When night falls on this south-central Colombian town, the hills above light up like a Christmas tree. Clusters of white lights glow in the darkness, marking the crops that have made Corinto synonymous with Colombian marijuana.

Half of all Colombia’s cannabis production is concentrated in the northern part of Cauca province, and 50% of that is grown in Corinto alone. Police estimate 100 hectares of land in the municipality are dedicated to growing weed; local farmers reckon the real number could be twice that.

So when Colombia recently legalised marijuana for medical and scientific purposes, farmers in Corinto figured they had a corner on the cultivation market.

A group of farmers came together in July to create Caucannabis, a cooperative that aims to be a prime supplier to companies hoping to cash in on Colombia’s new legal marijuana business.

“In this region we have been deeply affected by illegal drugs and terrorism. This is an opportunity for us to make a change,” says cooperative leader Héctor Fabio Sánchez, one of 52 members of the cooperative, most of whom have or have had marijuana crops.

Betania Rodríguez, a cooperative member who asked that her real name not be used, says that marijuana and coca – the raw material for cocaine – are just about the only options for farmers to make a living in this isolated area. Her husband tends the bushes next to their home made of thick bamboo and wooden planks, while she works as a day labourer for other growers trimming the buds to prepare them for sale.

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Colombia's clandestine cannabis growers keen to come out of the shadows

Development and peace go together, and this is why the United Nations sees as central to the achievement of sustainable development the drastic reduction of all forms of violence, the promotion of the rule of law, and equal access to justice for all.

This day is especially significant for our country since for the last three months, the country has been wracked by seeming government-sponsored violence and lawlessness, by a war the administration has declared, ostensibly against drugs but which has become a war against poor and marginalized Filipinos. Since the election of President Rodrigo Duterte, over 3000 people, practically all of them alleged drug users from the poor sector of Philippine society, have been subjected to extra-judicial execution either by the police or by vigilante groups. While President Duterte’s subordinates invent ever more complex arguments to exonerate him, he has made little attempt to conceal his preference for the extra-judicial execution of suspected drug dealers and users and his impatience with due process. He has also enthusiastically given the green light to vigilantes to shoot pushers and users. And he has made it very clear that he does not believe in rehabilitation, which is the principal policy of all other governments towards users.

End the killings. Uphold human rights. Defend democracy.

In Canada, leaders from around the world, with the UK at the forefront, stepped up to pledge a total of almost $13bn for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

UK civil society applauds the outstanding global health leadership of the UK government who pledged £1.1billion.

 – Today, in a show of commitment to global health and development, world leaders stepped up to meet the funding target of $13 billion set by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria at its Fifth Replenishment Conference hosted by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Montreal, Canada from September 16-17.

Mike Podmore, Director of STOPAIDS and Alternate Board member of the Developed Country NGO Delegation to the Global Fund Board, speaking from the conference hall in Montreal said “Despite very challenging economic and political contexts, the world has seized this critical moment to demonstrate their unwavering commitment to the fight to end AIDS, TB and malaria.”

“STOPAIDS and the rest of UK civil society are united in giving a standing ovation to the incredible £1.1 billion commitment made by the UK Government, who yet again stepped up to demonstrate what leadership in global health looks like. Post-Brexit, this makes a bold statement that the UK will continue to be a global leader focused on supporting the poor and marginalized around the world.”

The UK government pledge of £1.1 Billion included two new components. The first was that £200 million of the £1.1bn is a match fund with the private sector in which the UK would commit £200 million to match £100 million pledged by the private sector for Malaria. The second component was a performance agreement that DFID has signed with the Global Fund to tie 10% of its pledge to the Global Fund delivering on its commitments. It supports an already highly performing organization to have even better impact.

Speaking about the contribution the $13bn makes to the global disease responses, Mike Podmore said:

“The new funding from the UK and other global leaders will not only allow the Global Fund to continue its important work, but also reaffirms the international community’s commitment to meeting the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, while supporting the right to health for the world’s most vulnerable people.”

This replenishment will help keep us on the right trajectory to reach the targets of ending AIDS, TB and Malaria by 2030 but it is only just enough to do so. $13bn is 80% of what the Global Fund needed to be fully funded and so this can only be the beginning of an ongoing fundraising effort for the global Fund and for the broader global responses to the three diseases

If we don’t continue to increase investment then the epidemics will rebound to hit us twice as hard

Months of extraordinary efforts by the global community came to fruition at the Replenishment Conference, which brought together affected communities, civil society, donor and recipient governments, the private sector, and private foundations to rally support and commitments to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals target to end AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria as epidemics by 2030.

Many governments stepped up to increase their commitment from the previous replenishment, with 20-40% increases from the UK, Japan, Germany, Canada and others.

Since its inception in 2002, The Global Fund has saved 20 million lives through innovative partnerships and programming and has played a crucial role in the treatment and prevention of these three diseases. The US$13 billion pledge will create unique opportunities for millions of the world’s most vulnerable, especially women and girls and empower young people as leaders for social change. It will:

Save up to 8 million lives, for a total of 30-32 million lives saved by 2020

Build on the results achieved and prevent the resurgence of the diseases

Support partners in domestic investment of US$41 billion toward the three diseases

:
In 2013, the UK Government made a commitment of ‘Up to £1bn with a cap of 10% of the final replenishment amount, which meant that the UK gave just over £800 million for the 4th Replenishment.


 is a network of 70 UK-based international NGOs that work on the global HIV response. STOPAIDS convenes UK civil society organisations across the three diseases who have been working for the full replenishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.


is the Alternate Board Member of the Developed Country NGO Delegation to the Board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria and is currently at the Global Fund Replenishment Conference in Montreal.


Mike Podmore
Director of STOPAIDS
Tel: 0044 7734087950
Email: mike@stopaids.org.uk

   The world rallies to “End It. For Good.” 

The GIZ Global Partnership on Drug Policies and Development (GPDPD) and the LSE IDEAS International Drug Policy Project (IDPP) are pleased to announce a pilot for a new 'Innovation Lab on Drug Policies and Human Development'.

“this pilot, the first of its kind globally, represents a truly unique collaboration between a development agency and one of the world’s leading university-affiliated think tanks. It will enable the design of innovative drug-sensitive development policies through ongoing discussions with governments, international organisations and development bodies and ultimately to facilitate policy implementation.”

The immediate objective of the Innovation Lab pilot is to translate the April 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) outcome document and recent international debates into smart drugs-related development policies in affected countries.

The GIZ Global Partnership on Drug Policies and Development (GPDPD) is implemented on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and under the political auspices of the Federal Drug Commissioner of the Federal Government of Germany. It seeks to promote a development and health oriented approach to drug policy internationally.

LSD IDEAS and GIZ GPDPD launch pilot 'Innovation lab on drug policies and human development'

The Swedish government has launched an investigation on how to prevent drug-related deaths. Last month, Health Minister Gabriel Wikström announced that he wants needle exchange programmes to be managed by county councils instead of councils. County councils cover larger areas in the country. The report will be delivered in April next year.

"Needle exchange programmes are an important measure towards disease control, which we know from Swedish, as well as international, experiences. The aim of these propositions is to make needle exchange programmes available all over the country. This will give us new opportunities to meet groups that have previously been difficult to get hold of," Wikström said in a press release.

For decades, a majority of Swedish political parties have claimed that harm reduction programmes such as needle exchange programmes and drug consumption rooms "encourage" drug use rather than do good. But according to the 2016 annual report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Sweden has the second highest death rate from drug use in Europe. Only Estonia has higher drug-related deaths per capita. According to Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare, 48 percent of drug-related deaths in 2014 were caused by an overdose.

In November last year, UN's Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Flavia Pansieri, criticised Sweden's views on drugs. She told public broadcaster SVT that she was "surprised to see that [Sweden] lags behind a number of other countries in terms of its policies on drugs."

Stockholm's needle exchange programme has been available since 2012. The programmes have since become available at several places including Malmö, Jönköping, and Kalmar. And according to the Public Health Agency of Sweden, they're actually working. "For the individual, these efforts can improve the chances to a life without serious or deadly infectious disease. For society as a whole it all comes down to improving the possibilities of equal health," Johan Carlson, director general of the Public Health Agency said in a statement.

Sweden's battle against drugs and prejudice

While we have seen a surge in new psychoactive substances in recent years, there has also been a rediscovery in the West of old herbal narcotics that have traditionally been used in different parts of the world. One example is khat, the leaves of which are chewed for a mild stimulant effect in some societies in the Horn of Africa – it was banned in the UK in 2014. Another plant to come to the attention of the authorities is kratom, a tropical tree from Southeast Asia that has just been banned by the US Drug Enforcement Agency.

) is a tropical tree that grows between four and 16 metres high and is indigenous to Southeast Asia, the Philippines and New Guinea. Like coca leaves in the central Andes, the chopped fresh or dried leaves of the kratom tree have been chewed for centuries or made into tea to combat fatigue.

The DEA’s ban places kratom as a schedule 1 controlled substance, alongside drugs like cannabis, heroin, MDMA (ecstasy) and LSD. It joins an ever-expanding list of psychoactive drugs deemed to have “no currently accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse”. There has been quite an uproar about this among kratom users, although both the arguments for and against lack consistent evidence.

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Banning kratom won’t stop users or solve the drugs health crisis – so why continue this losing war?

The NGO Delegation to the Programme Coordinating Board of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS Programme Coordinating Board (UNAIDS PCB) has 

The NGO Delegation is now recruiting for:

One Latin America and the Caribbean Delegate 

Applications from people living with HIV, key populations, women and young people are particularly encouraged.

The NGO Delegation's terms of reference and mission/vision/principles, as well as the call for nominations of NGO delegates are attached to this email.

 The UNAIDS PCB is the governing body on all programming issues concerning policy, strategy, finance, monitoring and evaluation of UNAIDS. It is composed of 22 Member States, 11 Cosponsors, and an 

 of 10 civil society representatives, 2 per UN region. For more information about the UNAIDS PCB, please visit this 

The NGO Delegation is integral to the effective inclusion of community voices, representing the perspectives of civil society, including people living with HIV, within UNAIDS programs and policies. It is a unique opportunity for committed activists and advocates to make a difference in HIV and AIDS policy implementation globally and in their regions. UNAIDS was the first UN program to have formal civil society representation on its governing body through the NGO Delegation. For more information about the NGO Delegation, please visit this 

NGO Delegation to the UNAIDS PCB recruits three delegates

This short film, narrated by Jay Z (Shawn Carter) and featuring the artwork of Molly Crabapple, is part history lesson about the war on drugs and part vision statement. As Ms. Crabapple’s haunting images flash by, the film takes us from the Nixon administration and the Rockefeller drug laws — the draconian 1973 statutes enacted in New York that exploded the state’s prison population and ushered in a period of similar sentencing schemes for other states — through the extraordinary growth in our nation’s prison population to the emerging aboveground marijuana market of today. We learn how African-Americans can make up around 13 percent of the United States population — yet 

 of those arrested for drug law violations, even though they use and sell drugs at the same rate as whites.

The project came about when, last year, Dream Hampton, the filmmaker and a co-author of Jay Z’s book “Decoded,” approached the Drug Policy Alliance about collaborating with Revolve Impact, the social impact agency she works with. Revolve Impact connects artists and influencers to community organizers, and with marijuana legalization taking hold across the nation — and about to be considered in her own state, California — Ms. Hampton wanted to tackle the contradiction raised by Michelle Alexander, the author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” in 2014: Why were white men poised to get rich doing the very same thing that African-American boys and men had long been going to prison for? Ms. Hampton proposed creating an animated video that the D.P.A. would produce about the impact of the drug war in African-American communities.

Jay Z: ‘The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail’

Prisoners convicted of drug offences in Belarus are being forced to wear identifying badges and endure harsh conditions as part of the government’s increasingly repressive drug policy.

Over the past two years, the Belarusian government has ramped up its punitive approach towards people who commit drug offences. The intensification has been spearheaded by the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, a self-described authoritarian who has ruled the country since 1994, and is commonly referred to as “Europe’s last dictator”.

Lukashenko specifically advocates the systemic marginalisation of people who commit drug offences. In 2014, he demanded that people incarcerated for drug offences be segregated from other prisoners, and kept in “intolerable imprisonment conditions”. Indeed, later that year, the state began allocating specific prisons for “drug addicts” to be sent to, according to 

In April 2016, Siarhei Daroshka, the country’s interior minister, declared that people imprisoned for drug offences must face harsher “moral and living conditions” than people incarcerated for any other crimes.

Belarus Drug Offenders Singled Out in “Intolerable Prison Conditions”

The Russian government has a notoriously punitive attitude towards drugs. Substitution treatments are banned and the only option for recovering addicts is to go cold turkey. But three drug users who have struggled for years with their addiction and have become life-threateningly ill as a result, claim that this policy is an abuse of their human rights, and are taking the Russian state to court.

Though opioid substitution therapy (OST) – such as methadone or buprenorphine which are commonly used to treat heroin addiction in the UK – is banned in Russia, these replacement therapies are globally recognised as one of the most effective treatments of opioid addiction. Russian activists Alexey Kurmanayevskiy, Irina Abdyusheva Teplinskaya and Ivan Anoshkin have exhausted all available treatments in Russia without success, and over the years of battling with their addictions, have contracted HIV (the UN estimates that half of Russia’s new HIV cases last year were injecting drug users). They believe that being denied this treatment violates international human rights law (pdf) – in particular, the prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment (article 3) and discrimination (article 14).

In an attempt to gain access to what they see as vital and potentially life-saving healthcare, Kurmanayevskiy, Teplinskaya and Anoshkin have attempted to use Russia’s domestic legal system without success. After four years of litigation and evidence collection, they have submitted their applications to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, seeking a judgment against the legal prohibition of OST in Russia.

How three drug users took on the might of the Russian state

This week, the White House issued its yearly report on the nations on the front lines of the war on drugs. Predictably, it listed Bolivia as one of three countries that “failed demonstrably” to do enough to combat the drug trade. President Evo Morales of Bolivia responded, as he does each year, with defiance.

“The world knows that our counternarcotics model is better without the Americans,” Mr. Morales said during an event on Tuesday, alluding to his expulsion of American drug enforcement agents in 2008.

The yearly condemnation of Bolivia has been futile. So far, that country’s experience with its drug strategy is showing more promise than Washington’s forced-eradication model.

Over the past decade, the Bolivian government has sought to gradually curb the cultivation of coca — the plant processed to make cocaine — by establishing a tightly regulated market for its consumption as a nonnarcotic stimulant. (Bolivians have been chewing coca leaf and using it to make tea for generations.) The government eradicates unauthorized crops after negotiating with, and finding alternatives for, growers.

How Bolivia fights the drug scourge

ECOWAS Ministers of Justice and Interior have on the 5th of September 2016, adopted the ECOWAS Drug Action Plan to Address Illicit Drug Trafficking and Organized Crimes in the West Africa.

The 15-Member State’ Ministers including the Minister of Justice of Mauritania, have by this action at the end of their ministerial meeting, given more Philip to the resolve to chart a holistic course that is consistent with the collective wish of the ECOWAS Heads of State and Government, stakeholders and the people of West Africa to rid the region of the menace of drug trafficking and all forms of organised crimes.

By adopting the Action Plan, ECOWAS Commission, Member States, and all her partners will also now have a common strategic framework to guide their work in countering illicit drug trafficking, organized crimes and drug abuse in the region.

The Ministerial meeting was preceded by the meeting of Drug Demand Reduction, Law Enforcement and Legal/Judicial Cooperation from ECOWAS Member States and Mauritania who reviewed, validated and recommended for approval by the Ministers, of the ECOWAS Drug Action Plan 2016-2020. The recommendation was contained in the 9-page Final Report submitted to Minsters for their consideration.

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