Newly installed Peruvian President Ollanta Humala is facing the first serious challenge to his authority as coca farmer unions have gone on strike to protest the resumption of coca plant eradication. Last month, Humala's government announced a temporary halt to eradication in the Upper Huallaga River Valley, but now eradication is again underway, and the coca farmer unions are up in arms.
Some 51 percent of the HIV/AIDS-infected households in Cambodia are living in hunger, said a new UN survey, calling for more attention to the need for HIV-sensitive social protection mechanisms.
The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria has raised concerns over the high prevalence rate of these infections among intravenous drug users, despite continuously supporting harm reduction programmes. The concern was raised during a recent visit by a Global Fund executive to follow the progress of an Aids prevention programme in Thailand.
The White House added El Salvador and Belize to its list of drug producing and transit countries, placing for the first time all seven Central American nations on the list in a sign of how awash in illegal narcotics the region has become.
The Liberal Democrats have voted to establish a panel to consider decriminalising the use of all drugs in the UK. The panel would also consider a less radical alternative: that possession would remain illegal, but those caught would have to appear before a panel and made to undertake "appropriate education, health or social interventions", replacing the existing fines and jail sentences on the statute book.
On Friday September 23, 2011, the French NGO AIDES, ASUD and Fédération Addiction are organizing a public meeting in Paris dedicated to promoting drug law reform.
Thailand's new Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, is mobilising a crackdown on illegal drugs as a United Nations agency reveals a massive increase in the production and use of amphetamines across Asia.
The Count the Costs campaign has now been running for 6 months, after a successful launch at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in March. It is now fully up to speed, with the website complete, the resource library filling up, new briefings ready, and more to follow very soon, including translations, and the range and number of supporters growing.
In 1986, Congress enacted severe mandatory minimum sentences, condemning thousands of mostly low-level, mostly nonviolent drug offenders to years, sometimes decades in prison. Please call on the Congress to reform sentencing for drugs offences.
An international human rights group urged Vietnam to shut down drug rehabilitation centers that it said subject inmates to abuse and forced labor. It also called Wednesday on international donors to check the programs they fund inside the centers for possible ties to human rights violations.
Under a joint United Nations programme in the north-eastern part of the country, UNODC works in the four states of Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya, to establish HIV-prevention services that address the special needs of women.
