On 29-30 October, 2014 the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network (EHRN) participated in UNDP regional Conclusive Regional Dialogue on HIV, Rights and Universal Access in Eastern Europe: Successes, Lessons Learned, Next Steps supported by the European Commission, that was held in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Among other topics, the EHRN hosted two specific sessions in the framework of the conference with the aim of promoting member organisations’ work in the region and showcase some of the best practices from the region.

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

EHRN presented best regional practices at the UNDP regional conference in Tbilisi

THE first ever e-commerce transaction, conducted by students from Stanford and MIT in the early 1970s, involved the sale of a small quantity of marijuana. For decades afterwards, the online drugs trade was severely constrained by the ability of law enforcement to track IP addresses and the means of payment. The trickle of transactions threatened to become a flood with the emergence a few years ago of Silk Road, a drug-dealing site on the “dark net”. These e-depths cannot be reached through a normal browser but only with anonymising software called Tor. Buyers and sellers transact there pseudonymously in bitcoin, a crypto-currency.

Silk Road was shut last year with the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the 29-year-old American whom investigators believe to be Dread Pirate Roberts, the site’s founder. Mr Ulbricht is due to stand trial in New York next January on charges that include computer hacking and money laundering. But law enforcers who predicted that Silk Road’s demise would mark the beginning of the end for online black-market bazaars were wrong. Instead, dozens of dark-net Amazons and eBays (also known as crypto-markets) have sprung up to fill the void. They are not only proving remarkably resilient but expanding their offerings and growing more sophisticated.

Illicit e-commerce: The Amazons of the dark net

Voters across the country have accelerated the unprecedented momentum to legalise marijuana and end the wider drug war, with marijuana legalisation measures passing in Oregon and Washington, D.C., while groundbreaking criminal justice reforms passed in California and New Jersey.

“This Election Day was an extraordinary one for the marijuana and criminal justice reform movements,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Oregon proved that Colorado and Washington were no flukes. Washington, D.C. voters sent a powerful message to Congress that federal marijuana prohibition has no place in the nation’s capital. Voters in Florida and Guam demonstrated that medical marijuana could win big even in fairly conservative jurisdictions. And California and New Jersey revealed an electorate eager to reduce prison populations and the power of the prison industrial complex.”

“These victories are even more notable for having happened in a year when Democrats were trounced at the polls,” added Nadelmann. “Reform of marijuana and criminal justice policies is no longer just a liberal cause but a conservative and bipartisan one as well. On these issues at least, the nation is at last coming to its senses.”

Voters across the US accelerate unprecedented momentum to legalise marijuana

In Chile, the law on drug 20.000 allows therapeutic use of cannabis, but a regulation on the access to this substance, the garantee of the product's quality and the quality and the providing of low-cost treatment does not exist.

In October 2013, the Foundation Latinoamerica Reforma wrote a letter, supported by 130 doctors from all specialities, to support the regulation of cannabinoid drugs.

Chile doctors sign letter on cannabis

As Westminster Government partners fall out over the UK's long-standing policy of prohibition, the Scottish Council of Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) is lobbying for drug laws to be devolved.

The umbrella group has formally asked the all-party Smith Commission, which is working on new Home Rule proposals, to move control of the Misuse Of Drugs Act north of the Border.

Charities backing the move include Addaction, one of the biggest bodies supporting addicts in the UK.

Ruchir Shah, SCVO's policy manager, said: "Many voluntary organisations want Scotland to have powers over the control of illegal drugs. Tackling substance abuse could then be tailored more closely to Scotland's particular challenges and needs.

"Some of SCVO's member charities have raised concerns the current approach tries to criminalise people. They would prefer to see policies coming from a health, care and community approach."

Such an approach could see Scotland move to a more liberal regime within the UK - mirroring America. There, different states take very different attitudes to drugs, with two having legalised cannabis and several other decriminalising the substance.

Several senior drugs policy experts north of the border now question Westminster rhetoric on the issue.

SNP MSP Christine Grahame, who chairs the Scottish Parliament's Justice Committee, welcomed any move to bring drugs laws to Holyrood, saying this would provide more "cohesive" policy-making.

Call to devolve laws on cannabis in Scotland

In September 2011, the Supreme Court of Canada madea bold statement about the importance of harm reduction, and the lives of people who require harm reduction services, by allowing Insite - Vancouver's life-saving supervised consumption site - to remain open without risk of prosecution. The Court recognized that allowing a blanket prohibition on drug possession to apply even on the premises of such a health facility would undermine public health and put people at greater risk of preventable harm, including death from overdose and infection with HIV and hepatitis C. The Court found the Minister's decision to deny an exemption to Insite was "arbitrary" because it would advance neither public health nor public safety. Furthermore, the harms of denying people safe access to the site would be "grossly disproportionate" to any supposed benefit of maintaining a blanket prohibition on drug possession. Therefore, the Minister had violated the constitutional rights of people who use drugs to life, liberty and security of the person and was ordered to renew Insite's exemption.

Having intervened in this landmark case, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network applauded this important rights-based decision, and was hopeful it would pave the way for similar services in other communities across the country. Alas, three years later, no new supervised consumption services have started up in Canada.

Worse still, the federal government has introduced Bill C-2, which runs counter to the spirit (and the letter) of what the Supreme Court of Canada said in its Insite decision.

Simply put, Bill C-2 will make it more difficult for health authorities and community agencies to offer these badly needed health services to those members of our communities who use drugs in unsafe, unhygienic circumstances that mean a greater risk of overdose or of infection through non-sterile equipment. 

, produced jointly with the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. Last week, we submitted it to the Public Safety committee currently studying Bill C-2 to help them understand how this ill-conceived legislation will erode the health and human rights of people who use drugs, and in fact also harm the communities that could benefit from such services.

Demonstrating complete ignorance of the amply-documented health and community benefits of supervised consumption services, Bill C-2 focuses on exaggerated risks to "public safety" and perpetuates the stigma and discrimination already facing people who use drugs. Many public health and human rights experts share our concerns and have said so, on record. We have called for this bill to be rejected in its entirety.

Meanwhile, Insite continues to save lives and is a credit to our country. Even with the recent tragic news of 31 heroin overdoses in Vancouver, Insite staff members were able to prevent the deaths of these individuals by providing care and immediate treatment. And this good news story could play out in communities Canada-wide if we, as a country, were to truly rethink our outdated and deadly "war on drugs" policies.

Bill C-2's threat to supervised consumption sites - and to community health


Juan Manuel, owner of the first shop dedicated to cannabis merchandising in Montevideo, rolls a joint

Licensed clubs of up to 45 members will be allowed to grow a maximum of 99 plants each year.In August, growing up to six plants of cannabis at home became legal. Uruguay legalised the production and sale of cannabis last December and the government hopes to sell it from pharmacies in the new year.

Uruguay cannabis growers' clubs: Registration begins

The findings of the Home Office drug policy report are not news in terms of the evidence. It is well known in the drug policy field that there is no evidence to support the continued criminalisation of drug use. On the other hand there is a large body of evidence highlighting the very negative outcomes produced by criminalisation. Criminalisation contributes to the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C; it increases the risk of overdose and death; it ostracises people from vital public health and social welfare services; it confers criminal records on people who don’t deserve one and produces many other hugely negative impacts on the lives of people who use drugs.

What makes this report interesting is the political context. It highlights a rift within the Coalition around drug policy, with the Liberal Democrats advocating a re-evaluation of national policies based on evidence and the Conservatives looking to maintain the status quo. The fact that a sitting government is having this debate is the key. Traditionally evidence on this issue has been suppressed when it failed to conform to the ‘war on drugs’ narrative. UK minister Norman Baker claims a similar effort to suppress evidenceoccurred here, but was overcome.

The UK Home Office report on drugs is emblematic of the global shift towards re-evaluating current drug policies

Over a year after the activation of the National Committee for Combating Addiction and a binding ruling by the Court of Cassation, some judges are still refusing to apply the drug law by allowing drug users to seek treatment in lieu of prosecution. Activists and lawyers who spoke to The Daily Star said many prosecutors and judges still perceive addicts as criminals, especially if they are from impoverished or troubled backgrounds.

“Judges are trying to help but are now just recently being educated,” said Rabih Khattab, one of the founders of the Cedar Rehab Center in Hammana, which opened earlier this year. “We’ve gotten phone calls [from judges] where they ask if a patient can be admitted to rehab rather than going to jail, but they only call when they know the patient is ‘not suitable’ to be in a jail cell, suitable meaning somebody coming from a good family.”

Although some judges might assume only wealthy users can afford Cedar’s $7,000-a-month price tag, Khattab said the center operates on a sliding scale and about half of all patients receive financial assistance. The Oum al-Nour association offers inpatient rehabilitation for free, but a spokesperson for the institution refused to discuss its relationship to the judiciary or whether the number of referred cases had risen since the Committee’s formation.

Discrimination persists in drug law application in Lebanon

On 19-21October 2014, a regional dialogue was organized in Tbilisi, Georgia. It focused on the regional proposal regarding access to treatment for vulnerable groups in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which is being prepared by ECUO and EHRN for submission to the Global Fund (GF). Information is already available on our website regarding an initial proposal that was submitted to the GF and supported by it at the stage of an expression of interest.

The meeting of key populations, vulnerable groups, people living with HIV, governmental specialists and international agencies was very fruitful. Not only was the common goal of the future regional project agreed upon, but there was also a detailed discussion of its objectives as well as a common way of interaction between the partners.

The main issues discussed, both at the plenary session and within the working groups, were the fundamental challenges that are relevant not only to the project, but also to ensuring the viability and effectiveness of the response to the epidemic in our region.

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

What is the HIV care continuum and how can we ensure access to it by vulnerable groups?

November 1st has been observed as International Drug Users Day since 1995. Globally, there is a growing movement by activists and policy experts calling for de-criminalisation of drug users.

India has a long history of cannabis and opium use for social, cultural, religious and medical purposes. There are several examples of the use of these substances being sanctioned by particular communities. In sharp contrast today, India’s explicit constitutional aspiration to eliminate all forms of drug use from society is possibly the single most dangerous ideal that has fueled utter disregard for the health and rights of people who use drugs in India.

Political apathy is evident from the 2014 amendment to the principal Indian drug law, NDPS Act 1985, which leaves very little space for the promotion of evidence-informed and rights-based programming for drug users. The amendment does have a few positive features in its handling of harm reduction, treatment and recasting the death penalty. However, it enhances punishment for consumption and possession of small quantities for personal use from 6 months to 1 year, which is in direct contrast to developments in countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and even America where the War on Drugs originated. The response in India to drug use has primarily been a health services-based approach. Though it mitigates some aspects of vulnerability, this approach fails to address the central role that rights protections play in ensuring the overall wellbeing of drug users.

India: End the war on drug users

Lib Dem Home Office Minister Norman Baker said politicians were out of step with public opinion and called for an end to "robotic mindless rhetoric".

Backbench Conservatives also expressed doubts about current policy but Downing Street said there would be no change.

A report found no obvious link between tough laws and levels of drug use.

The findings of the Home Office report, commissioned by the Liberal Democrats to compare drugs policies in different countries, prompted a row at the top of the coalition.

Lib Dem deputy prime minister Nick Clegg accused his Conservative colleagues of trying to block the report, and of a "totally misplaced, outdated, backward-looking view".

Downing Street in turn accused Mr Clegg of sending "an incredibly dangerous message" and said that drug use in the UK was "plummeting" because of existing policy.

But during the Commons debate brought by Green MP Caroline Lucas, Conservative MPs Robert Syms, Bob Stewart and Zac Goldsmith expressed unease with the current approach.

Mr Syms said: "Contrary to press reports, there are many of us on these benches, the Conservative benches, that believe in evidence-based reform to have a more effective policy in dealing with the scourge of drugs."

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