"Health-based" approaches to drugs put a greater focus on treatment and recovery services for addicts.

The second part of the Dame Carol Black Review is set to be released early next month.

It is likely to acknowledge system failures after a squeeze on funding for youth services in local government.

The review was originally commissioned last July, and will highlight shortcomings due to cuts across national government.

Drugs: UK government adviser to urge more focus on health of users

It was the first day the drop-in centre in a residential neighbourhood here had opened its doors since the coronavirus forced them shut in the spring of 2020. “I’m so glad you all are open again,” the man, whose first name is Jordan, told a volunteer who handed him a full paper bag while heavy metal music riffed over a speaker in the background. He asked for extra naloxone for friends in his rural county, an hour away, where he said it had been scarce throughout the pandemic.

Overdose deaths rose by nearly 30% over the 12-month period that ended in November, to more than 90,000, according to preliminary federal data released this month — suggesting 2020 blew past recent records for such deaths. The staggering increase during the pandemic has many contributing factors, including widespread job loss and eviction; diminished access to addiction treatment and medical care; and an illegal drug supply that became even more dangerous after the country essentially shut down.

But the forced isolation for people struggling with addiction and other mental health issues may be one of the biggest. Now, with the nation reopening, the Biden administration is throwing support behind the contentious approach that the centre here takes, known as harm reduction. Instead of helping drug users achieve abstinence, the chief goal is to reduce their risk of dying or acquiring infectious diseases such as HIV by giving them sterile equipment, tools to check their drugs for fentanyl and other lethal substances, or even just a safe space to nap.

Such programmes have long come under attack for enabling drug use, but President Joe Biden has made expanding harm-reduction efforts one of his drug-policy priorities — the first president to do so. The American Rescue Act includes $30 million specifically for evidence-based harm-reduction services, the first time Congress has appropriated funds specifically for that purpose. The funding, while modest, is a victory for the programs, both symbolically and practically, as they often run on shoestring budgets.

Helping drug users survive, not abstain: ‘Harm reduction’ gains federal US support

By Naomi Burke-Shyne and Ajeng Larasati / TalkingDrugs

On 28th June the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released its report, “Agenda towards transformative change for racial justice and equality,” which highlights the pervasiveness of discrimination faced by Africans and people of African descent around the world. It points to the fact that ‘

systemic racism and enduring harmful and degrading associations of Blackness with criminality and delinquency also shape interactions of people of African descent with law enforcement officials and the criminal justice system

The report speaks to how drug control props up racist systems and explicitly calls for states to remove laws and practices that act as incentives to perpetuate racial discrimination in law enforcement and the criminal justice system – including by reforming drug policies, laws and practices with discriminatory outcomes, in line with international human rights standards.

UN highlights role of drug war in racist policing 

On 26 June, the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking which the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has dedicated this year to the theme “Share facts on drugs. Save lives”, Amnesty International is renewing its call on the UN and its Member States to end the use of the death penalty for drug-related offences as a critical first step in ensuring drug policies are effectively designed to protect people.

The continued secrecy around the use of the death penalty and the silence from UNODC about its use for drug-related offences by some countries, and its wider impact on the enjoyment of human rights, is deeply concerning. The failure by UNODC to even mention the death penalty in its annual report and unreservedly advocate for the abolition of the death penalty not only allows for the harmful narrative that has dominated punitive state responses in the past decades to continue, but also offers cover for violations of human rights committed by some governments in the name of the ending drug-related harm.

The use of the death penalty for drug-related offences represents the pinnacle of the highly punitive paradigm of the “war on drugs”. Amnesty International renews its call on the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and its subsidiary bodies, including UNODC, to make the abolition of the death penalty an integral component of all programmes to promote drug policy reform, prevent crime and improve criminal justice systems globally. Ending the death penalty, an inherently cruel and unfair punishment, would ultimately save lives and allow for the development of new drug policies based on the respect of public health and human rights.

World Drugs Day: UNODC must integrate ending drug-related executions in its work

Oral statement on the importance of decriminalisation for the promotion, protection and fulfilment of the right to health

Statement delivered on 23 June 2021 by the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC).

Thank you for giving me the floor. The IDPC Consortium is a global network of NGOs that promotes drug policies that advance social justice and human rights.

On 26th June, advocates worldwide will mobilise for the Support. Don’t Punish Global Day of Action, to call for the human rights of people who use drugs to be protected. It is in this context that I am making this statement.

Fear of incarceration drives people who use drugs away from life-saving harm reduction and treatment services, increasing their vulnerability to blood-borne diseases, and the risk of overdose deaths.

In 2017 alone, the UN recorded 585,000 preventable drug use-related deaths. And today, over 470,000 people are in prison for simple drug possession, exacerbating health risks.

There is now overwhelming UN support for people who use drugs to be decriminalised, including in the UN System Common Position on Drugs and the latest report of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Globally, over 30 countries have turned to drug decriminalisation.

When grounded in a health and human rights approach, decriminalisation provides an enabling legal framework that promotes, protects and fulfils the right to health of people who use drugs.

We urge you to support this approach, as your predecessors did as far back as 2010, and include assessments on how drug policies are impacting on the right to health in your future reports and country visits, with a particular focus on women, gender non-confirming people, indigenous people, and racial and ethnic minorities.

Statement at the Interactive Dialogue with the UN Special Rapporteur on Health - 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council

Fifty years ago this month, the United States launched a war on its own people. President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one.” Since then, our criminal approach to drugs has devastated lives, destroyed communities, and led to the largest prison population in the world.

Over the past half-century, the drug war has driven a well-documented surge in police budgets and incarceration. Law enforcement agencies now make more than 1.6 million arrests each year for drug possession alone. Human Rights Watch documents that every 25 seconds in the United States, someone is arrested for the simple act of possessing drugs for their personal use. From its inception, the war on drugs, has fueled institutional and structural racism and fuels the prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, and police brutality.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Black people are almost four times as likely as white people to be arrested on marijuana charges, despite similar rates of consumption. The war on drugs has turned even the suspicion of substance use into an excuse for deadly force. A no-knock search warrant — a tactic frequently justified by the assertion that drug suspects pose an inherent danger — led to the killing of Breonna Taylor. As George Floyd was being murdered, an officer nonchalantly told onlookers, “This is why you don’t do drugs, kids.”

The U.S. has exported these violent and regressive policies across the globe, promoting an international framework of drug prohibition and tying military aid and intervention to the war on drugs. In these countries, as in the U.S., criminalization has done nothing to curb supply or demand. Instead, it’s just fueled black market-related violence. Since 2006, Mexico’s war on drug cartels has led to more than 150,000 deaths associated with the drug trade and more than 32,000 disappearances.

Nixon's war on drugs has failed for half a century. It’s time to end it: Alexander Soros

By Toby Seddon / Social and Legal Studies

Origin stories are perennially fascinating. This is partly because of our intuition that beginnings are important and that they may sometimes provide a clue to hidden or buried truths. Origin 

 further appeal by drawing on our deep human attachment to narratives and story-telling. For sociologists, they have proved to be central to the critical analysis of social policy because of the ways in which the framing of social problems is so often shaped by the creation of particular narratives about their origins.

The origin story of global drug prohibition has been told many times and in many ways. One persistent version – partly influenced by a narrative template first set in classic works in the 1960s and 1970s by Howard Becker, Alfred Lindesmith and David Musto – holds that prohibition is a twentieth-century phenomenon, created, driven and led by that century’s superpower, the United States. The prototype for this framing is the notorious Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger’s racist campaign against ‘marijuana’ in the 1930s. But it has been revisited many times since, perhaps most (in)famously in relation to Richard Nixon’s declaration in 1971 of a ‘war on drugs’. The idea that this American-led war has been a total failure has become almost a shibboleth for drug policy experts today.

Rethinking drug law reform in the Asian century

The Narcotics, Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) (Amendment) Bill 2020 was passed by the National Assembly during a session of the Committee of the Whole House on May 19, 2021 and is now awaiting President Uhuru Kenyatta's assent to become law.

But there are arguable and compelling reasons as to why His Excellency the President, in his wisdom and concern for the welfare of all Kenyans - including those burdened by drug addiction and their families - should not append his signature to the Bill but have it returned to the House for further deliberation, input and consensus.

The Bill, as it is, is a product of a process that excluded robust public participation as required by the Constitution and deliberately ignored concrete evidence presented to the drafters that, among other things, it unnecessarily creates insurmountable hurdles in regard to access to healthcare for low cadre users hopelessly hooked to drugs.

This despite international best practices and trends now unreservedly recommending that such individuals be considered candidates for public health interventions.

Kenya: Let President reject narcotics bill

Ongoing discussions, including among key international donors, have raised concerns within Harm Reduction International and the International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD) about the proposed inclusion of mental health within the harm reduction package and more generally about conflating drug use and mental health. This paper aims to stimulate and clarify the discussion around this.

Although there are people who use drugs who may experience mental health issues, drug use and drug dependency itself is not a mental health condition. The concerning conflation of drug use and dependency with mental health issues is inaccurate, stigmatising and might have long term harmful consequences to the community, including removing the agency and capacity of people who use drugs to make decisions about their own bodies and lives. It could reduce resources available for harm reduction and community-led services, and lead to deprioritizing evidence-based, lifesaving public health interventions in national and international guidelines. A lack of political will and insufficient funding are major barriers to implementing harm reduction at scale, and this conflation could seriously disrupt availability, access and delivery of essential services.

Drug use and drug dependency itself is not a mental health condition - Statement

To: Dr. Philippe Duneton, Executive Director, Unitaid Madame Marisol Touraine
Unitaid Executive Board

Dear Dr. Duneton, Madame Chair Touraine, and Esteemed Members of the Unitaid Board,

We write to call urgent attention to the plight of the 354 million people living with viral hepatitis and the dire need to elevate efforts to improve patients’ health, which has potentially resounding effects for affected communities, governments, and global health. We applaud Unitaid’s leadership in strengthening and accelerating activities to ensure generic access to HIV, viral hepatitis, TB, and malaria treatments, and the development of simpler, point-of-care diagnostics. We commend your organization’s significant accomplishments, in partnership with civil society organizations (CSOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and community advocates, to spur global uptake of innovations in hepatitis C virus (HCV), to sensitize governments and communities, and to catalyze political commitments to end viral hepatitis, HIV, TB, and malaria in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Thanks to highly effective treatments and vaccination, we have the unique opportunity to end HBV and HCV globally by 2030. We must seize this opportunity to ensure that hepatitis patients are not left behind and that diseases with the greatest chance for cure in our lifetimes are eliminated.

We urge Unitaid to continue making catalytic investments towards curing people with HCV and treating people with HBV and to enable LMICs to reach WHO targets and Sustainable Development Goal 3 by 2030 through funding and targeted action.

Unfortunately, progress towards HBV and HCV elimination in the majority of countries is hampered by the difficulties of finding and diagnosing asymptomatic patients, due to complex and costly diagnostics and antiviral/direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) prices that are still unaffordable where generic access is not possible. We believe that CSOs, NGOs, community health workers, and affected communities, with the support of Unitaid and other partners, can help overcome these barriers and accelerate progress on all these fronts.

Significant progress in other fields has been made to generate demand for simpler diagnostics and more optimal treatments, to increase treatment uptake, and to adopt changes in national policies by supporting community engagement efforts led by people living with HIV and TB, such as the IMPAACT4TB initiative. Notably, community engagement, as part of treatment and diagnostics literacy and leadership-building efforts, have been important activities in the Unitaid- funded HEAD-Start project to generate demand for simpler, innovative HCV diagnostics, and are an integral component of the Unitaid LONGEVITY grant to develop long-acting formulations for malaria, HCV, and latent TB infections. Unitaid’s support has enabled affected communities to meaningfully participate in high-level national elimination planning; aided in scaling up community-based testing and treatment with oral DAAs; and strengthened the technical capacity of community leaders to serve on steering committees and a WHO-level technical working group focused on HCV and substance user health. Additional investment is necessary to sustain this momentum, to strengthen and capacitate effective leadership that achieves similar accomplishments as in the HIV and TB spaces, to spur action towards HBV elimination, and to ensure greater participation by affected communities in advancing health equity in national elimination strategies.

To date, Unitaid’s investment in HCV and grassroots advocacy to champion the needs of affected communities and people disproportionately affected by viral hepatitis has made enormous impacts. Community healthcare and advocacy trainings have increased HCV awareness and strengthened technical knowledge of thousands of community-based providers in at least a dozen countries when launching national hepatitis programs. Support for community-government dialogues have contributed to community mobilization to find the ‘missing millions’ of undiagnosed patients; decentralized testing and treatment; and catalyzed initiatives, such as the integration of viral hepatitis test-and-treat programs in HIV, maternal health, harm reduction, and prison settings.

Unitaid’s unique and holistic involvement in HCV also instigated the development of innovative, simpler diagnostics, including HCV self-tests, generated real-world evidence on the effectiveness of generics, and supported the development of ravidasvir/sofosbuvir. Unitaid’s end-of-project evaluations have also acknowledged the game-changing role that core antigen rapid diagnostics tests could play for bringing fast, confirmatory testing to the community level.

Despite HCV and harm reduction programs saving lives, saving costs, proving cost-effective, and providing enormous returns on investment, the funding necessary to apply these innovations to accelerate treatment and diagnosis is absent. We are deeply concerned by the impact that COVID-19 has had on implementing viral hepatitis programs worldwide, in addition to ever-growing funding gaps in this field. Global hepatitis programs are estimated at US$500 million annually – less than one-tenth of the US$5-6 billion required annually to achieve elimination by 2030. Global health funding for harm reduction is also dire, amounting to 5 percent of the US$2.7 billion required annually to meet global need.

Additionally, while investment and prioritization has led to progress towards HCV elimination, to date, very little progress has been made towards eliminating HBV, which affects 292 million individuals and has effective treatments that prevent liver cancer and save lives. HBV continues to be under-prioritized globally, and it is critical that we are more inclusive of HBV when planning for and funding viral hepatitis elimination efforts.

We encourage Unitaid to help reinforce health systems during the pandemic and bridge funding gaps, thus playing a catalytic role to accelerate access to HBV and HCV diagnostics and treatments in LMICs. In fact, leveraging Unitaid’s COVID-19 funding, such as research and development on HBV surface antigen and core antigen rapid diagnostic tests; support for lab infrastructure and civil society networks to integrate viral hepatitis screening/testing in COVID- 19 responses; and investing in community engagement across its projects, could strengthen health systems to address viral hepatitis and to continue to work on HIV, TB, and malaria under your mandate. We propose several strategies as part of creating these enabling environments:

Expansion of awareness among decision-makers that HBV and HCV are diseases that can be eliminated by 2030 with existing tools but that need community education and participation, action plans, and financing;

Development of financing mechanisms for viral hepatitis elimination;

Support for simplified HBV and HCV diagnostic tools; and

Support for access to simple and affordable DAA and HBV treatments in high-burden LMICs.

The 130 signatories of this letter represent CSOs and NGOs committed to eliminating viral hepatitis, healthcare providers, patients, and communities living with or affected by HBV and HCV and fighting for affordable, equitably accessible treatments and diagnostics. We welcome an opportunity to further discuss with you how discontinuing funding for HCV-related initiatives will roll back the progress that we’ve made.

We request acknowledgement of this letter and a meeting in the coming months to plan how we can collaboratively tackle this global health issue and continue to offer hope to the hundreds of millions of people living with or at risk of viral hepatitis.

Treatment Action Group
Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative FIND, the global alliance for diagnostics

Civil society and community organisations call on Unitaid leadership to support funding for hepatitis & harm reduction 

Today, I announce that the preliminary examination into the situation in the Republic of the Philippines ("the Philippines") has concluded and that I have requested judicial authorisation to proceed with an investigation.

As I stated in December 2019, at the annual session of the Assembly of States Parties, before I end my term as Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court ("ICC" or the "Court"), I intend to reach determinations on all situations that have been under preliminary examination during my tenure, as far as I am able to do so in accordance with my obligations under the Rome Statute. In that statement, I also indicated the high likelihood that several preliminary examinations would progress to the investigative stage.

The situation in the Philippines has been under preliminary examination since 8 February 2018. During that time, my Office has been busy analysing a large amount of publicly available information and information provided to us under article 15 of the Statute. On the basis of that work, I have determined that there is a reasonable basis to believe that the crime against humanity of murder has been committed on the territory of the Philippines between 1 July 2016 and 16 March 2019 in the context of the Government of Philippines "war on drugs" campaign. The Office does not take a position on any government's internal policies and initiatives intended to address the production, distribution and consumption of psychoactive substances within the parameters of the law and due process of law, and in the present case, it is duly acting strictly in accordance with its specific and clearly defined mandate and obligations under the Statute. Following a thorough preliminary examination process, the available information indicates that members of the Philippine National Police, and others acting in concert with them, have 

 killed between several thousand and tens of thousands of civilians during that time. My Office has also reviewed information related to allegations of torture and other inhumane acts, and related events as early as 1 November 2011, the beginning of the Court's jurisdiction in the Philippines, all of which we believe require investigation.

Statement of the Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, on her request to open an investigation of the situation in the Philippines

Full-time position based in Bangkok, Thailand

12 months, full-time contract (with possibility of extension)

The International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) is a global network of NGOs and professional networks that aims to promote objective and open debate on the effectiveness, direction and content of drug policies at national and international level, and supports evidence-based policies that are effective in reducing drug-related harm. We have over 180 member organisations worldwide, and extensive communication and contacts with a range of experts in the field. The IDPC Secretariat is based in London with a smaller presence in Bangkok.

IDPC is looking to appoint a Programme Officer to provide support to the IDPC regional work programme in Asia.

The successful candidate will report to IDPC’s Regional Director: Asia and support financial management and reporting to donors, communications, administration, networking amongst IDPC members in the region with the potential to take on policy research and analysis work.

The successful candidate will be highly motivated, flexible, capable of working both independently and as part of a team, and will possess a willingness to combine financial management and administrative work with communications, networking and other tasks requiring more autonomy and creativity. At present, IDPC does not have a physical office in Bangkok, so the successful candidate would be expected to work from home with regular face-to-face meetings in shared working spaces with the Regional Director: Asia and other colleagues when appropriate.

Demonstrable experience and/or interest of issues relating to human rights, public health, HIV/AIDS and harm reduction, criminal justice and law reform as it relates to drug policy in Asia

Demonstrable project and financial management skills with experience of managing budgets, expenditures and project and financial reporting to donors

Excellent interpersonal, representational and communications skills, especially in developing and sustaining relationships with a wide range of stakeholders in a professional and courteous manner at all times

Excellent organisational skills with attention to detail

Strong problem-solving skills along with the ability to work independently

Ability to multi-task and manage competing priorities, including those that arise on an ad hoc and urgent basis

Excellent spoken and written English and Thai language skills

Strong capabilities in policy research, analysis, and writing

Experience working on strategic social media communications

Please note that we can only accept applications from individuals who already have the right to live and work in Thailand

If you wish to apply for this post, please complete the application form and send it to Ms. Daisy Bowdery (dbowdery@idpc.net) by 6:00 pm (Bangkok time) on Wednesday 23 June 2021.

It is expected that interviews will be held from 28 June 2021, with a commencement date as soon as possible afterward.

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