When gang violence erupted in British Columbia in 2009, the federal government acted at light speed to implement measures to contain the violence. That rapid response stands in stark contrast to the feds’ lethargy in dealing with the very things the gangs were fighting over: drugs.

Drug overdoses are nothing new, of course, especially in Western Canada. But at the onset of the gang war, something new did appear: fentanyl, a synthetic opioid about 100 times more potent than morphine.

According to the Canadian Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use, fentanyl was detected in more than 1,000 drug-poisoning deaths in Canada from 2009 to 2014. Furthermore, fentanyl-detected deaths increased by nearly 700 per cent from 2012 to 2014 in B.C., and by more than 2,000 per cent from 2011 to 2014 in Alberta. The trend continued unabated last year, with record numbers of fentanyl-detected deaths in both provinces.

Clearly this is a crisis situation. And when you’re faced with such a situation, you have to act fast, particularly when you have the means to avert the crisis. We have the means. It’s called naloxone, a drug that blocks opioids in the brain, thereby preventing or reversing an overdose. Naloxone has been used in Canadian emergency rooms for more than 40 years, and many provinces have recently started providing Take Home Naloxone kits to people who use drugs, along with training in recognizing and reversing overdoses.

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

No excuse for Canadian government’s slow response to fentanyl crisis 

Medical cannabis is set to hit pharmacy shelves in Israel in the form of cigarettes, cookies and oil, while the number of doctors permitted to prescribe the natural painkiller and the number of farmers allowed to grow it will substantially increase, according to a Health Ministry reform.

At the same time, the entire production and supply chain will be strictly supervised to ensure that medical cannabis, also known as marijuana, is kept out of the recreational drug market, the Yedioth Ahronoth daily newspaper reported Tuesday.

“We’re working to reorganize the field of medical cannabis in order to lighten the process for those who need it and, on the other hand, to make it harder for the material to trickle into the regular market,” Health Minister Yaakov Litzman said Monday. “There is no reason to make things difficult for whoever really needs it, just because there’s someone who exploits it illegally.”

Medical cannabis set to hit pharmacy shelves

DENVER — Two years into Colorado’s experiment with legalized cannabis, marijuana has become a bit passé. Marijuana stores have lost their novelty, and no one remarks anymore when there’s the tell-tale aroma in the air. People puff on portable vaporizers everywhere you look: in bars, on the sidewalk, or while stuck in traffic on the way home from work. It’s impossible to know whether they’re inhaling tobacco or cannabis — nor does it matter, legally. Decades of social stigma have evaporated; all signs indicate legal marijuana is here to stay.

But several developments over the past few weeks suggest that legalization might not be as stable and permanent as it seems. Last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that aimed to help launch the world’s first marijuanacredit union. The ruling came on the heels of the settlement of a racketeering lawsuit that could be among the first of many to plague cannabis businesses, and a post office threat to forbid all marijuana advertising from going through the mail. All three events are reminders that marijuana markets around the country are built on shaky ground, and 2016 could be the year that these precarious arrangements show ever more signs of wear, or even in some cases come tumbling down.

That’s because the seemingly unstoppable force that is the marijuana legalization crusade is finally hitting the immovable object that is federal law. While lawmakers and business stakeholders have proven adept at creatively building state-by-state marijuana regulations and industries where none before existed, as recent events make clear, there is only so far they can go before running headfirst into the fact that, according to the U.S. Controlled Substances Act, the product at the center of all this action is still 100 percent illegal.

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

Marijuana legalisation: Could 2016 be the year federal law derails the cannabis movement? 

Drug use is common, drug addiction is rare. About one adult in three will use an illegal drug in their lifetime and just under 3m people will do so this year in England and Wales alone. Most will suffer no long-term harm.

There are immediate risks from overdose and intoxication, and longer-term health risks associated with heavy or prolonged use; damage to lungs from smoking cannabis or the bladder from ketamine for example. However most people will either pass unscathed through a short period of experimentation or learn to accommodate their drug use into their lifestyle, adjusting patterns of use to their social and domestic circumstances, as they do with alcohol. Compared to the 3m currently using illegal drugs there are around 300,000 heroin and/or crack addicts while around 30,000 were successfully treated for dependency on drugs in England in 2011-12, typically cannabis, or powder cocaine.

A powerful cultural narrative focusing on the power of illegal drugs to disrupt otherwise stable, happy lives dominates our media and political discourse, and shapes policy responses. Drug use is deemed to “spiral out of control”, destroying an individual’s ability to earn their living or care for their children, transforming honest productive citizens into welfare dependent, criminal “families from hell”.

Many people use drugs – but here’s why most don’t become dependent

The world's governments used to agree on tackling the use of cocaine, cannabis and other narcotics. Policies, such as locking up dealers, traffickers and even users, were underpinned by global treaties from the 1960s onwards as the US led a war on drugs.

That system is crumbling as ever-more Western nations, from Portugal to the United States, rewrite rules on whether cannabis and other drugs should be available to sufferers of multiple sclerosis and other maladies, decriminalised or even legalised, so that people can use them for recreation.

Experts warn of a polarised world in which reformers, such as Switzerland and some Latin American countries that have borne the brunt of narco-gang violence, clash with Russia, China and many Asian and Middle Eastern states that hold tougher lines against drugs.

James Cockayne, a scholar at United Nations University, the world body's think-tank, warned that the consensus on drugs is fragmenting, creating headaches for policymakers and a vacuum of leadership that could be exploited by drug cartels.

"We're concerned about policy fragmentation and worsening coordination between states, making it harder to safeguard global public health and throwing up a range of unexpected trans-border spillover effects," Cockayne told Al Jazeera.

"Countries that wish to legalise cannabis and trade it with others will run into treaties designed with prohibition in mind, undermining a system that helps governments collectively combat criminal networks and other bad actors."

"Efforts to create a drug-free world have clearly failed," Cleia Noia, an analyst at the Social Science Research Council, a think-tank, told Al Jazeera.

"A blanket prohibition policy has been hugely negative, criminalising people for low-level activities and drug use, often women and ethnic minorities. And has any of it made it harder for teenagers to buy drugs?"

In the US, ever-harsher drugs sentences saw the prison population quadruple to 2.3 million people from 1980 to 2008, with blacks behind bars at six times the rate of whites, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, a social equality campaign group.

In Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Ecuador, more than 60 percent of women prisoners were jailed for drug offences - often poverty-racked mothers who became drug mules for quick cash, according to the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC).

"It's time to change the metrics by which we measure success," Heather Haase, an IDPC expert, told Al Jazeera.

The paradox of war on drugs and marijuana legalisation

The german government has finally published the draft for the new bill “Cannabis as medicine” on the website of the Federal Ministry of Health on January 7th.

After much speculation on the details of the bill in the last couple of months, now the draft for the law is public. Allthough there still might be some changes in the process of implementing the law, it looks quite positive. Here are the main cornerstones:

- There will be no further need for exemption licences to use legal medical cannabis.

- Any Doctor will be able to prescribe Cannabis flowers for patients on a special receipt, just like any other prescription drug available in german pharmacies.

- In addition, the costs for the flowers will"in certain cases" be covered by the regular health insurance.

- In order to secure the supply for german patients a cannabis agency will be established. The cannabis agency will issue licenses for commercial cultivation of cannabis and distribute it to the regular pharmacies.

If the draft bill passes into law, cannabis flowers will be prescribable as a controlled substance with medical use and listed in Schedule III of the german Narcotics Act (BtMG). It will be deleted from Schedule I and II, which list the narcotics that are non-prescribable and those controlled substances which are not marketable. With these changes patients will not need any special permits to use the narcotic prescription. Any doctor will be able to hand out these prescriptions.

Medical marihuana to become a medicine like any other in Germany

There's a growing consensus in the U.S. that drug addiction is a public health issue, and sufferers need treatment, not prison time. But good luck if you are pregnant.

A short film released Monday shines a light on a recent trend among states to criminally prosecute women for using drugs while pregnant. The video, created by Brave New Films, investigates the effect of "feticide laws" across the country. Originally passed to protect pregnant women from violence, women's health advocates say these laws are now being used to prosecute pregnant women themselves.

In 2014, Tennessee became the first state in the nation to pass a law allowing women to be charged with a crime if their babies are born with symptoms of drug withdrawal.

The state was responding to a dramatic rise in the number of babies born with "neonatal abstinence syndrome," a group of symptoms that can occur when babies are in withdrawal from exposure to narcotics. Medical professional stress that while babies with NAS may be irritable, the condition is treatable and has not been associated with long-term negative consequences.

Yet the same cannot be said of Tennessee's law.

Health advocates have reported that women are avoiding critical prenatal care and even leaving the state to give birth because they are afraid of facing arrest and losing custody of their children. While it's not clear exactly how many women have been arrested under the new law, in Shelby County alone, at least 22 women have been prosecuted.

"This policy has resulted in separating mothers from their children and incarcerating people struggling with drug use instead of ensuring access to effective options for recovery," Allison Glass, state director of Healthy and Free Tennessee, a nonprofit women's advocacy group, said in a press release. "This law is hurting far more people than it could ever help."

Watch the short film by Brave New Films here.

Please, stop locking up pregnant women for using drugs

The Middle East and North Africa Harm Reduction Association (MENAHRA) and the Regional Arab/Network Against Aids (RANAA) conducted Regional Dialogue Focus Meeting to consult on the development of the MENAHRA/RANAA Global Fund Regional Concept Note.

The dialogue took place in Crown Plaza Hotel in Beirut, Lebanon, from 8 till 10 December 2015 in the attendance of national AIDS programs managers, representatives of United Nations organizations, civil society organizations, key populations (KPs), related parties and other experts in this field from the MENA region.

This dialogue aimed to discuss major challenges in the field of harm reduction and AIDS, to ensure that strategies and suggested plans in the proposal reflect the multi-stakeholder response, in addition to the participation of KPs and community social organizations in the joint regional project proposal.

MENAHRA and RANAA regional dialogue focus meeting

Last week, Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was captured in the town of Los Michos, possibly because of an interview he conducted with Sean Penn for Rolling Stone. The Sinaloa cartel, however, will carry on business as usual: “It’s not even going to skip a beat,” one analyst told AFP.

“The capture won’t have a significant impact other than a moral victory,” a former international operations chief at the Drug Enforcement Administration, Mike Vigil, told Agence France-Presse. El Chapo, who faces extradition to the U.S., will probably be succeeded by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. “It’s going to continue to function.”

In the interview with Penn, El Chapo himself is seemingly aware of his diminished significance in the context of his business. “The day I don’t exist, it’s not going to decrease in any way at all,” he said.

El Chapo's capture will likely have little to no effect on Sinaloa cartel's business

A plan backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker to legalize recreational use of marijuana in California is on the path to the November ballot, potentially bringing more than $1bn a year in tax revenue, according to legislative analysts.

The proposal, which would allow for the retail sale of marijuana to adults aged 21 and older, is one of the most highly anticipated initiatives, in no small part because California is the country’s largest economy and the eighth largest in the world.

But some industry insiders are unhappy with the proposal – which is backed by Parker, the founder of Napster, and Justin Hartfield, the founder of WeedMaps – and are withholding support.

“This skews towards big marijuana,” said Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, an industry trade and lobbying group.

The state’s attorney general cleared the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (AUMA) on Wednesday, allowing the campaign for the measure to begin. The first hurdle will be gathering 365,880 signatures to qualify for this year’s general election – an effort that will start “in a handful of days”, according to AUMA spokesman Jason Kinney. Signature gathering could cost as much as $2m, with the overall campaign reaching $10m, according to industry sources.

Marijuana plan backed by billionaire Sean Parker on path to California ballot

In booming Seattle, where daydreams typically take the shape of mega-mansions and supersize yachts, street activist Shilo Murphy has managed to lower his expectations.

The techies at Amazon, Microsoft and other millionaire-minting factories can have their Lexuses and Lamborghinis. He'd be happy with a used van filled with heroin addicts, needles loaded and ready to fire.

Traveling neighborhood to neighborhood, with a nurse attendant aboard, the drug mobile would be the equivalent of a narcotics shooting gallery delivered to your doorstep. Let Jeff Bezos' Amazon drones top that.

"It's going to happen," Murphy, 40, insisted, sitting at his desk in the basement of a church in Seattle's University District, across the street from an entrance to the University of Washington. "We're in the design stage. Maybe in a few months we'll be rolling." On cluttered shelves and in boxes stacked around him are some of the tools of his trade: new meth pipes, alcohol swabs and needles, needles, needles, all to be handed out free and, in some cases, against state law.

Inspired by Insite, a government-supported supervised drug facility in Vancouver, Canada, where addicts go to safely shoot up and obtain support services, Murphy and others planned to open a similar operation

Thumbnail: Public domain image, Debora Cartagena

Seattle activist plans mobile drug haven to encourage safe use

Afghan officials have opened a new drug treatment center in an abandoned NATO military base in Kabul, in the latest attempt to stamp out the country's massive problem of drug abuse.

Afghanistan is one of the world's biggest sources of opium, producing around 3,300 tonnes last year, despite a drop of 48 percent in output.

With the economy in ruins after decades of war and unable to provide jobs for young Afghans, demand for the temporary relief provided by drugs is high.

Camp Phoenix, a former training camp on the edges of Kabul set up by the U.S. army in 2003, will take in around 1,000 homeless drug addicts who will receive food, medical attention and treatment, said Public Health Minister Ferozuddin Feroz.

"We give them a proper shave, they will take a shower, winter clothing and treatment will follow," he said, showing reporters around the facility, which offers a 45-day course of treatment for homeless addicts.

In May, a U.S.-funded report said around 1.9 million to 2.4 million Afghan adults may be drug users, from among a population of about 30 million, with drugs found in more than 30 percent of homes.

To counter this situation, the country has just 123 treatment centers, sufficient to treat just over 10 percent of opium and heroin users. But even addicts who go through the centers often fall back into drug use.

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