Indonesia is a tough jurisdiction for achieving drug policy reform. Massive corruption, lack of evidence in policy making, and a struggling democracy are all prevailing hurdles that won’t go away in the near future.

Every year at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Indonesia’s government pats itself on the back over-proudly about diverting people from the criminal justice process. For those who work in the field, we know for sure that such “success” aren’t manifested in practice – and if there’s any, it should be attributed as well to the work of civil society actors and it seldom has nationwide implementation.

Indonesia’s approach towards drug policy, like many countries, is still steered by a prohibitionist manner: simple drug possession could imprison someone 4-12 years, selling/buying drugs more than 5 grams is an act punishable with the death penalty, and forced inpatient rehab is viewed as “humane” punishment.

As of October 2020, Indonesia’s prison capacity is around 135,000 yet it is filled with almost 240,000 people. Stopping to arrest people who use drugs will directly help the situation since the number of people who are charged with the drug law is almost 136,000 and most of them are people who use drugs.

How COVID-19 failed (to inspire) drug policy reform in Indonesia 

The European Union (EU) which welcomed Sri Lanka’s record on maintaining its moratorium on executions had encouraged the country to legally abolish the death penalty.

A Joint Statement released by the EU and the Foreign Ministry yesterday said the EU also reiterated its opposition to the use of the death penalty in all circumstances.

This has been discussed during the 23rd meeting of the EU-Sri Lanka Joint Commission held yesterday.

The EU and Sri Lanka took note of the ad-hoc Counter-Terrorism Dialogue, which took place in Colombo in July 2019 and reviewed on-going cooperation provided through an EU funded project with UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Interpol.

EU encourages Sri Lanka to legally abolish death penalty

Unlike some of its neighbouring countries, the Brazilian government has continued to block efforts to decriminalise cannabis. In 2017, when Argentina legalized medical cannabis, the right-wing Brazilian president Michel Temer censored the publication of a study by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ) which questioned the very existence of a drug addiction epidemic; the government was accused of suppressing data that would call its war on drugs into question.

The current president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has promised to invest in the war on drugs since he began campaigning for the presidency in 2018, a vow he renewed upon election. In 2019, during his first year in office, Bolsonaro signed a decree establishing his own kind of drug policy. The new piece of legislation excludes previously adopted harm reduction approaches, relying on the enforcement of coercive abstinence. In practice, this channels taxpayers’ money into abstinence-only institutions and removes support for people who use drugs.

The Brazilian government also altered the composition of the National Drug Policy Council, excluding civil society representatives; 13 seats were removed, including those held by the Order of Attorneys of Brazil; the Federal Council of Social Work; the Federal Council of Medicine; the Federal Council of Nursing; the Federal Council of Psychology; the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science; and the National Student Union. The seats previously occupied by an anthropologist, a journalist, and an artist were also extinct.

In Brazil, Bolsonaro continues to pump blood to the war on drugs

In 2019, Equis Justicia para las Mujeres A.C. (Equis hereinto) carried out an advocacy-oriented research on women and girls who use drugs and are in detention, either in prison centres or in drug treatment centres. Our purpose was to listen to and give visibility to women and girls who use drugs, in order to increase knowledge and reduce stigma. Our research collected women’s testimonies on how their drug use began, which circumstances and motivations prompted it and what response they received. We interviewed 43 women and girls in a total of three female prison centres, two public and two quasi-public treatment centres and five 

The experience of being locked up in a treatment centre happens at different stages of their lives, but is generally ignited by their families, in response to a situation they see no other solution for. Usually, people who use drugs are taken by their families and forced to enter the centre, or picked up using violence by the centre’s personnel (usually former drug users) in their house, stuck into a van and forced to stay in the centre against their will. Families pay a weekly amount for the person’s maintenance and usually are not allowed to release their relative until the treatment is considered to be over. However, the decision to determine the treatment as successful – on an abstinence-based model – is made by the drug centres’ owners themselves, who are often former drug users or religious figures, such as pastors, and clearly have an economic interest in keeping people inside.

During our visits, we witnessed and recorded through testimonies all sorts of abuse and ill-treatment: people detained are usually given rotten food, they are not allowed to wash themselves every day, have no access to education or medical attention and are often punished in humiliating ways, such as having wet, hard sand thrown at their bare back by their peers – who are compelled to do it – or being forced to wash blankets and then sleep with them while they are still wet and freezing cold. In the case of relapse – which is a normal condition in the rehabilitation process of substance dependency – they are also punished, for instance by shaving their head or sitting at the front on “the bench of relapse” during group treatment sessions.

Arbitrary detention and compulsory drug treatment in Mexico: A forsaken face of female incarceration

By Stephen Kalin / The Wall Street Journal

Saudi Arabia said Monday it had imposed a moratorium on capital punishment for drug-related offenses that led to an 85% reduction in executions, as the conservative Muslim kingdom seeks to soften its image to attract Western tourists and foreign investment.

The state-backed Human Rights Commission said 27 executions were recorded in 2020. That is down from 184 the year before, according to rights watchdog Amnesty International, when Saudi Arabia trailed only China and Iran globally.

Saudi Arabia curbs death penalty in move to soften image

The Icelandic government has proposed the decriminalisation of drugs for personal use by adults, and this week launched a consultation exercise to gauge public opinion on the matter.

The initiative, led by Minister of Health Svandís Svavarsdóttir, is intended as a harm-prevention measure. It includes the provision of additional resources to support users, with particular focus on more marginalised members of society, Vísir reports.

This new approach is based on regarding users as patients rather than criminals, and follows the minister’s successful introduction last year of a bill to provide safe spaces for drug injection.

Under current law, possession of illegal drugs is usually punished as a criminal matter. However, as the government suggests in its public consultation document, this approach has shifted in societies around the world as understanding of the issue improves.

“In the last decade, there has been a change in attitudes towards drugs worldwide, as doubts about the usefulness of the international war against drugs have grown,” states the consultation document. “The effects of these changes in attitude have also been felt in Iceland, and in recent years the decriminalisation of consumption doses has been prominent in public discourse.”

The public consultation, which can be found here, is open until January 31st.

Icelandic government proposes drug decriminalisation

By John Collins - London Schools of Economics,

“Decades ago, the Thai royal family effectively decided that illicit drug production was a long-term policy development issue, and that they would therefore treat it as such. They would not just go in and eradicate crops unless there were alternatives for those communities to live off, and they have seen the benefits of that policy.”

Dr John Collins, founding Executive Director of LSE's International Drug Policy Unit (IDPU), is explaining why the Drugs and Development Hub (DDH) focuses on the work of its partner, the Mae Fah Luang Foundation, and why Thailand is often seen as a success story in development and drug policy. While northern areas of Thailand used to be a significant opium growing and trafficking region, he says, decades of government intervention has effectively shifted those communities and their economies away from a reliance on illicit crops.

“Now there are a lot of reasons why you can’t just replicate or transfer that experience to say Colombia” Dr Collins cautions. “Thailand is much smaller, the cultivation areas were much more constrained, they had support of the Royal family etc, but it is a good example of effective policy and there are of course lessons we can learn from that."

Creating the environment to enable such lessons to be learnt is one of the aims of the DDH, which launched in January 2020 at an event hosted by the Centre for the Study of Security and Drugs (CESED) at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Led by the IDPU, in collaboration with the Global Partnership on Drug Policies and Development and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, the Hub provides a platform to enable policymakers and practitioners across a range of disciplines to forge connections and learn from each other.

“There is currently quite a siloed approach to international drug policy,” Dr Collins says. “You have certain actors that focus specifically on drugs, or specifically on crime or development and there's not really a platform to enable cross-cutting discussions where these fields meet.”

The DDH aims to change this. “There are a lot of institutional hurdles to creating these collaborative or inter-institutional discussions” Dr Collins explains. “It’s not necessarily through a desire not to engage, but there are institutional set ups which push back against any meaningful collaboration. We’re aiming to bring people together in ways that will encourage these networks and develop the discussions that we feel are currently missing."

How can we end the War on Drugs?

The recreational use of cannabis was legalized in Canada two years ago, and when the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made its legalization pitch to the country, it was stories like Robert’s — a life derailed by a possession charge — that most resonated with many Canadians.

Legalization, the government vowed, would address the inequalities in a criminal justice system where marijuana and hashish penalties and prosecutions — and the lifelong burdens they impose — had fallen disproportionately on marginalized communities, particularly Black Canadians and Indigenous people.

That promise has largely been kept, with legalization essentially ending what Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto who studies race and policing in Canada, called the “heavily racialized” arrests for marijuana possession.

But some other key promises, and hopes, that came with Canada being the first industrialized nation to legalize marijuana remain unfulfilled. The for-profit industry it created has struggled. Pot sales outside the legal system still thrive. Indigenous communities feel their needs are being ignored. And the injustices that came from criminalizing pot in the past have yet to be fully remedied.

2 years after legalizing cannabis, has Canada kept its promises?

By Anine Kriegler / Institute for Security Studies

In November 2020 Anine Kriegler interviewed Shaun Shelly about recent developments in South African Drug Policy in the wake of the 2018 Constitutional Court judgment decriminalising personal possession of cannabis, and the subsequent Cannabis for Private Purposes Bill. Shaun is a researcher at the University of Pretoria Department of Family Medicine where he is part of the team implementing a community oriented primary care approach to address drug use in the City of Tshwane.3 He is the founder of the South African Drug Policy Week and is the drug policy lead at TB HIV Care, a non-profit organisation that works to prevent, find, and treat TB, HIV, and other major diseases by targeting interventions to address the needs of populations at risk, such as inmates, sex workers, and people who inject drugs. Shaun is a founding member and chair of the South African Network of People Who Use Drugs and the former Deputy Secretary of the United Nations Vienna NGO Committee on Narcotic Drugs. He sits on various other national and international task teams and advisory boards on drugs.

On the record - Interview with Shaun Shelly, researcher at the University of Pretoria and the Policy, Advocacy and Human Rights lead at TB HIV Care, South Africa

A pandemic is gripping Europe with its centre in Great Britain. More than 3 million Britons caught it in 2019-20, of whom 5,657 died – a number that has quadrupled since 2013. Scotland’s death rate has soared to three and a half times that of the whole UK, and is the worst in Europe. Multiple cures are being tested round the world, but the British government opposes every one of them.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Westminster telling the world that its Misuse of Drugs Act (1971) would stamp out illegal drugs for ever. The act failed utterly, but it has never been repealed. Among other horrors, the industry it created now enslaves an estimated 27,000 children and teenagers, some as young as eight, in “county lines” drug gangs. The government has no answer but to throw a few of them in jail.

During any crisis, radical ideas tend to come from troops at the front, rather than from the centre. Drugs are no exception. The Home Office in Whitehall is terrified not of the facts, but of the tabloid press. It is now 20 years since the Runciman committee on reforming the drug laws advised that cannabis be reduced to a class C drug, which Tony Blair’s government reluctantly did before reversing the decision. As a pro-legalisation member of the committee, I will never forget the fury of the well-dressed Stepney dealer who told us we wanted to “do me out of living”. He was a great fan of the anti-reform home secretary Jack Straw.

Since then, evidence of new ways of handling narcotics, soft and hard, has poured in from around the world. The Netherlands, Switzerland and Portugal have been in the lead, with the US and Canada across the Atlantic. For marijuana, the salient point has been its medicinal use. Medicinal cannabis is now legal in most countries.

In Britain, the Home Office was implacable until a media campaign in 2018 for two epileptic children forced it to license the drug for serious pain relief. Figures last month revealed that not a single NHS prescription for cannabis has yet been allowed. British sufferers must still seek relief abroad. The health ministry says fatuously that it wants more research.

For 50 years, zero tolerance to drugs has failed – yet Britain refuses to change

Rebecca Askew launches her new Drug Policy Voices podcast which aims to engage people into debates revolving around drug policy. Every month, topics will be addressed which will seek to educate, inform, and amplify the voices of people who use drugs, as well as provide a space where all viewpoints around drug policy can be considered.

In their first episode, Dr. Stuart Taylor is invited to discuss the term 'drug' and its uses, implications, and inferences therein. Dr. Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in criminal justice in the School of Justice Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. His background includes professional and academic experience on the processes within the criminal justice system, the social construction of drugs and drug policy, the alcohol industry, sexual offences, and the night-time economy.

Drug terminology is quite varied but unfortuately has been prone to misuse in recent years; a plethora of terms has arisen which unfairly discriminate against people who use drugs and people who have unfortuntaely developed drug dependencies. Dr. Taylor therefore presents the idea on whether or not people who use drugs should try to drop the term 'drug' from general use altogether, or instead try to reclaim it by spreading awareness on its proper contextualisation.

‘Drug’ - A discussion on the term, with Dr Stuart Taylor

In early December, the House of Representatives passed the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act, or the MORE Act. The bill sought to decriminalize marijuana nationally by removing cannabis from the federal government's list of controlled substances deemed to have a high potential for abuse.

A main concern for cannabis decriminalisation in Mexico is that the bill could find itself being sent back and forth between the two houses as concerns for how to properly implement a regulated cannabis market is still being thought out. Mexico has had a medical cannabis bill since 2017, but permitting its mainstream use is another matter entirely.

The war on drugs has revolved around Mexico to an unfairly high degree; most noticeably concerning the cultivation of cannabis. Regulating cannabis would be an enormous step in righting the wrongs of the war on drugs, but first it must be ensured that such regulations are written with Mexico's benefit in mind - for its people, economy, and health care system.

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