By Apoorva Mandavilli / The New York Times

The United Nations on Tuesday adopted new targets for ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030, seemingly a goal most countries could easily have agreed to. But consensus had been elusive.

In early negotiations over the agreement, called a political declaration, the United States and the European Union fought to ban policies and laws that stigmatize, or even criminalize, high-risk groups — and drastically scaled back moves to relax patent protections for H.I.V. drugs.

The U.N. declaration sets priorities for the global AIDS response and guides policies at a national level. It also gives global health groups and civil society organizations leverage to pressure governments to honor their commitments.

On Monday, Dr. Kavanagh and his colleagues published new work showing that countries that criminalize same-sex relationships, drug use and sex work have had much less success in turning back H.I.V.

A U.N. declaration on ending AIDS should have been easy. It wasn’t.

RE: PETTITION AGAINST GRANTING OF PRESIDENTIAL ASSENT TO THE NARCOTICS, DRUGS AND PSYCHOTROPIC SUBSTANCES (CONTROL) (AMENDMENT) BILL 2020.

We jointly write to you as the Caucus on Harm Reduction and Drug Policy Reforms in Kenya (CHRDPR) an initiative that brings together individuals and institutional advocates of drug policy reforms in Kenya.

This is to humbly Petition you against giving presidential assent to the Narcotics, Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) (Amendment) Bill 2020 that was passed by the National Assembly during the Committee of the whole house on 19 May 2021.

We laud your government’s efforts towards the eradication of illicit drug trafficking in Kenya, bearing in mind the harms of illicit drug trade and use on our youth and economy. We also loud the efforts of the legislature to curb illegal drug trade by the promulgation, and passing of the above mentioned Bill in an attempt to support your governments efforts to curb the illegal drug trade in Kenya.

However, your excellency, the legislative approach on the issue of drug use and the plight of persons with problematic substance use has ignored evidence of what works.

The punitive approach of having minimum mandatory sentences is misused by law enforcement to target low level offenders with small quantities of drugs including amounts for personal use. This diverts law enforcement efforts from traffickers, limiting the objective use of police, courts and scarce public resources. Overly punitive measures to fulfil objectives relating to drug control have and will continue to affect the poorest and most marginalised Kenyans; particularly women and young people should we fail to take advantage of this current opportunity to inform the law based on evidence. Although the changes propose a lower prison sentence for users, the increase in the minimum fine payable will guarantee mass imprisonment for economically overburdened women and youth.

Further, we commend the changes which now rightly recognize treatment in addition to voluntary rehabilitation for people in possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use. However, their introduction into law as an additional rather than an alternative to punishment is counterproductive to public health efforts. Kenya’s classification as a middle income country could soon impact access to funding for harm reduction programmes which are heavily funded by international development partners. Having sound legislative backing will catalyze greater commitment by the government of Kenya by establishing the most effective framework to sustain and expand comprehensive and coordinated harm reduction resources and services in Kenya.

It is established best practice that persons with substance use problems be diverted from the criminal justice system to public health interventions, which are readily available to your able ministry of health. The cost of keeping users in prison wastes limited resources that can be used to improve already strained health services including treatment and rehabilitation.

It is our submission that despite our efforts to sensitize legislators on the economic and social benefits of public health approaches for users, the amendments as proposed fails to;

Make adequate provisions to address the public health needs of persons with problematic drug use contrary to article 43 of the constitution, which negates the whole object of reforming these individuals leading to relapse or even adverse impact to their health since these victims require treatment and not incarceration,

Make adequate and intentional provisions to tackle the public concern of unnecessary incarceration of petty offenders who include individuals arrested with small quantities of drugs for personal use, which results in overcrowding of prisons with individuals who would otherwise be productive members of the community given effective support.

Your Excellency, the state has already implemented several interventions regarding treatment and reintegration of persons living with drug use disorders.

These processes have been ongoing for many years, which include inter alia,

The Methadone programs in several counties,

Establishment of guidance, counselling and rehabilitation centres in several counties.

The proposals that we have made shall have minimal fiscal allocation for implementation since the call is for the already existing infrastructure to be integrated in the criminal process as an alternative to incarceration. As such, the cost of implementation of these proposals shall be negligible, as it will seek to rely heavily on already existent Public Health infrastructure. Your Excellency in conclusion, it is our humble submission that the war against drugs can only be won through decisive action in regard to persons living with drug use disorders from a human rights and public health perspective, and more intentional tackling of trafficking. In this regard we humbly petition you to not assent to the bill as is, and refer it back to parliament to either:

Undertake proper public participation which includes consultations with public health experts and affected communities for an informed perspective of what works in effectively addressing the issue of problematic drug use; or

Re-draft the sub section on treatment and rehabilitation of persons arrested for possession of small quantities for personal use to avail effective alternative options and not additional punishment.

Signed by Caucus on Harm Reduction and Drug Police Reform in Kenya (CHRDPR), Nextgen Lawyers, Kenyan Network of People who Use Drugs (KeNPUD), VOCAL Kenya, Reachout Centre Trust, Teens Watch, New Leaf Rehab Centre Lamu, Muslim Education and Welfare Association.

Kenyan civil society organisations call on the President to halt harmful reforms to the country's drug laws

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;

News