By Colleen Daniels & Suchitra Rajagopalan - Harm Reduction International / Filter

By every measure, the global drug war has failed. It has failed to decrease drug use and sales. Drug-involved overdose deaths continue to soar around the world. And violence related to the illicit markets created by prohibition wreaks havoc on individuals and communities.

The drug war also continues to enable racist policies and practices. Black, Brown and Indigenous people are disproportionately targeted by punitive drug law enforcement and overrepresented in prison populations worldwide.

Every year over $100 billion is spent on global drug law enforcement. This is more than 500 times the amount invested in harm reduction services for people who use drugs. Prioritizing punitive enforcement over interventions which protect the health of people who use drugs is a political 

 made by many governments. This approach violates human rights, drives stigma and discrimination, and has no impact on drug use. As well as being expensive for governments to implement, it places additional economic burdens on public health, communities and the individual, further amplifying inequalities.

Decades of advocacy by drug policy reformers and human rights activists have resulted in a recognition of the magnitude of the damage done by the drug war’s punitive logic. As we reimagine drug policy, it is essential that we question who is best placed to respond to drug use and sales—and that we advocate for the redirection of funds within local, national and international budgets, away from punitive drug control towards compassionate and effective health and community programs.

We must divest from the failed drug war locally, nationally and globally

Interview with Linas Tamošaitis & Young Wave / EHRA

This year “Young Wave” has focused small grant activities on the development of the social campaign. Why have you chosen such kind of activity? Could you please tell us what your campaign is about?

Even though it was a small grant, for us it was a big project! In Lithuania, we knew that the Parliament is due to discuss drug decriminalization amendments this year. As the only NGO in the country focused on drug harm reduction for young people, we decided that it is our responsibility to start raising awareness and understanding on how drug criminalization disproportionately affects young peoples’ lives. Over the past 3 years, alarming indicators have shown that drug policy in Lithuania is focused only on criminalization of people who use drugs and those, who possess small amounts of drugs without intent to distribute. For example, possession of drugs in small quantities without intent to distribute accounted for 77% of all drug related crimes committed in 2019. 63 % of offenders were under the age of 29. Each year, about 750 people are serving sentences in prisons, which cost Lithuania around 10,5 million Euro per year. These are just a few indicators, that prompted us to create a social campaign on the harms of drug criminalization. The campaign is called “Give a helping hand, not handcuffs” 

(in Lithuanian – “Ištiesk ranką, ne antrankius”)

Why this campaign was developed, what were the expectations, main expected results/changes?

This campaign was developed in recognition of the fact that the political process to achieve drug decriminalization would be very contested, and our opposition would mobilize in the media and social networks. We realized that we also need to strengthen our message so that politicians feel that young people and society at large are concerned about the harms of drug criminalization. If we don’t take action, who will? The expectation was that our campaign would get featured publicly in the media, social networks, and at least will offer a counterpoint to the narratives of the political right wing in our country. Obviously, the main expected change would be for the drug decriminalization law to pass the vote in the Parliament, but we still have some time before the vote. If it doesn’t pass, at least we would have mobilized the community and got it ready for the next response. During the campaign we have found new allies and new stakeholders for us to grow and be more impactful in the future.

Give a helping hand, not handcuffs: Social decriminalization campaign in Lithuania

Drugs like opium and cannabis have been used in cultures around the world for millennia. Drug regulation, on the otherhand, arrived when settlers and colonizers did—particularly in African and Asian countries.

“Criminalization is a colonial legacy,” Tripti Tandon, deputy director with the Lawyers Collective, told 

Lawyers Collective is one of the oldest human rights organizations in India. Tandon had just spoken on the impact of colonization on drug policy within the country during a May 26 panel hosted by Harm Reduction International, Release, Dejusticia, the International Drug Policy Consortium, the Transnational Institute, and Voices of Community Action & Leadership, Kenya. The panel, 

Decolonising Drug Policy: Dismantling Racism and Colonialism Through Drug Policy Reform

, was the first of a four-part series. Speakers from India, South Africa and Kenya shared their experiences.

“The American experiment in drug prohibition … really became one of the flagship foreign policies of the USA,” said Kojo Koram, a lecturer at the Birkbeck School of Law, during the panel. “[It] had the consequences of actually reproducing, and in some cases accelerating, the racial and geographical divisions within the world.” Koram’s research points to implementation of drug prohibition and penalization policies as a way to “civilize” Indigenous peoples.

To decolonize drugs, start with prohibition’s settler origins

Over the course of May 2021, the fear that COVID-19 would breach Cambodia’s prisons was finally realized, but despite being warned of such a possibility for more than a year, the government has so far refused to explain its response to the crisis or detail the exact number of cases found within the penal system.

This has prompted concerns among rights groups that COVID-19 is going unchecked through Cambodia’s gravely overcrowded prisons and that cases are not being reported.

DLA Piper called for a reduction in custodial punishments, notably pre-trial detention which is how an estimated 35 percent of the roughly 39,000 prisoners in Cambodia are held.

A similar study conducted across 109 countries by Harm Reduction International and the International Drug Policy Consortium published in January 2021 also found that prison release schemes eased the burden on states during the pandemic, but while they had been initially successful, they were not widely implemented.

COVID-19 outbreaks highlight urgency of prison reforms in Cambodia

The Misuse of Drugs Act (MDA) turns fifty today. In the half-century since its implementation, the act has perpetuated a false reality that renders a selected list of drugs the cause of society’s ills.

I use the term ‘drugs’ here for convenience, but that in itself is troublesome. Loaded with moralistic implications, it is a linguistic construction that feeds into the binary drawn between substances that are approved by the state, like caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco, and those that are not—cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy, and so on—which makes it part of the problem that the MDA represents.

That problem is the attempted eradication of certain psychoactive substances. Introduced in the wake of the global shift towards a prohibitive approach to substance regulation, the MDA is a mechanism of control that aims to govern the use and distribution of substances considered ‘dangerous or otherwise harmful’.

50 years of Britain’s bad drug policy

Suzanne Sharkey used to arrest drug users, then she became one. She worked as an undercover officer for Northumbria Police in the 1990s, and was "very happy" locking up users and dealers. "I joined the police because of what they stood for - reducing crime, protecting communities and locking up 'the baddies'," she said.

"But I ended up a 24/7 alcoholic and I used drugs. I was in recovery and I looked around at the people there with me, and one of the biggest barriers I saw to their recovery were drug laws. The criminalisation closed so many doors for them that they couldn't move on with their lives."

Now she is one of those calling for drug policy reform as co-executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, an activist group made up of current and former justice sector workers.

Britain's Misuse of Drugs Act turns 50 with reform calls

Melbourne City Council has voted in favour of a supervised-injecting room in the CBD after furious debate at its meeting on Tuesday night.

A motion by councillor Roshena Campbell – a senior Liberal party figure – opposing a safe-injecting room anywhere in the city was narrowly defeated, while a second vote on a council management report that recommended supporting a Victorian government service was successful.

It would be the second safe injecting room in Melbourne, joining a controversial centre in Richmond.

Australia: After furious debate, Melbourne council votes to support safe-injecting room

While the Czech parliament discusses the amendment to the Criminal Code that would effectively decriminalise drug use, the Constitutional Court has repealed part of the law concerning small amounts of cannabis and ‘magic’ mushrooms.

An important amendment to the Substance Abuse Act is being debated in the Chamber of Deputies, which is very important for the whole area of drug policy. It is a government proposal by the Ministry of Health, to which a large number of amendments of various quality and content have been tabled. However, three of these amendments, if adopted, can mark a positive breakthrough in the field of drug policy and addiction care in the Czech Republic.

These are amendments laid by Mr Tomáš Vymazal, Deputy Minister for Health Care, which would allow the creation of supervised consumption rooms for controlled use of drugs, would allow for testing of the chemical composition of drugs in, for example, dance clubs and would get rid of unnecessary criminalisation for the processing of small quantities of cannabis. On Thursday, May 13, the amendment was debated by the House Health Committee.

Civil society supports government proposal to reform drug laws in the Czech Republic

It’s a Rio de Janeiro classic. Officers of the civil, military or army police make an incursion into a 

. They arrive in armored vehicles, carrying assault rifles. Soon they issue a statement justifying their actions as necessary to stamp out illegal drug suppliers who “dominate” the area. They say that in order to tackle organized crime, you sometimes need to produce corpses and orphans in the process. It’s a drug war, and there are always casualties in war.

One day before the May 6 Jacarezinho Massacre, President Jair Bolsonaro met with Rio de Janeiro’s governor, Cláudio Castro, at the Palácio das Laranjeiras. I wonder if they talked about the operation that would become the deadliest in the long history of police violence in the Wonderful City.

In June 2020, the Brazilian Supreme Court had prohibited police raids in Rio’s favelas—due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By the next month, under the reduction in police incursions, the number of people fatally shot in favelas dropped 70 percent. Then police forces started ignoring the ruling.

The Jacarezinho Massacre exposed the current government’s necropolitics. Heavily-armed police officers entered a poor community and murdered at least 28 men in 10 different areas of the neighborhood. The vice president of the republic then dismissed the dead as “all thugs.” Bolsonaro called the victims “drug traffickers who steal, kill and destroy families,” and congratulated the police officers for a successful operation. Conservative media rushed to disclose the victims’ aliases and criminal records so that the public could shrug off the incident. The police surely had both the license and the duty to put these criminals down.

The Jacarezinho massacre and lethal drug policy enforcement in Brazil

1. Underlines the importance of a positive outcome at the UN High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS to be held from 8 to 10 June 2021; requests that the Council contribute to the adoption of a set of forward-looking and ambitious commitments in the political declaration;

2. Reaffirms that everyone is entitled to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health, as well as equality conducive to living life in dignity;

3. Commends the EU’s role in the multi-sectoral global AIDS response and calls on the Commission to address AIDS as a global public health crisis and accelerate all efforts to meet the 2025 targets, including through scaling-up investments in UNAIDS and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria;

4. Insists on the essential provision of sufficient means for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in order to enable it to make decisive contributions to the fight against HIV/AIDS;

Accelerating progress and tackling inequalities towards ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030

If you’re in Japan, keep this mantra in mind: never do drugs in this country. Ever.

The United States, Australia, and other countries are hardly perfect with their drug laws. Celebrities, however, have long appeared to play by different rules. This is not true in Japan, where if the rich and famous are caught with illegal substances, it’s not a speedbump on their careers, but a stop sign.

Japanese society is built on very high expectations. The expectation is that if some has broken the law, a company should not profit from that person’s work. The taint of crime, especially drug-related, is seen to reflect on the larger group. Making money off an alleged criminal is certainly not a good look in image-conscious Japan.

Why Japan Is so strict about drugs

The Rastafarian Society of Kenya has filed a petition to decriminalise the use of cannabis or bhang for 'spiritual' purposes.

They argue that followers and believers of the Rastafari faith use cannabis by smoking, drinking, bathing or burning incense for spiritual, medical, culinary and ceremonial purposes as a sacrament to manifest their faith.

In their petition, they also argue that Rastafarians are apolitical and therefore have no political power. They say they are subject to prejudices such as intimidation and searches on their homes because of their use of cannabis.

News