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.

Talking Policy: César Gaviria on the Peace Treaty and Drug Policy in Colombia

Indonesian President Joko Widodo, following in the bloody footsteps of the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, has issued a “shoot-on-sight” policy for drug suspects. The hardline policy comes amid a sudden media blitz about the drug “state of emergency” in the archipelago nation. Amnesty International says it believes at least 60 drug suspects (including at least eight foreigners) have been killed by Indonesian police so far this year—compared with just 18 in all of 2016.

In late July, Widodo said during a speech in Jakarta: “Be firm, especially to foreign drug dealers who enter the country and resist arrest. Enough, just shoot them. Be merciless.”

Given the massive bloodletting such rhetoric has led to in the Philippines, this sparked outcry from human rights groups.

“This shocking escalation in unlawful killings by the police sounds serious alarm bells,” said Usman Hamid, director of Amnesty International Indonesia. “While Indonesian authorities have a duty to respond to increasing rates of drug use in the country, shooting people on sight is never a solution.”

“It is deeply worrying that foreigners appear to be targeted by the authorities. This could point to a deliberate policy to scapegoat non-Indonesians,” Hamid added.

Indonesia unleashes ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy on drug suspects

This week Penal Reform International and the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) made a joint statement on drugs and human rights at the 36th Session of the Human Rights Council.

The statement highlighted how a range of well-documented human-rights violations – such as increased police violence and mass incarceration of people involved in non-violent, low-level drug crimes – have occurred as a result of the so-called ‘war on drugs’ and drug-related policies. PRI and CELS acknowledged the work of the Human Rights Council and Special Procedures in establishing and documenting the impacts of harsh drug policies on human rights, but stressed that further work is needed to address this issue, and a human rights perspective is needed in the design and implementation of drug policies around the world.

PRI issues joint statement on the impact of the ‘war on drugs’ on human rights

Marijuana busts increased last year, with nearly 600,000 people being arrested on a possession charge—a staggering number that costs taxpayers billions of dollars even as the vast majority of Americans support legalization of the drug.

The new arrest data, released Monday by the FBI, comes at a time when nearly 30 states allow the drug for medical use and eight have legalized it recreationally.

“It’s really shocking in this era that these numbers are so high,” said Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, executive director of Drug Policy Alliance. “It really makes you question why law enforcement is wasting resources and locking people up for personal use of marijuana.”

Marijuana arrests were up last year—and you’re paying billions for it

The new cabinet is to sanction experiments with legal marijuana production which would then be sold in cannabis cafes, RTL news said at the weekend.

Details are still sketchy but sources told the broadcaster between six and 10 local authority areas will be singled out for the experiment, which will lead to council-licenced growers producing marijuana for sale in their own locality. Breda and Eindhoven are among the cities which have already come forward.

While officials turn a blind eye to the sale of small amounts of marijuana for personal use, how the drug ends up in licenced coffee shops remains a grey area. Dozens of local authorities have for years argued for licenced production to remove drugs gangs from the entire chain.

The local authorities association VNG also recommended regulated production in 2015.

The VVD and CDA had always been against experimenting with licenced growing, but last year the VVD’s annual conference voted in favour of experimentation and in February, parliament voted in favour of a D66 plan for official regulation.

Research by Radboud University in 2015 said legalising cannabis production would have benefits for public health and human rights.

New Dutch cabinet to run trials in regulated marijuana production

On October 10th, the World Coalition will highlight the fact that the application of the death penalty is inextricably linked to poverty. Social and economic inequalities affect access to justice for those who are sentenced to death. Defendants disproportionately lack resources (social and economic, but also political power) to defend themselves and will often be disadvantaged because of their social status.

15th world day against the death penalty: poverty

Release has been providing free and confidential specialist advice to the public and campaigning for the reform of drug policy for 50 years. To mark half a century of our work, we will be hosting the Museum of Drug Policy in London in November. As part of this event, we are creating an exhibit to honour those who have died due to a drug overdose.

Drug-related deaths have been steadily increasing in the UK for many years, and reached the highest figure ever recorded in 2016. This public health crisis is causing untold harm to thousands of families across the country, and could be prevented.

Release campaigns for the decriminalisation of drug use because we believe that people who use drugs should not be treated as criminals. We know that criminalising people who use drugs problematically creates stigma that can dissuade them from seeking medical help or treatment, and that denying people basic harm reduction services - like safer consumption rooms - fuels overdoses.

We believe that drug use should be treated as a health matter, and that people who use drugs should be treated with dignity, and without fear or stigma.

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