In 1974, scientists at the University of Chicago immunized a rhesus monkey against morphine. After training the monkey to self-administer both heroin and cocaine by hitting buttons that delivered small, separate doses into a surgically-placed catheter, they administered the vaccine. The monkey’s heroin use plummeted, but it continued to use cocaine the same as before—a sign that the vaccine was working.

The effects started wearing off in a matter of hours, and it wasn’t long before the monkey required boosters. If offered a high enough dose of heroin, its interest in using it returned.

This wasn’t the most sophisticated methodology. But in the decades since, as our technology and grasp of vaccine science advanced, the idea of a vaccine against addiction lingered. Researchers have attempted immunizations for tobacco and cocaine, both of which were tested on humans but failed to receive Food and Drug Administration approval because they were found no more effective than placebo.

Human trials are currently underway for a vaccine against oxycodone, oxymorphone and hydrocodone—better known as OxyContin, Opana and Vicodin. The University of Minnesota Medical School team behind the research sees this as an additional treatment option for addiction to those pharmaceuticals.

The vaccine is intended for people with opioid use disorder. It would train immune cells to treat opioid molecules like an invading pathogen, and destroy them before they can make it to the brain. It would not reduce cravings, but would block people from feeling any effects of the opioid after they used it. If effective, they would experience no pain relief; no euphoria; no overdose.

An opioid vaccine is not the answer 

A section of civil society organisations (CSOs) have asked the government to stop the arraignment of drug addicts in court.

The Uganda Harm Reduction Network (UHRN), an organisation that provides treatment and care for people affected by drugs, says such repressive actions have proven to be counterproductive.

UHRN adds that such actions contravene international standards on human rights and public health.

“The suspects in drug cases are subject to violence or torture by the police. The hostile legal environment drives both brutal human rights violations and epidemics of HIV, TB and viral hepatitis among people who use drugs in Uganda,” Mr Twaibu Wamala, the UHRN executive director, said yesterday.

The Global Drug Policy Index that came out in November 2021 shows that Brazil keeps Uganda off the basement when it comes to poor drug policies and their implementation.

The index serves as a tool for accountability and evaluation in the field of drug policy.

Many African countries fared poorly on the index because their policies do not align with the UN principles of human rights, health, and development.

Do not take people living with drug dependency to court, Ugandan CSOs urge government

INPUD and Drugreporter are excited to announce the five winners of our #Morethan video contest!

The contest, which launched in September, is intended to be a continuation of the #MoreThan campaign launched on 2021 International Drug Users Remembrance Day, highlighting that people who use drugs are more than the sum of all labels attached to us by broader society. The contest was supported through the Robert Carr Fund for Civil Society Networks.

In total we received an incredible 22 submissions from 17 countries. It was not easy to select five winners among all of these fantastic videos, which highlighted some incredible human stories as told by members of the community. An independent board of five community activists were asked to rate the videos according to: eligibility, appropriateness, relevance, message and quality.

Below please find the five winners with links to view their videos on YouTube. Congratulations to all the winners!

1st Prize: Delirium a choice
Directed by Sania Zehra & Aisha Kasiri, Pakistan

This short film is based on the life events of a woman who by profession is a nurse, portraying her struggles during the pandemic and how isolated she became even among family and friends due to the negative connotation attached to drug use. The fact that she was juggling her responsibilities of home and work life were simply negated because of her inclination towards drug use as a way to cope with daily challenges of life and the havoc that COVID-19 pandemic brought on her mental health.

2nd Prize: 6 Women, 1 Seed
Directed by Larissa Lewandovski, Portugal

This documentary features violence against women who use drugs and sex workers. The documentary was made as part of the campaign against violence on women using drugs (WUD) launched by WHRIN and EuroNPUD – SisterWUD. Since then, a new group, GAMEM (Peer support group among women experiencing violence) has been created, representing WUD, including migrants, sex workers, homeless women and non-binary people. GAMEM has a weekly meeting at a safe space provided by a cultural association, Sirigaita, at a neighbourhood where drugs, sex work and tourism coexist in Lisbon.

3rd Prize: Living With Stigma
Directed by Dhojo Wahengbam, India

This is a short documentary film about a person who use drugs in Manipur, India, narrating his personal real life experience.

4th Prize: Confession
Directed by Tengku Raka, Indonesia

This short documentary video is about stigma and discrimination experienced by woman who use drugs. We meet a mother and daughter, who both suffered the consequences of Draconian drug laws and mass incarceration from different perspectives.

5th Prize: Should I say that I use other drugs?
Directed by Raúl Lescano Méndez and Dana Bonilla

This short film, based on Carl Hart’s essay ‘Get Out of the Closet: Stop Behaving Like Children’, calls on drug users to use self-examination and the power of their own voice as an urgent step to fight the stigmata related to drug use. Instead of waiting for the world to change, it might be time for ourselves to start changing.

Announcing the winners of the #MoreThan video contest

Malta will this week become the first European country to legalise the cultivation and possession of cannabis for personal use, pipping Luxembourg to the post, as the continent undergoes a wave of change to its drug laws.

Possession of up to seven grams of the drug will be legal for those aged 18 and above, and it will permissible to grow up to four cannabis plants at home, with up to 50g of the dried product storable.

A vote in favour of the legislation in the Maltese parliament on Tuesday will be followed by the law being signed by the president in order for it to be enacted by the weekend, Owen Bonnici, the minister responsible, told the Guardian.

The move by Malta, the EU’s smallest member state, is likely to be followed by reform across Europe in 2022. Germany recently announced a move to establish a legally regulated market, following announcements from the governments of Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. A referendum in Italy is planned, while Canada, Mexico and 18 US states have already enacted similar legislation.

Malta to legalise cannabis for personal use in European first

In our last INHSU 2021 satellite session, we welcomed a global panel of experts to discuss the decriminalisation of drugs. The lively session gave real-life examples of decriminalisation models and shared valuable insights into how decriminalisation could positively impact the health and wellbeing of people who use drugs globally.

The session was chaired by Professor Alison Ritter from the Drug Policy Modelling Program at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Alison was joined by Jean-Maxence Granier, Chair of Asud, Dr. Marie Jauffret-Roustide from Inserm, A/Prof Caitlin Hughes from Flinders University, Hon. Fortune Daniel Molokela-Tsiye, Member of Parliament of Zimbabwe and National Assembly Movement for Democratic Change Alliance, Caitlin Shane, Lawyer at Pivot Legal Society and Shaun Shelly, chair of the South African Network of People Who Use Drugs (SANPUD).

“There has been a long history of criminal penalties, discrimination and multiple forms of surveillance against people who use drugs,” Alison said, opening the session. “One solution that is gaining more traction is to remove the penalties for personal drug use.”

As the subject of decriminalisation becomes a hot topic globally, common questions, concerns and considerations have appeared. This session aimed to delve into each of them.

Key considerations for the decriminalisation of drug use

An estimated 58 million people worldwide are infected with hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus that can lead to serious liver disease. This virus, which causes an estimated 300,000 deaths each year, affects people who inject drugs and incarcerated populations at much higher rates.

Unitaid is therefore seeking to fund innovative projects that will expand access to new tools or under-utilised interventions to prevent and treat hepatitis C, with a particular focus on these key groups in low- and middle-income countries.

Significant progress against hepatitis C has been made in recent years; new medicines that can cure the disease are more widely available, prices have become more affordable, and diagnostic tools have improved. But efforts to prevent transmission remain insufficient. COVID-19 has caused further setbacks; according to the World Health Organization, hepatitis services were among the most frequently disrupted as a result of the pandemic.

“Hepatitis C greatly affects people who are too often overlooked or ignored by traditional health interventions. Building on the previous work done by Unitaid, we want to invest in the prevention and treatment of hepatitis C, and seek to avert transmission using additional, effective and high-impact harm reduction tools and strategies,” said Dr Philippe Duneton, Executive Director of Unitaid.

Globally, despite their proven effectiveness, the availability and use of tools to prevent hepatitis C transmission are low. Without intervention, uptake an availability of effective interventions will remain low and will impede the achievement of hepatitis elimination targets. This will also continue to put populations that are already highly vulnerable and marginalized at risk of infection, liver disease and death.

Make innovative or under-used tools more widely available for key populations

Accelerate the integration of hepatitis C prevention, including testing and treatment, into harm reduction settings or prisons

Reduce hepatitis C transmission among some of the most vulnerable and high-risk groups

Facilitate the expansion of integrated hepatitis C prevention services to reach key populations in countries where the need is greatest

Engagement with civil society and affected communities is a critical determinant for success.

Join us on Thursday 13 January 2022 at 12:00 (noon) CET for a Unitaid-hosted webinar to discuss the scope of the call for proposals and answer questions related to submission. Register here

The deadline to submit a proposal is Thursday 31 March 2022 at 12:00 (noon) CET.

Unitaid launches call for proposals to prevent hepatitis C in the most marginalised and at-risk groups

At midnight on May 26, 2018, Ekramul Haque’s daughters were trying to reach their father, who had left home three hours earlier and had still not returned.

Haque was an elected council member in Cox’s Bazar’s Teknaf municipality, a southeastern Bangladeshi town bordering Myanmar. To the outside world, Teknaf and surrounding subdistricts in Cox’s Bazar are best known for hosting nearly a million Rohingya refugees, but domestically, it is also a major entry point for narcotics (mostly yaba—a combination of methamphetamine and caffeine) sourced from Myanmar.

When Haque’s daughters reached him, he was audibly distressed, but he was also trying to comfort them. “Abbu [dad], you seem to be crying,” one of his confused daughters said. Unsettled, they alerted their mother, Ayesha Begum, who joined in subsequent calls.

Haque was at that time in the custody of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite Bangladeshi police unit estimated to have killed more than 1,100 people between 2004 and 2020. He would soon be executed, joining hundreds of others killed by authorities in a bloody election-year anti-drug campaign. After his death, the RAB produced a typical press release, claiming that Haque had been killed in a supposed gunfight during a drug raid.

The US has a police brutality problem. So does Bangladesh.

For years, drug policy reform organisations have been advocating for policies which promote alternatives to prohibition, such as a move away from the criminalization of people who use drugs, and a move towards evidence-based models such as harm reduction. Whilst harm reduction measures are mentioned – the first time since the 1990s – activists are still left with a bitter taste in their mouth as the new drugs strategy (and the media attention surrounding it) doubles down on the failed and unevidenced ‘War on Drugs’ discourse perpetuated by its 2011 and 2017 counterparts.

Despite the well-known success of the decriminalisation model in Portugal, the UK drugs strategy chooses not to take this path, incorrectly asserting it would “leave criminals in control while risking an increase in drug use”. Yet, the evidence clearly shows that where the harm reduction measures described above are implemented in conjunction with decriminalisation of drugs, such increases do not occur.

The UK still lags behind the global trend of reform that can be seen across Europe in countries such as Norway and Germany as well as in North America. Despite UN guidance to move away from repression and punishment of people who use drugs and to decriminalise drug use, the UK government has chosen to continue along a punitive path which has been shown time and again to exacerbate all the societal ills that criminal justice responses purport to address.

The UK government's 'War on Drugs' approach is failing

On 19 June 2009 Kostya Proletarsky, a drug user and HIV activist, died of tuberculosis meningitis at the Botkin Hospital in St. Petersburg, Russia. His death was the result of three years of mistreatment and torture at the prison facility No. 4 in Karelia, Russia. In Russia, where drug treatment is barely available, imprisonment becomes the main “solution” to the problem of drug addiction. But unfortunately, these institutions don’t cure. Instead, prisons kill.

The animated hand drawn documentary, featuring the original audio interview with Kostya and his mother, Irina, aims to commemorate Kostya Proletarsky and many others who have not survived prison systems around the world.

This animated movie is produced by the Rights Reporter Foundation, narrated by Anya Sarang, directed by István Gábor Takács, and is hand drawn frame by frame by Lili Rontó.

The documentary film was screened at 7 film festivals around the world, and won the main prize of the 65th Hungarian National Independent Film festival, and of the Madrid Film and Human Rights Film Festival in 2020.

For background materials, press kit and other resources, visit: https://www.drugreporter.net/kostya
Or contact: takacsistvangabor@rightsreporter.net
For more information on the Andrey Rylkov Foundation, visit: https://rylkov-fond.org/

This video is produced by the Rights Reporter Foundation, a non-profit organisation, which is not supported by any governments or political parties. If you like our shows, please support our work on our website, https://drugreporter.net/support/. Make a donation today and become our supporting member.

Kostya Proletarsky - A documentary on the violence of prisons and the need to end the 'war on drugs'

INCB recalls that the three conventions were adopted to safeguard the health and wellbeing of people. It is for this reason that INCB is concerned about continued reports of human rights violations, including arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, other forms of mistreatment, and extrajudicial killings, being committed in the name of drug control. These violations undermine the rule of law and are contrary to the human rights instruments and drug control conventions. INCB would like to remind Member States that the drug control conventions, the Political Declaration adopted by the General Assembly at its twentieth special session, and the Political Declaration and Plan of Action on International Cooperation towards an Integrated and Balanced Strategy to Counter the World Drug Problem all call for a balanced approach, respect for the principle of proportionality and respect for human rights, including the rights of people who are suspected of committing drug-related offences.

In particular, INCB reminds Member States of their treaty obligations to take all practicable measures for prevention, and for education, treatment, rehabilitation and social reintegration for people who use drugs. Such services should be evidence-based, accessible, free from discrimination and stigma, and respect human rights and dignity.

The drug control conventions must be implemented in a manner consistent with international human rights standards. Indeed, compliance with the drug control conventions can lead to the direct and positive fulfilment of human rights, and such compliance is vital for the realization of the right to health, which includes the right to treatment and access to controlled substances for medical purposes.

Drug control policies that meet all human rights principles and standards are effective and sustainable. INCB highlights the important links between human rights and drug control policies and how these policies can lead to the protection of human rights and the promotion of the Sustainable Development Goals.

INCB continues to work with Member States to support the implementation of the drug control conventions and reaffirms its commitment to progress the Sustainable Development Goals.

Statement by the INCB President on the occasion of Human Rights Day, 10 December 2021

The Reconvened Session of the 64th Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) was held from 9th and 10th December 2021. IDPC, HRI and INPUD drafted the following statement at the occasion of the UN meeting.

Statement by the International Drug Policy Consortium, Harm Reduction International and the International Network of People Who Use Drugs on Agenda Item 11 of the 64th Reconvened session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs

Madame Chair, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for giving me the floor.

This statement is delivered on behalf of the International Drug Policy Consortium, Harm Reduction International and the International Network of People who Use Drugs.

Today, 10th of December, is International Human Rights Day. Unfortunately, the Commission on Narcotic Drugs has nothing celebrate.

In recent years, support for human rights has become a welcome mainstay of international drug policy documents. In the 2016 UNGASS Outcome Document, the 2019 Ministerial Declaration and many CND Resolutions, all Member States regularly commit to respect, protect, and promote human rights. The INCB has repeatedly stated that drug control must comply with human rights obligations. And through the UN system Common Position on drugs, under UNODC’s stewardship, all UN entities have pledged to support policies that put human rights at the centre.

Despite these commitments, repressive drug policies continue to fuel widespread and systematic rights violations, including the death penalty for drug offences, extrajudicial killings, mass incarceration, the systemic denial of harm reduction, and countless acts of police brutality and violence.

This year’s International Human Rights Day focuses on equality and non-discrimination. Drug bodies should be deeply compelled by this theme. As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote in her recent report on racial justice, ‘The discriminatory application of criminal law must be tackled at every stage, including by reforming drug policies with discriminatory outcomes’. Yet, even in yesterday’s session, we were shocked to hear objections to the inclusion LGBTQI+ populations in UNODC reporting.

Last June, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention published a watershed study on arbitrary detention and drug policies.

International law establishes an absolute prohibition on the arbitrary deprivation of liberty that applies to all Member States. This study documents the appalling extent to which this prohibition is breached because of drug laws. But the study also provides a series of positive country examples, as well as constructive recommendations, and the Working Group has always stood ready to dialogue and cooperate with Member States.

In light of this, we are deeply regret that the Chair of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, who had been invited to present their findings today, has been disinvited at the last moment.

This study requested by the Human Rights Council in a resolution adopted by consensus, which also mandated the Working Group to bring it to the attention of CND. The decision to disinvite the Working Group places Vienna in discordance with the rest of the UN system.

The move to silence a UN human rights mandate precisely on International Human Rights Day sends a disturbing message that human rights expertise is not welcome in Vienna, and that the Commission on Narcotic Drugs prefers to turn a blind eye to human rights violations.

This decision is unprecedented and deeply concerning. The CND has made repeated commitments on welcomingcontributions by other UN entities to the work of CND, most recently in the 2019 Ministerial Declaration. And for several years now, UN human rights bodies have rightly addressed CND meetings without issue.

We urge Member States to ensure that the Chair of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is invited again to the upcoming regular session of the CND. The involvement of human rights bodies and experts needs to be welcomed and proactively encouraged in all CND meetings. Otherwise, the Commission will risk sliding into an increasingly isolated and irrelevant position within the United Nations system.

Civil society condemns silencing of human rights discussion at CND Reconvened session

We don’t have a drug problem. The problem lies in the way we think about drugs. Unless we stop demonising drugs, criminalising or pathologising the people that use them and abandon the goal of a drug-free society, we will continue to be distracted from the real problems that cause many of our youth to find solutions in the dependent use of drugs.

The 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs committed countries “to prevent and combat the evil of drug addiction”. In 2019 the heads of 31 UN agencies expressed unanimous support for the decriminalisation of possession and the use of drugs.

The shift in UN thinking enables us to move forward. We have relied on the criminal justice system to address drug use for far too long. In a 2020 article, Justice Edwin Cameron described the catastrophic effect of the “war on drugs”. We need a fresh, bold response to the use of drugs. People who are dependent on drugs need support, not punishment.

South Africa is beginning to see changes. The new National Drug Master Plan (2019-2024) promises a shift in policy. It “recognises that the punitive approach has not been successful in tackling drug-related problems”. Instead, it emphasises “evidence-based public health and social justice principles that focus on individuals, families, communities, society as a whole”. These must “underscore social protection and health care instead of conviction and punishment”.

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