Michael has struggled with kidney disease since he was in his early 20s serving in the military. The high stress of the job ultimately put him in the hospital, and he was not able to return to the service due to his condition. The 37-year-old Virginia Beach resident, who requested his name be changed because of concerns about retaliation from future employers, said that a nurse mentioned during that hospital stay that marijuana could help alleviate many of his symptoms, like nausea and vomiting. But at the time, the substance was not legal in Virginia.

In order to pursue that treatment, Michael had a relative send him marijuana from a state where it was legal. But police tracked the package back to Michael, and he was arrested and charged with felony possession and intent to distribute in 2015. He was convicted and sentenced to three years of probation.

At the time, Michael was working in an administrative role for a federal government contractor, and having two felonies on his record prevented him from advancing in his job.

“Since that day, I wasn’t able to be promoted or even try to grow in the company or in the job field, because that would be cause for further background checks,” Michael said. After getting sick with the coronavirus last year, he developed further kidney complications and had to go on dialysis, as well as undergo a second kidney replacement. He left his government job for health reasons, and while marijuana will soon be legal to possess in Virginia, he still has a criminal record he worries will present roadblocks in his job search.

As more states legalize marijuana, people with drug convictions want their records cleared

At least 25 people have been killed after heavily armed police stormed one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas in pursuit of drug traffickers, in what was the deadliest raid in the city’s history.

About 200 members of Rio’s civil police launched their incursion into Jacarezinho in the early hours of Thursday, sprinting into the vast redbrick community as a bullet-proof helicopter circled overhead with snipers poised on each side. By lunchtime at least 25 people were reported dead, among them André Frias, a drug squad officer who was shot in the head. Police and local media described the other victims as “suspects” but offered no immediate evidence for that claim.

Santos Silva, a researcher from Rio’s Centre for Studies on Public Security and Citizenship, said his city’s war on drugs was effective when it came to killing but did nothing to protect citizens or reduce crime. “It’s repugnant,” he said of the photographs showing Jacarezinho’s streets littered with dead bodies.

“Irrespective of whether they were ‘traffickers’ or residents, these are lives, these are bodies – somebody’s child, somebody’s brother,” Santos Silva added. “There’s no way of looking at these photos and not wanting to cry over just how sick our society it.”

Rio de Janeiro: at least 25 killed in city’s deadliest police raid on favela

By Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard / TalkingDrugs

In a small Dutch city outside of The Netherlands, drug user activists from around the world gathered in 1999 for the fourth annual International Drug Users Day (IDUD) conference.

As Mat Southwell, a British activist, delivered a presentation, he could “hardly see the audience” he told 

, “because everybody was chasing,” or smoking drugs off of foil. The event was like no conference he had ever attended. “There was so much smoke coming up from the audience. You could hardly hear people speak over the rustle of silver foil.”

One of the things that made the event particularly special for Southwell was the involvement of people who supplied drugs, something that he himself would soon be working on back in the United Kingdom. A group of Dutch suppliers called the Hard Drug Dealers Union sponsored the event run by the Dutch National Interest Group of Drug Users (LSD).

Today, the contributions of drug suppliers towards harm reduction efforts remain mostly neglected by history, although some within the grassroots end of the movement still emphasise their critical role. The work of Van Dam in The Netherlands and Southwell in the United Kingdom is part of a mostly-forgotten history of drug dealers organising themselves and alongside drug-user activists to advance the health and wellbeing of people who use drugs.

The forgotten history of European drug-dealer activism

On Monday, 3rd May 2021, the Parliament of Uganda enacted the Sexual Offences Act, 2021, which is now awaiting presidential assent. The Bill was first presented as the Sexual Offences Bill, 2015, published in the Uganda Gazette on 11th December 2015.1 It was tabled in Parliament on 14th April 2016 as a Private Member’s Bill by National Female Youth MP, Monica Amoding under the umbrella of the Uganda Women’s Parliamentary Association (UWOPA).

On behalf of the community of people who use drugs in diversity, Uganda Harm Reduction Network would like express the shared and profound concern at the continued enforcement of discriminatory, stigmatizing, criminalizing and harmful laws which abet bad policies and practices that increase vulnerability to HIV and continue to criminalise the already marginalised population. This proposed bill is yet another step backward in the fight against the HIV AIDS because it is founded on stigma and discrimination and based on approaches that have been condemned by international health agencies as ineffective and violating the rights of people who use drugs living and affected with HIV including; sex workers and sexual and gender minorities.

Drug user communities speak out on the proposed Uganda sexual offences bill

The drop-in centre of the Uganda Harm Reduction Network (UHRN) looks lonely from the deserted suburban pavement. It is a non-descript house, hidden behind an imposing solid pink steel gate, in an equally non-descript neighbourhood.

It looks like so many other drop-in centres in eastern Africa that serve key populations—anonymous and low-key. Necessary characteristics, perhaps, in a region that mostly criminalizes people who use drugs, gay men and other men who have sex with men, sex workers and transgender people.

Once through the gate, visitors are greeted with a hive of activity that belies the quiet exterior. Clients and staff are buzzing around, setting up chairs under the makeshift gazebo in the verdant garden. In a few minutes, a group of people who use drugs will take part in a harm reduction workshop run by one of the centre’s staff.

Pioneers of the harm reduction response in Uganda

The staging of the 64th Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) from April 12-16 was the latest annual meeting for the Vienna, Austria-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), for which the CND serves as the governing body and provides policy guidance.

It would probably have passed out without much notice, except that it served as a coming out of sorts for Myanmar's military junta.

The conference appears to signify the first time that a senior figure in Myanmar’s regime—in this case, Lt-Gen Than Hlaing—has participated in a UN forum since the February 1 coup.

As Myanmar's newly installed deputy minister for home affairs, a department that controls both the police and the Special Branch, Lt-Gen Than Hlaing has played a central role in the ongoing violent crackdown that has seen nearly 3,600 people arrested and more than 766 killed in the country’s blood-stained streets.

Myanmar general's speech at UN drug policy conference draws outrage

By Angus Thompson / The Sunday Morning Herald

The commissioner who led the state’s ice inquiry has accused the NSW government of missing a once-in-a-generation opportunity for drug reform and ignoring his recommendations 15 months after handing down a landmark report.

Professor Dan Howard SC said he was deeply disappointed with the government’s failure to respond to the 104 remaining recommendations after rejecting five almost outright, including pill testing and another supervised injecting centre. He said he wanted to know its reasoning for doing so.

The veteran lawyer and teacher also said it was “beyond belief and unacceptable” the government hadn’t responded to a recommendation for more services for Aboriginal communities. He said he had felt personally haunted by some evidence of Indigenous families who remained sceptical the government would help.

‘A disgrace’: Ice inquiry commissioner accuses New South Wales government of ignoring calls for reform

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), stigma is a major cause of discrimination and exclusion and it contributes to the abuse of human rights. Stigma is rarely based on facts but rather on assumptions, preconceptions, and generalizations.

IDUCare, a Cebu City-based organization, aims to counter the stigma that is often faced by persons who inject drugs (PWID).

“Before we started in 2015, we gathered drug users [in the] community and we [had] a three-day consultation with them and we came up with the IDUCare model within that consultation and we laid out the objectives and components of the organization and detailed activities,” Johan Nadela, Founder and Executive Director of IDUCare, said during the Philippine Harm Reduction Summit.

The goal, he added, was to have a peer-based community for people affected by drugs focusing towards behavior change, integral health, and upholding and defending human rights. Through offering legal rights literacy and paralegal services training to PWIDs, IDUCare hopes they could also “help other drug users.”

Reducing the stigma of substance use in the Philippines

Two recent studies show how the attempt to curtail drug abuse by discouraging and restricting opioid prescriptions has hurt bona fide patients by depriving them of the medication they need to ease their pain. The harm inflicted on these innocent bystanders, which would not be morally justified even if the opioid crackdown did what it was supposed to do, is all the more appalling because limiting legal access to these drugs seems to have accelerated the upward trend in opioid-related deaths by driving nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes.

Jon Furuno, an associate professor of pharmacy practice at the Oregon State University College of Pharmacy, looked at prescribing patterns among 2,648 terminal patients who were transferred from an academic medical center to hospice care from January 2010 through December 2018. During that period, regulators and legislators responded to the "opioid crisis" by directly and indirectly limiting analgesic prescriptions, often in ham-handed ways. While that was happening, the study found, the share of hospice-bound patients who had opioid prescriptions when they were discharged fell from 91.2 percent to 79.3 percent—a 13 percent drop.

Should dying cancer patients suffer from undertreated pain because of 'concerns regarding addiction'?

In the last few weeks, three US states have legalised cannabis for recreational purposes, all via the legislature and not via public ballots. New York, Virginia and New Mexico will begin by permitting cannabis use in private and home cultivation, for adults aged over 21 (out of sight and away from children). The intention is to introduce commercial markets in the coming years, after detailed regulatory requirements are agreed.

Legalisation of cannabis in 3 US states: New York, Virginia, New Mexico

In November 2020, Vancouver City Council unanimously passed a motion to request that the federal government decriminalize the simple possession of illicit drugs in Vancouver. For over two decades, we at the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) have been fighting to end all forms of illicit drug criminalization and related policies that target drug users.

We have needlessly lost thousands of our family members, comrades, friends, and loved ones to the drug war. VANDU members were briefly vindicated and relieved by news of the City’s announcement, but the feeling was bittersweet. Too many have already lost their lives and we’ll never get them back. This long-overdue attempt to change the status quo came too little too late, and now the proposed changes risk worsening the situation for illicit drug users in Vancouver and across Canada.

Now, City staff are rushing the so-called “Vancouver Model” of decriminalization in its final submission to Health Canada without the involvement or knowledge of drug users, the very people this initiative purports to serve. The decisions that have already been made by the City in this process have been alarmingly ill-informed and their top-down process has been fatally flawed. If Vancouver does not correct its course immediately, the proposed model for decriminalization set a dangerous precedent for drug users across Canada.

The “Vancouver Model” of decriminalization will set a dangerous precedent for drug users across Canada

Over the course of the last decades, peer work has been increasingly recognised as the most efficient model of intervention in any HIV or HCV cascade and is deeply embedded in the Harm Reduction approach. Despite this recognition and numerous global recommendations to expand peer work, adequate funding for peer work as well as ensuring the security, capacity building and meaningful participation of peer workers in programming and strategy-making spaces is lagging behind. Often, contexts do not have an administrative framework to recognise peer work in a job-structure, neither is peer work recognised as being part of the national health systems. Many peer workers find themselves in precarious and unfavourable employment situations and receive an extremely low daily wage, despite the fact that they are often the low threshold point of engagement for harm reduction services and exposed to the most risk.

It is recognised that peer workers’ expertise and engagement within the community is invaluable in delivering outreach and ensuring access to services. Peer workers are people with lived experiences who also have privileged access to marginalised communities and active drug scenes. As such, these models need to be scaled up in order to meet current health targets. Furthermore, the engagement of the community must be appropriately recognized and supported. Meaningful participation should be factored into all aspects of planning, design and implementation of harm reduction interventions. Peer workers are also essential in this process.

What can we do to strengthen and sustain interventions with peer workers for people who use drugs and sex workers?

This video summarises discussions from a multi-stakeholder consultation process organised by the International Network of People Who Use Drugs (INPUD), CoAct, the European Network of People who Use Drugs (EuroPUD), the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE) and Médecins du Monde.

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