Canada's health minister said Thursday that the government has formed a special task force to propose ways to regulate sales of recreational marijuana ahead of legalization in 2017.

The group includes a former attorney general of Canada, an expert in pain management and cannabis therapeutics, a drug policy researcher, a law professor and a handful of ex-cops, said Health Minister Jane Philpott.

The panel will examine the production and testing of the drug, distribution and marketing, and "look at the experience of other jurisdictions" that have lifted bans on the recreational pot use, Philpott said.

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

Canada to unveil recreational marijuana rules in November

IDPC will hold its Annual General Meeting of its Board of Directors in the UK from the 6th to 8th July. Following a call for new Board members in May and a difficult selection process due to the high number of excellent applications, four individuals have been invited to the July meeting with the expectation that they will join the Board of IDPC. The Board will also appoint a new Chair and Vice Chair at the AGM. An announcement with full details of all Board changes will be released following the end of the Board meeting this week.

IDPC to hold Annual General Meeting of Board of Directors

A substance abuse group is to explore the case for opening an injecting facility for drug users in Glasgow.

The Glasgow City Alcohol and Drug Partnership said about 500 vulnerable drug users injected in public places.

It said these people were responsible for the majority of discarded needles which posed a health risk and also contributed to public order problems.

The partnership will examine if an injecting area, like those in Europe, Canada and Australia, could help here.

If such a facility was approved, it would be the first of its kind in the UK.

The Glasgow City Alcohol and Drug Partnership (ADP) is a multi-agency group tasked by the Scottish government with tackling alcohol and drug issues.

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

Case examined for drug injecting area in Glasgow city centre

Turkey’s move from illicit to licit opium production for medicinal use demonstrates that an orderly transition, with a range of benefits for the producer country, is possible in places with the institutional capacity to deliver the right regulatory framework.

It provides a useful example of the practical steps involved in transitioning, and how such changes can impact on the global illicit trade, even while wider global prohibitions remain in place alongside steady or rising demand.

However, Turkey also demonstrates that moving opium production from the illicit market to the licit medical use market alone will not reduce overall global illicit production. The economic dynamics of the illicit trade mean supply will expand in other countries to meet continuing illicit demand. This is true of all ‘silver bullet fantasy’,1poppy-for-medicine proposals in places such as Afghanistan, Guatemala and Mexico, that are aimed at eliminating global illicit opium production.

Turkey’s opium trade: successfully transitioning from illicit production to a legally regulated market

California will vote on whether to legalise marijuana for recreational purposes on 8 November, after an initiative backing the measure secured the 402,000 valid signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. The California Secretary of State’s office announced on Tuesday that voters could now decide whether to approve the creation of the world’s largest legal marijuana market.

If passed, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (AUMA) would permit California adults aged 21 or over to possess and carry up to an ounce of marijuana, and to grow up to six cannabis plants for personal use. It would create the framework for a distribution and retail market, managed by a new Bureau of Marijuana Control, with a 15 per cent tax on all cannabis product sales.

Jason Kinney, a spokesman for the initiative, said the news marked “a fresh start for California,” adding that AUMA would “replace the costly, harmful and ineffective system of prohibition with a safe, legal and responsible adult-use marijuana system that gets it right and completely pays for itself.”

California to vote on legalising marijuana for recreational purposes

Drug law reformers Matt Noffs and Dr Alex Wodak are pushing ahead with Australia's first supervised ice smoking room, in a move which directly contradicts the NSW Government's stance on such a centre.

The planned centre in Sydney would provide clean pipes and smoking equipment and encourage contact with addiction health services, but not provide any substances to users.

"My understanding is we don't face any legal obstacles to having an inhalation room. The obstacles are all politics and crisis management," Dr Wodak told 7.30.

7.30 joined the pair as they looked at potential locations and spoke to air ventilation suppliers about the equipment needed to purify the air of toxic chemicals exhaled by several ice users smoking the drug in a confined space.

Drug experts plan Australia's first ice smoking room despite Government opposition

Iran is under pressure to end its use of death penalty against drug traffickers after facing a serious shortfall in the international funding of the country’s counter-narcotics campaign.

An increasing number of European countries have decided to cut off contributions even though the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) last year approved a five-year country partnership programme for Iran that was aimed at providing about $20m (then £14.4m).

The agency’s latest annual appeal document, obtained by the human rights groupReprieve, which works for the abolition of death penalty, shows that Tehran has received no money in funding for 2016. The UK has confirmed in writing that it is no longer contributing. Similar indications have come from Italy, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Ireland and Norway.

Two senior Iranian officials have recently complained about the lack of international support. Last week, Iran’s prosecutor general, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, blamed “imperialist” powers for young people’s addiction to drugs. In April, the Tehran Times quoted the interior minister as saying that Europeans were uncooperative.

Iran under pressure to abolish death penalty for drug trafficking

The latest United Nations drug report poses a question with major implications for Latin American organized crime: is the global cocaine market shrinking?

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 2016 World Drug Report (pdf) presents a long-term analysis of cocaine production, seizures and consumption that comes to a startling conclusion: the cocaine trade appears to be in decline.

According to the UNODC, coca cultivation fell by 40 percent between its 2000 peak and 2014. Better yields through improved farming and processing techniques meant cocaine production was less affected, either falling by just 10 percent or actually increasing by 14 percent, depending on which formula is used to calculate it.

However, whichever figure is used, deducting the quantity of cocaine seizures from production produces the same result -- significantly less cocaine on the market.

North America remains the world's biggest cocaine market but consumption has been declining for some time, according to the UNODC. Between 2006 and 2014, cocaine use in the United States fell significantly by all indicators; past year use fell by 32 percent, cocaine related deaths by 34 percent, and treatment admissions by 54 percent.

Is the global cocaine trade in decline ?

Tailyn Wang was two months pregnant when federal police officers broke into her house in Mexico City, ripped off her nightgown and threw her to the ground. They groped her breasts while punching and kicking her in front of her terrified children, before taking her blindfolded to a police base – without an arrest warrant.

The officers continued to physically and sexually abuse her until she miscarried in the attorney general’s office in Mexico City. Instead of receiving medical attention, she was transferred, still bleeding, to a prison hundreds of miles away. Here, several days after the illegal arrest, Wang was told she was accused of kidnap and organised crime.

More than two years later, Wang, a 35-year-old Peruvian cook, remains in prison awaiting trial, struggling with severe pain in her jaw, shoulders and back. Her mother has been granted a humanitarian visa in Mexico to care for her three traumatized children, now aged seven, 10 and 17.

Innocent women tortured in Mexico to boost arrest figures, report says

Vienna is the location of the headquarters of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In addition, Vienna is the third UN residence city, after New York and Geneva. The Vienna International Centre (VIC), UNO-city – contains the offices of the IAEA and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) as well as the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). The UN Vienna International Centre, at the Kaisermühlen underground station, is magnificent. It is hard to make an accurate estimate of how many people work there and how many more visit it on a daily basis as guests, visitors and sightseers. From the inside, it resembles an ant-hill: an endless flow of people, with work carrying on in a variety of halls and other rooms.

The annual CND meeting isn't just speeches and exchange of ideas, but also offers an opportunity to see with your own eyes how, for example, the Vienna police and fire service work, or what harm reduction in Vienna means. This is a tour we had a chance to take, so for several hours DUNews soaked up information in the centre providing integrated support to drug users.

Harm reduction in Vienna

Dr Nang Pann Ei Kham, coordinator of the Drug Policy Advocacy Group, speaks to Al Jazeera about the deadly addiction.

In Myanmar, thousands of families earn a living farming the crop that feeds the heroin habit of the world's drug users. But not all of the country's opium is smuggled abroad.

Pure, cheap heroin is flooding Myanmar's villages, leaving a trail of death and devastated families in its wake.

Dr Nang Pann Ei Kham, the coordinator of the Drug Policy Advocacy Group, talks about how the fear of corporal punishment and imprisonment prevents many drug users from seeking help, and the rehabilitation centres where "treatment" is based on religious teachings.

Her pressure group includes experts, opium farmers and drug users themselves.

"They are the ones whose lives, livelihoods and health are directly affected by repressive drug policies based on criminalisation and forced eradication. Unfortunately, their voices are too often ignored," she explains.

Poppylands: Understanding Myanmar's addiction to heroin

Could illicit drugs transform from being a source of violence into a source of political order ?

To many law enforcers, the question is completely heretical. For how could a criminal enterprise – associated with violence in so many countries across the world such as Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan, Myanmar, or Mali – ever bring about stability? The business of illicit drugs, many say, is simply a predatory and corrupt cause of violence and disorder. To even insinuate otherwise is sacrilegious.

The evidence emerging from the experience of some countries, however, says otherwise. Rather than dismiss such evidence as heresy, policy-makers would become better informed if they could carefully look at and consider what may really be going on.

In 2009, two US-based professors of political science – Richard Snyder and Angelica Duran-Martinez – confirmed that something was amiss in the historical understanding of opium and heroin production in the conflict-affected mountainous areas of north-eastern Myanmar.

Before 1989, there were some 25 insurgent ethnic armies operating in remote regions of the country, many of them operative since the 1960s. Around eight – who also happened to be the largest armies – operated in the Shan and Kachin regions of the northeast. As the conflicts dragged on year by year, most if not all started turning to opium cultivation and trafficking to finance their armed struggles. In this sense, illicit drugs came to be seen as a direct cause of violence and instability.