This week federal parliamentarians will discuss with world experts ways to minimise harm caused by illicit drugs. At a national drug summit, legislators will also be reminded of the sobering reality that Australians consume illegal drugs at concerning levels. A 2014 United Nations report found, for example, Australians lead the world in ecstasy use.

The so-called war on drugs has failed, here and in every nation that embraced it. Former Victorian police commissioner and head of the National Ice Taskforce Ken Lay last year encapsulated the views of many informed people when he said "we can't arrest our way out of this". Former UN chief Kofi Annan made the same case in these pages only last Sunday.

Associated with all this, experts argue the use of police sniffer dogs at music festivals illustrates how a severe approach can result in greater harm; the dogs can create panic and scare attendees into rapidly and potentially fatally consuming all the drugs they have with them, rather than risk being apprehended.

We need an inclusive, informed community discussion about how we deal with drugs that are available on the black market and thus effectively beyond the control of authorities. Ultimately, that means destroying the black market by decriminalising and regulating these substances, and by putting people with problems into the health system, not the criminal justice system.

 has consistently stressed we are motivated by harm minimisation, and are not condoning or encouraging the abuse of substances illicit or legal. We recognise the danger of misusing substances, and the tragedies that occur daily. An effective harm reduction strategy would foster policies based on education and, again, regulation.

Next year, the Victorian Parliament's law reform, road and community safety committee will deliver a report on the effectiveness of treatment programs and will explore harm-minimisation as an alternative to treating drug users as criminals. The inquiry is an opportunity to consider a wide range of expert views, including those of the police. It provides a chance for legislators to examine what has worked elsewhere.

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

Drug decriminalisation helps minimise harm

In 1961, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs called drug dependency "a serious evil for the individual" and a "social and economic danger to mankind." These words reflected the century-old philosophy of global drug control: that prohibition of drugs and and punishment of those who used illicit substances would "protect the health and welfare" of the world's citizens.

More than 50 years later, in April 2016, a United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) is focusing on the world drug problem. And its member nations must acknowledge it's time to change course.

The UNGASS 2016 Women's Declaration calls for global leadership to consider the disparate impact of the war of drugs on women, children, and families. The global war on drugs has not made the world safer, healthier, or more equitably prosperous. Indeed, the costs of making a "drug-free world" only continue to mount — especially for women, children and families. Around the world, the number of women incarcerated for drug offenses have skyrocketed. In too many countries, drug use while pregnant can lead to losing custody of one's children and harmful family separation. Drug-related violence — and state efforts to control it — have destabilized civil society and increased gender-based violence. Efforts to stem the drug trade have literally fueled the fires of environmental degradation and demolished families' livelihoods, as countries have burned coca plants and poppy fields from South America to South Asia.

We call the United Nations and its member states to lead the way in developing drug policy for a new age — policy that understands the different price women pay in this war, that puts families and health care before punishment, and observes the human rights of all.

 (NAPW) seeks to protect the rights and human dignity of all women, particularly pregnant and parenting women and those who are most vulnerable to government control and punishment including low income women, women of color, and drug-using women. NAPW uses the lessons learned from the experiences of these women to find more effective ways of advancing reproductive and human rights for all women and families. NAPW is actively involved in ongoing court challenges to punitive reproductive health and drug policies and provides litigation support in cases across the country. NAPW engages in local and national organizing and public education efforts among the diverse communities that are stakeholders in these issues, including the women and families directly affected by punitive policies, as well as public health and policy leaders. Learn more about NAPW.

About UNGASS Women 2016

 A prison guarded by crocodiles, tigers and piranhas.

Force-feeding drug dealers their own narcotics until they die. Controversial as they may be, these are just some of the latest weapons Indonesia is considering in its war on drugs. With the country home to 4.5 million addicts, according to government estimates, Indonesia's National Narcotics Agency is suggesting these proposals to tackle the drug menace.

The government says 33 people die from overdoses each day, and it considers the narcotics problem a national emergency. "We need to be serious because drugs are the enemy," says agency spokesman Slamet Pribadi.

Indonesia already has tough narcotics laws, including death by firing squad for large-scale traffickers. But the government believes more needs to be done to deter local drug use.

Across Indonesia, police have stepped up raids on suspected drug dens. A recent raid in Jakarta resulted in four deaths - a police officer, an informer who provided intelligence, and two gang members.

"We have to fight this war on drugs everywhere," says Hendro Pandowo, the local police chief who oversaw the raid. "They have to be cleaned off the streets of Jakarta and eradicated throughout Indonesia."

Every week, law enforcement agencies gather the media and parade the low-level drug users, dealers and the narcotics they have snared.

But critics say the war on drugs is only creating a climate of fear with potentially fatal consequences.

Suhendro Sugiharto, an outreach worker with the Indonesian Drug Users Network, the country's biggest group of advocacy organisations, says the number of HIV infections is rising, a development he attributes to more people sharing needles. Users fear that if police catch them carrying a syringe, they could be sent to prison, he says. "We'll be facing the next HIV outbreak if this doesn't change," says Sugiharto, whose groups provide clean needles. He says drug programmes used to be successful in curbing overdose rates, HIV and hepatitis C because social workers knew where to find addicts.

But now, because of the crackdown, users have moved to more hidden locations. "It's creating difficulty for the outreach worker to give away clean needles and also to collect used needles … and it has put us in danger of an HIV epidemic," he says.

Others argue that Indonesia's drug laws unfairly punish addicts because they do not distinguish between users and traffickers. "Our laws criminalise the victim," says Rudhy Wedhasmara, a defence lawyer who represents addicts pro bono. "If someone is buying a drug for their own use, it's described in laws as being involved in an illicit trade. Our laws also say if you are caught with a gramme of a drug, they should be sent to rehab, but instead they are sent to jail."

Wedhasmara says prison is the worst place possible for addicts. "Prison is no solution as they remain addicted," he explains.

Up to 70 percent of Indonesia's total prison population are low-level drug offenders, according to prison officials.

Indonesia weighs controversial new drug crime penalties

A Canadian federal court judge has struck down the previous government’s ban on patients growing their own medical marijuana. The court ruled that regulations introduced in 2013 by the Conservative Party of Canada went against patients’ constitutional rights.

The objective of the ban was supposedly to keep patients safe – the government has expressed health concerns over home-growing – but the court ruled that there was no advantage to making patients order their marijuana through the government system.

Judge Michael Phelan said that the ban “does not bear a connection to the objective of the legislation, and is therefore arbitrary”. He said: “The access restrictions did not prove to reduce risk to health and safety or to improve access to marihuana - the purported objectives of the regulation.”

The court stressed that this ruling had nothing to do with the legalising of marijuana for recreational use, but only about access for medical purposes to those who “are ill, including those who are suffering severe pain”.

The decision has been suspended for six months in order for the government time to respond to the declaration.

A Canadian federal court judge has struck down the previous government’s ban on patients growing their own medical marijuana. The court ruled that regulations introduced in 2013 by the Conservative Party of Canada went against patients’ constitutional rights. The objective of the ban was supposedly to keep patients safe – the government expressed health concerns over home-growing – but the court ruled that there was no advantage to making patients order their marijuana through the government system.

Canada lifts 'arbitrary' ban on people growing their own medical marijuana

details the widespread human rights violations that stem from the War on Drugs and argues they are systemic and the shared responsibility of all governments. He suggests that only by acknowledging and discussing these violations at an international level can there ever be any hope of addressing them.

Over the years, there has been a real evolution in my thinking about human rights and the War on Drugs. In the beginning, it was about the sheer scale of the abuse in the context of drug control. Later, it was the systemic nature of that abuse and how the international regime fuelled it. But now, while these two ways of looking at the human rights dimensions of the War on Drugs remain entirely valid, I see something wider, affecting human rights itself. Others have no doubt reached these conclusions before me, but with UNGASS approaching, it seemed a good time to set them out.

It’s now trite to say this, but the human rights abuses committed in the War on Drugs are shockingly common, widespread and serious. For example (and I mean 

) this year, two or three people on average will be executed daily for drug offences. Billions of people, four-fifths of the world population, lack access to opiates for the relief of pain. These are people with cancer, late-stage AIDS, injuries from accidents and so on.

A lot of factors contribute to this, but everybody is clear that drug laws and a pathological concern with opiate addiction play a major role. Global HIV targets will be missed by decades at current rates because of ideological resistance to harm-reduction interventions and because much-needed resources are squandered on drug enforcement.

Hundreds of thousands of people are arbitrarily detained in drug detention centres, facing unbelievable abuses once inside. Hundreds of thousands more, if not millions, are displaced due to drug-related violence and crop eradication campaigns. It is truly frightening to think how many people, how many 

, are now saddled with unnecessary criminal records for minor infractions of drug laws, with all the limitations this places on life chances.

Some thoughts on human rights and the war on drugs

People working in law enforcement, drug treatment, harm reduction and social services, are calling for drug policy reform to end the punishment of people who use drugs in Asia.

This film was produced with support from the European Union through the Asia Action on Harm Reduction programme.

Click here to access the Support Don't Punish website.

Support. Don't Punish - Voices for drug policy reform from Asia, Trailer

Have you ever wondered why ending the War on Drugs isn't as simple as passing a few laws in Congress? Well, it has to do with some pretty bad pieces of international law that tie the hands of national governments to policies that even they know kinda stink. Fortunately, there's a coalition of really smart people working at the highest levels to untangle what is a really bad knot. Here's what I mean...

This April 19 to 21, many of the world's countries, together with human rights and advocacy organizations from around the world, will meet in New York at the United Nations to discuss global drug policy in an event called the "UNGASS," which is UN-speak for United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs.

See, the reason so many drugs are harshly criminalized is because there are three international treaties - the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971, and the Convention Against the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988 - that require countries who sign the treaty (including the United States, Canada, Mexico, and most of Europe), to "establish as a criminal offense" the "cultivation, production, extraction, possession, sale, distribution, purchase, and delivery" of several drugs and to "prosecute and punish," "particularly by imprisonment," individuals or groups who violate the terms of the treaties.

These treaties have thus established drug criminalization and the drug war as an "international norm," or a commonly accepted international standard of behavior, which means that because they signed the treaties, governments have to pass national laws in line with the treaty or face damage being done to their reputation on the international stage. Because of a principle in international law called 

, which is Latin for "agreements must be kept," going against the treaty would, in theory, damage their "soft power," their ability to use their reputation and influence to achieve their foreign policy goals, without having to rely on hard power threats of military force. And because countries don't want to become known as not being good on their word when they sign treaties, they therefore enact the drug war at home.

An edited version of this article was originally published on the Drug Policy Alliance blog.

Here's why the UN's big meeting on drugs matters to you

The NSW premier, Mike Baird, has dismissed a planned trial of pill testing at music festivals as “ridiculous”. “We are not going to be condoning in any way what illegal drug dealers are doing,” he told reporters in Sydney on Sunday.

His comments follow reports the Sydney doctor Alex Wodak, the president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, wants to begin a privately funded pill testing trial – and is prepared to break the law to do so – to save lives. Wodak and an emergency medical specialist, David Caldicott, say they will begin a privately funded trial with or without the Baird government’s approval. “I am prepared to break the law to save young people’s lives,” Dr Wodak told Fairfax Media.

In January, the New South Wales government threatened to shut down some music festivals after a spate of drug overdoses. The threat followed several people being rushed to hospital suffering suspected drug overdoses at Sydney’s Field Day music festival, which is held on New Year’s Day. More than 180 others were charged with drug offences. There were three drug-related deaths at similar events in 2015.

The NSW premier, Mike Baird, said in January that ministers would be asked to review the regulations for granting permits for events on public land. “Enough is enough, this simply has to stop,” he told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

On Saturday, seven people were charged with drugs offences after the first day of the Secret Garden Music Festival in Camden, south-west of Sydney. Police said they searched more than 100 people at the three-day festival on Friday and those arrested face 11 charges between them. They were all granted conditional bail to appear at Picton Local Court on April 26.

Mike Baird attacks drug experts' vow to trial pill testing even if it breaks the law 

For this pilot study, the survey is being conducted in different countries across Europe. The countries are: Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Latvia, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The surveys are running at different times. Below, you can find more details, links to live surveys including the dates on which they are running.

The EMCDDA is currently developing estimates of the size of the drug market in the EU based on data provided routinely to the EMCDDA by National Focal Points. One key component of such market size estimates, for which there is no routine data collection and only limited data available, is the quantities of substances used by different groups of drug users. The data that is available has tended to come mainly from small scale studies of specific heavy user groups, for example of people entering treatment. On the other hand, General Population Surveys generally do not have sufficiently large samples of drug users to provide robust information on amounts.

For the report Further Insights into the EU drug markets, researchers from Trimbos Institute coordinated an online survey of drug users in seven EU countries, which included the collection of information about amounts used as well as frequency of use and sources of supply. The data collected provided valuable information on the variation in quantities used per occasion by different user groups in different countries. It also demonstrated the potential of this approach for obtaining information from drug users in different countries in a quick and cost-effective manner, while highlighting areas requiring further development to improve the method for the future.

The EMCDDA is therefore undertaking a pilot project in collaboration with the researchers from the Trimbos Institute to build on the earlier survey experience and develop a system and the capacity within EMCDDA for collecting such data. This would not only be of value to the EMCDDA but would also be a valuable resource for National Focal Points allowing them to obtain valuable information for policy development at the national level quickly and at low cost. If successful, it is anticipated that the range of topics covered would be developed further in the future.

Pilot project: European web survey on drugs: Patterns of use

Hundreds of people attended the Urban Drug Policies Conference in Warsaw on 17-19 February, supported by the Warsaw municipality and the Polish government agency on drugs. Most of the participants were Polish service providers and city officials. Researchers, policemen and NGOs from other European cities, including Barcelona, Zürich, Frankfurt, Coppenhagen and Lisbon, shared their experiences on best practice in urban drug policies. There were presentations about innovative ways to deal with drug problems, such as drug consumption rooms, cannabis social clubs and heroin maintenance programs, as well as examples of drug coordination mechanisms and the meaningful involvement of civil society. Barriers to access to harm reduction programs, especially opiate substitution treatment, and the challenges posed by new psychoactive substances, were central themes discussed in the sessions. Our Room for Change campaign was presented and two of the campaign movies - Where Do Poles Inject? and Life After the Closure of Needle Exchange in Budapest - were screened at the conference.

At the conference, a drafting committee was created, in which the International Drug Policy Consortium, the Rights Reporter Foundation, Krytyka Polityczna and the Polish Drug Policy Network played a major role in producing a set of recommendations on urban drug policies. The so-called Warsaw Declaration is based on the Prague Declaration (watch our movie about it here), an earlier document on urban drug policies, adopted in 2010. From the more general seven principles of the Prague Declaration, we developed ten concrete and more action-oriented recommendations. Here is a short summary of the ten recommendations:

Policy responses should be coordinated, and decisions should be based on evidence and consultation with civil society.

 Cities should allow innovation in drug policy.

 Police should not target drug users, and should cooperate with health and social services.

 The human rights of drug users should be protected.

 A comprehensive menu of health and social services should be provided, including harm reduction.

. Cities should create regulations and guidelines on safe nightlife and partying.

 Local governments should allocate adequate and sustainable funding for services.

 Local communities should be educated, and forums for dialogue to resolve confilcts should be created.

Local policies should be monitored and evaluated.

 Partnerships and networking should be established among European cities.

The Warsaw Declaration on Urban Drug Policies

The EU Drugs Strategy provides a political framework and priorities for actions in the field of drug policies for the period 2013-2020. It builds around two policy fields: drug demand reduction and drug supply reduction; and three cross-cutting themes: coordination, international cooperation and information, research, monitoring and evaluation.

The EU Drugs Strategy requests the Commission to initiate an external mid-term assessment by 2016, in view of preparing a second Action Plan for the period 2017-2020.

In the framework of this evaluation and following the Better Regulation Guidelines, the Commission is conducting a broad stakeholder consultation, including an open public consultation, as outlined also in the roadmap of the evaluation. The stakeholder consultation seeks to gather views from individual citizens, non-profit/private organisations, industry and from national/regional/local public administrations on all 5 objectives of the EU Drugs Strategy and corresponding actions of the Action Plan and on the key evaluation criteria: effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, coherence and EU value added. This public consultation will form part of the evidence base for the evaluation of the EU Drugs Strategy and Action Plan and the work ahead.

A Steering Group, made up all relevant Commission services and the European External Action Service (EEAS) chaired by DG HOME, is consulted regularly at all stages of this evaluation and it has approved the consultation strategy for this evaluation, as well as the questionnaire for the public consultation.

Click here fore more information and learn how to submit your contribution.

Public consultation for the 2016 evaluation of the EU Drugs Strategy and Action Plan on Drugs

Citing the staggering increase in heroin use and overdose deaths, an upstate New York mayor is proposing the nation's first supervised injection facilities modeled after sites in Canada and Europe, places where addicts can safely shoot up heroin under clinical supervision while receiving health care and counseling.

"One-hundred and twenty-five people will die in America today from opioid overdose, will die in the streets or will die in their homes or will die in gas station bathrooms," Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick told reporters Wednesday, citing federal figures on the epidemic of opioid overdose deaths.

To back his controversial proposal, Myrick, 28, released a report recommending, among other things, treating heroin addiction by allowing users to inject drugs at supervised facilities. Similar centers have been found to reduce the spread of infectious disease, overdose deaths and improperly discarded syringes.

Myrick said the report is a blueprint for cities struggling to deal with a rise in heroin addiction and overdose deaths.

"This is a strategy that sounds as outrageous as the strategy that we came up with to provide sexual education to teenagers, something that was unthinkable in the '70s," said Myrick, whose father was a heroin addict.

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