. The people who can benefit from harm reduction interventions are most often injecting opioid users, and harm reduction often becomes associated with heroin use alone. At the same time, people using stimulants may face somewhat different problems, regarding health as well as psychosocial and legal circumstances. As this leaves many marginalised stimulant users underserviced, there is a need for the harm reduction field to broaden the scope and to structurally include stimulant users.

Harm reduction for stimulant users: a Mainline-GIZ study

About 5,000 people have been arrested for drug use and trafficking since July in the second phase of an ongoing controversial drug crackdown, bringing the total number of arrestees this year to almost 13,700 people.

According to the Interior Ministry, 13,691 people were arrested in 6,205 cases over the past nine months – more than 7,200 of them suspected traffickers, and almost 6,500 alleged users. More than 8,000 people were arrested in the first half of the year. The Anti-Drug Department also confiscated 68 cars, 1,624 motorbikes, 16 guns and more than 153kg of drugs, including methamphetamine, heroin, ketamine, cocaine and marijuana.

Rhona Smith, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia, last Wednesday warned of overcrowding in the Kingdom’s already-packed prisons. “This year the situation has deteriorated to dangerous levels,” she said.

Thousands more drug arrests in Cambodia

Washington, DC — On October 5, rural farmers gathered in Tumaco, Nariño department to protest forced eradication of coca crops by the security forces, with crowd size estimates ranging from 200 to more than a thousand. These farmers protested because the government refused to address local conflicts that affect how to best to implement the national crop substitution program (

Programa Nacional de Sustitución de Cultivos

, PNIS). Rather than address these communities’ concerns so that an effective crop substitution program be implemented, the security forces fired indiscriminately on the protestors, resulting in at least eight reported murders and over fifty wounded. The security forces claim that they were responding to an attack initiated by FARC dissidents. However, reports and witness testimony provided to the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) from those on the ground indicate that this was not the case. WOLA calls on the U.S. government to immediately condemn this massacre and urges Colombian authorities to investigate and sanction those responsible for these abuses.

We also urge U.S. officials to tone down the rhetoric and offer constructive solutions to the coca issue. President Trump’s recent threats to decertify Colombia on account of increased coca cultivation put pressure on Colombia to show results at any cost. Fifty years of internal armed conflict and abuses committed during Plan Colombia all show that when the U.S. government gives Colombia a blank check to use force to solve security and criminal problems, this leads to increased abuses against civilians. Over the years, U.S. officials have learned that this is not the best way to affect change in Colombia. Past experience has also shown that while forced coca eradication may yield short-term results, it is ineffective in the medium to long-term if farmers are not provided with alternative sources of income. Rather than extol unhelpful rhetoric on the drug issue, U.S. officials should focus on providing Colombia with the funding and tools it needs to implement the peace accord in coca-growing areas. Building infrastructure, strengthening governmental institutions, addressing corruption, and creating economic opportunities for rural farmers will take time. However, this approach will have better results in the long run.

The most complicated part of implementing the peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is the drug chapter. The FARC agreed to stop engaging in the drug trade and help with reducing coca cultivation, in return for the Colombian government addressing the socio-economic problems that drive rural farmers to grow coca. Creating sustainable and lucrative economies for rural farmers in these remote areas of the country—where there is little infrastructure to get goods to markets, and poor state presence (if any at all) in terms of education, health, and other services—is hard. Coca production and illicit economies do not blossom in a vacuum. They develop when there is poverty, marginalization, extreme socio-economic conditions, and a lack of effective state response to communities’ needs and problems. Frequently, it is the most marginalized, poor, rural, and vulnerable communities where coca is grown due to lack of other economic options.

Colombia must immediately investigate, punish those responsible for killing protesters in coca-growing region

Canada's opioid epidemic shows no signs of abating, and a sense of urgency is clearly gripping law enforcement.

In recent months, police have begun laying manslaughter charges against drug dealers for allegedly selling fatal doses of fentanyl and other dangerous synthetic opiates.

It's happened in Alberta and Ontario, and is forecast to become more common. The prosecutions are a signal that Crown attorneys and police see the need to act purposefully in the face of a crisis that will cost more than 3,000 lives this year.

But while the impulse is understandable, it doesn't equate to being the best response.

Stiff trafficking penalties already exist and clearly aren't working – an outcome supported by research. One summary of the findings by experts at the University of Toronto in 2014 concluded that "crime is not deterred, generally, by harsher sentences."

In contrast, harm-reduction strategies such as legalization, opiate substitution (or prescription) and supervised injection have proven their effectiveness in places like Portugal and Switzerland.

Globe editorial: To solve the opioid crisis, stick to harm reduction

César Gaviria governed Colombia from 1990-1994, during which time he fought Pablo Escobar’s 

 drug cartel and oversaw the civil war between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Recently, the Colombian government signed a landmark peace deal with the FARC to put an end to the 53-year-old war. Gaviria talked with 

 about the implications of the deal, and how to minimize violence while conducting a war on drugs.

Some have argued that the FARC peace deal offers too much leniency to former rebels—for example, offering reduced sentences in exchange for confessions, and not prosecuting some members at all. Do you think the agreement ensures justice for the people of Colombia?

It’s the first time that a peace treaty has balanced justice and human rights in accordance with the Rome Statute, which codified genocide and crimes against humanity as international crimes. Certain types of crimes, such as those against humanity, will be punished, so it is not a question of too much leniency. Of course, it would have been better if things could have been handled by the justice system, but the FARC have been around since 1962 and the civil war had been occurring for nearly 60 years. The fighting could have gone on for another 20 to 30 years but Colombians wanted to find the right balance between punishing these crimes and respecting the Rome Statute. There is no doubt that the crimes committed against humanity will be punished. What is still not clear though, is how that punishment will be carried out—it may not necessarily mean sending people to jail.

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