PARIS -- France’s government launched a two-year nationwide experiment with medical marijuana Friday with a view to its eventual legalization.

Some 3,000 patients around the country will be given medical cannabis treatments and their health will be monitored by the national medicines watchdog, the Health Ministry said in a statement. The first prescription was issued Friday at the Clermont-Ferrand University Hospital in southern France.

The goal is to gather data about the effectiveness and safety of therapeutic marijuana, and to prepare eventual logistical circuits for future distribution, the ministry said.

Among those eligible will be cancer patients, people with nerve pain that is not treatable by other methods, people with certain forms of epilepsy and people in palliative care.

France launches 2-year experiment with medical marijuana

Colombia’s government is moving closer to reinstating a program, suspended in 2015, that would spray herbicides from aircraft over territories where coca is cultivated. Twenty-five U.S. and Colombian organizations have joined on this letter to President Joe Biden urging him to avoid supporting a renewed “fumigation” program, succinctly laying out the reasons why this would be an unfortunate policy mistake. The letter was shared with the White House on March 26.

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
The White House
Washington, DC

We write out of strong concern about the imminent restart of a program that your administration is inheriting from its predecessor: an effort to eradicate coca in Colombia by spraying herbicides from aircraft. 

We encourage you not to provide funding for this program

, which not only failed to achieve past objectives, but sends a message of cruelty and callousness with which the United States should no longer be associated. It will undermine the peace accords that are a powerful legacy of the Obama-Biden administration.

Aerial fumigation can bring short-term reductions in the number of acres planted with coca. But past experience shows not only that these gains reverse quickly, but that the strategy undermines other U.S. and Colombian security objectives. Recurring to fumigation is like going back in time, ignoring much that we have learned about what does and does not work.

Many of our organizations have published studies documenting the harm that fumigation has done in the past. The December 2020 report of the U.S. government’s bipartisan Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission found that forced eradication brought “enormous costs and dismal results.” Just since the end of February, we have seen strong critiques of forced eradication and fumigation from the International Crisis Group; the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a Colombian business sector think tank; a list of over 200 scholars, and seven UN human rights rapporteurs.

Between 1994 and 2015, a U.S.-backed program supported a fleet of aircraft, and teams of contract pilots and maintenance personnel, that sprayed the herbicide glyphosate over 4.42 million acres of Colombian territory—a land area 3 1/2 times the size of Delaware. In 2015 the Colombian government suspended the spray program, citing public health concerns based on a World Health Organization study finding glyphosate to be “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

For a few years afterward, the Colombian government failed to replace the strategy with anything—neither eradication nor assistance to affected areas. During the late 2010s, Colombia’s coca crop increased to record levels. Nearly all of the increase 

happened in the exact municipalities and communities where fumigation had been heaviest

. After 20 years of constant eradication, farmers continue to face the same on-the-ground reality.

Most Colombian producers of the coca bush are not organized crime-tied criminals or supporters of illegal armed groups. They are families with small plots of land. Estimates of the number of families who make a living off of coca vary from “more than 119,500” to 215,000. If one assumes four people per family, then more than 2 percent of Colombia’s 50 million people depend on coca. Households earn about $1,000 per person per year from the crop, making them by far the lowest-paid link in the cocaine supply chain.

They live in “agricultural frontier” zones where evidence of Colombia’s government is scarce. Paved or maintained roads are nonexistent. The national electric grid is far off. There is no such thing as potable water or land titles. In some areas, even currency is hard to obtain, and stores offer the option of paying for groceries with coca paste.

These people need to be governed and protected by their state. An aircraft flying anonymously overhead, spraying chemicals on populated areas, is the exact opposite of that. But the program has other important disadvantages:

Because it targets poor households in ungoverned areas, chemical fumigation sends a 

, and associates that message with the United States. Your administration is steadily working to undo the Trump administration’s cruel migratory measures, which imposed suffering on a weak, impoverished population at the U.S.-Mexico border. We ask that you also avoid returning to “deterrence though cruelty” in rural Colombia.

Like any eradication without assistance, fumigation further 

weakens governance and threatens to worsen security

 in Colombia’s ungoverned territories, where illegal economies and armed groups thrive. Forced eradication, especially when uncoordinated with efforts to physically bring government services into territory, sends families from poverty to extreme poverty, with no official help in sight. This hurts the government’s legitimacy in frontier areas where it badly needs to be built up.

After perhaps a short-term drop in cultivation, fumigation is not effective at reducing the coca crop. Past experience shows 

 and other means of minimizing lost harvests, in contexts of absent government and few alternative crops.

Fumigation goes against what Colombia’s 2016 peace accord promised

. That document’s first and fourth chapters offered a blueprint for reducing illicit crops: first by engaging families in substitution programs, and then by carrying out a 15-year “comprehensive rural reform” effort to bring state presence to rural areas. Fumigation was meant to be a last resort, for circumstances when families were refusing opportunities to substitute crops and when manual eradication was viewed as too dangerous. Rushing to fumigate is a slap in the face to brave farmer association leaders who took the risky step of defying traffickers and leading their communities into the fourth chapter’s crop substitution programs.

fumigation risks large-scale social discord

 in rural Colombia. In 1996, after the program first got started, much of rural Colombia ground to a halt for weeks or months as mostly peaceful coca-grower protests broke out around the country. Today, farmers are even better organized than they were 25 years ago.

risks for human health and the environment

. The 2015 WHO document is one of many studies that give us reasonable doubts about the health impacts of spraying high concentrations of glyphosate over populated areas from aircraft. Bayer, the company that purchased glyphosate producer Monsanto, has agreed to settlements with U.S. plaintiffs potentially totaling over $11 billion—another reason for reasonable doubt. While the environmental impacts are less clear, glyphosate’s own labeling warns against spraying near standing water sources, and we are concerned about its use in proximity to rainforest ecosystems. The largest environmental impact, though, is likely to be the way many past farmers have responded after losing crops to fumigation, while remaining in a vacuum of government presence: they move somewhere else and cut down more rainforest to grow coca again.

Like all forced eradication unaccompanied by assistance, fumigation is 

 themselves. In 2013, not long before the program’s suspension, FARC guerrillas shot down two spray planes within the space of two weeks. While planes and their escort helicopters will be more armored than before, the vulnerability remains. Eradication is far safer when it is agreed with communities by a government that is physically present in its own territory.

In March 2020, Donald Trump met with Colombian President Iván Duque and told him, “You’re going to have to spray.” The country’s highest court has required Duque’s government to meet a series of health, environment, consultation, and other requirements. Colombia’s Defense Minister is now predicting that the spraying could restart in April.

This time, U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg has stated, the U.S. role in the program won’t be as extensive. Still, during the Trump administration, the State Department supported maintenance of the spray plane fleet, upgrades to bases, and training of eradication personnel, among other services. State Department reports sent to Congress in late February and early March hailed fumigation’s imminent restart as a sign of progress.

we reiterate our hope that the Biden administration will turn away from supporting Colombia’s spray program while there is still time

. The United States should not support aerial fumigation in Colombia again. Nor does it have to. We know what to do.

Farmers with land titles hardly ever grow coca. Farmers who live near paved roads hardly ever grow coca. Criminal groups are badly weakened by proximity of a functioning government that is able to resolve disputes and punish lawbreaking.

This is a longer-term project, but Colombia’s 2016 peace accord offered a good blueprint for setting it in motion: a fast-moving, consultative crop substitution program, tied to a slower-moving but comprehensive rural reform program. Though those programs exist and parts of the Duque government are carrying them out diligently, they are underfunded and well behind where they should be as accord implementation enters its fifth year.

It’s not too late to help Colombia jumpstart the model offered by Colombia’s peace accord, which the Obama-Biden administration so effectively supported. We urge you to take that path instead of that of renewed fumigation, which we know to be a dead end.

Center for International Environmental Law

Centro Estudios sobre Seguridad y Drogas, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)

Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America

Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (Colombia)

Fellowship of Reconciliation: Peace Presence

Institute for Policy Studies, Drug Policy Project

Institute on Race, Equality, and Human Rights

Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Washington Office

Presbyterian Church (USA), Office of Public Witness

United Church of Christ, Justice and Witness Ministries

25 organizations call for an end to U.S. support for aerial herbicide fumigation in Colombia

By Luis Ferré-Sadurní / The New York Times

After years of stalled attempts, New York State has legalized the use of recreational marijuana, enacting a robust program that will reinvest millions of dollars of tax revenues from cannabis in minority communities ravaged by the decades-long war on drugs.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the cannabis legislation on Wednesday, a day after the State Legislature passed the bill following hours of debate among lawmakers in Albany.

New York became the 15th state to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, positioning itself to quickly become one of the largest markets of legal cannabis in the nation and one of the few states where legalization is directly tied to economic and racial equity.

Previous attempts to legalize marijuana were stymied over disagreements on how the tax revenue from sales would be distributed. Democratic lawmakers, especially those who are nonwhite, insisted that a large portion of the money be earmarked for communities where Black and Latino people have been arrested on marijuana charges in disproportionate numbers; the governor wanted to retain more control over how the money was spent.

The lawmakers prevailed. Forty percent of the tax revenue from pot sales will be steered to those communities, and people convicted of marijuana-related offenses that are no longer criminalized will have their records automatically expunged. The law also seeks to allow people with past convictions and those involved in the illicit cannabis market to participate in the new legal market.

New York legalizes recreational marijuana, tying move to racial equity

Since the first of February this year, anyone in the US state of Oregon caught possessing or using a personal quantity of any controlled drug – including heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine – has been officially not a criminal – or, rather, not liable for criminal prosecution. Instead, they will have the choice of paying a $100 fine or completing a health assessment at an approved addiction recovery centre.

The state government reported late last year, that Oregon had suffered a 40% increase in drug overdose deaths in 2020, in line with with national trends during the Covid pandemic. This dramatic shift from a criminal justice approach for drug users to one centred around health (a move the American Public Health Association called for as far back as 2013, came not from the state's elected politicians, but from the voters themselves, who last September approved Measure 110 by a 16-point margin. The measure also stipulated that funding for the introduction of new healthcare resources, including a a 24/7 telephone addiction recovery centre, would come from Oregon's burgeoning tax revenue from its legalised cannabis market.

The funding component was, says Portland drug reform activist and public radio broadcaster Doug McVay, a political winner". But he also credits an increasingly strong reform movement: "People who use drugs have become vocal and politically active. We've become visible."

McVay says that although Oregon has long led the way on drug policy reform – its needle exchange was one of the first in the US – "conventional wisdom has always been that even talking about decriminalising drugs other than marijuana, let alone legalising and regulating them, is too radical. What Oregon has done is prove that bit of conventional wisdom wrong. Oregon has set an example for the rest of the nation, which becomes apparent when you look at the other states that are now considering broad drug decriminalisation. Politicians in those states need to be bold."

Turning away from the 'war on drugs'

In November 2015, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that four individuals from the Mexican Society for Responsible and Tolerant Personal Use (SMART) would be permitted to grow and consume their own cannabis. The court ruled that prohibiting people from growing the drug for personal consumption, personal use and private consumption was unconstitutional as it violated the human right to the free development of one's personality. The case followed several years of patient work by México Unido Contra Delincuencia (MUCD), involving the development of individual cases which could test the legal status of prohibition (so-called ‘strategic litigation’).

After the 2015 ruling, more similar cases followed. On 31 October 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the law prohibiting recreational use of cannabis in Mexico was unconstitutional for the fifth time. Under Mexican law this fifth ruling set a binding precedent across the country's court system — rather than only applying to the individual litigants. The effect of the ruling was that while the law prohibiting cannabis remained in place, it could no longer be meaningfully enforced, since anyone could cite the ruling and demand that their charges be thrown out. Crucially, the ruling also mandated that the government of Mexico move to formally legalise and regulate cannabis within the next 90 days.

The challenging and contentious process of devising a cannabis regulation Bill has led to the 90 day deadline being extended 3 times by the Court — with April 30th of 2021 now being the final deadline.

Cannabis legalisation in Mexico: An explainer

New Zealand’s drug laws are increasingly leaving us behind the rest of the world.

The new Biden-Harris Administration in the United States has made racial equality a top priority, and within that the delivery of criminal justice reform. Their Office of National Drug Control Policy has now made an unprecedented statement about its new priorities, which, at its heart, represents the end of the failed repressive approach to drugs in favour of a health-based approach.

The New Zealand Government is clearly of the view that the use and possession of drugs should not be a criminal offence, as demonstrated when it passed the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Act 2019 (MODA). That amendment reminded the police that they have the discretion not to arrest and prosecute for use and supply, and that they should consider in each case whether a health-centred approach might be more beneficial to the public interest.

This amendment isn’t working as well as everyone had hoped, and thousands of New Zealanders continue to be convicted of low-level offences each year. The solution is to overhaul our current law and reformulate it, placing health considerations at the centre of how we deal with drugs.

New Zealand: We're being left behind on drug laws

 announce their call for applications for emergency grants in the framework of the Emergency Support Fund for Key Populations. The activities of the Fund are financed by the Elton John AIDS Foundation and Aidsfonds.

Organisations from 10 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

 (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan) can receive small grants.

The maximum amount per grant is € 8.000,-.

 can be awarded the maximum amount, whereas the costs of the sustainability activities cannot exceed € 3.000,- or account for more than 37.5% of the total amount of the grant.

Please note: The Fund will be operational until December 2021; activities funded with an ESF grant should finish no later than October 1, 2021.

and Aidsfonds will support organisations representing key populations in surviving in difficult situations which they face due to legal barriers, stigma and discrimination, financial challenges and political restrictions. Support will be given to organisations carrying out activities that ensure access to HIV prevention, treatment and/or services for key populations, or projects protecting the human rights of key populations.

You can download the complete call here and apply online here.

An example of the form can be found here (that is only the example, not for filling in).

Emergency support fund for key populations in the EECA region

By the Global Partnership on Drug Policies and Development (GPDPD)

Numerous studies examine how the Covid-19 pandemic affects illicit drug markets. We asked ourselves: how does the Covid-19 crisis affect the lives of families who grow the raw materials to produce heroin or cocaine, or who are in the process of escaping the poverty trap of illicit cultivation? The GPDPD commissioned a study on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The study paints an initial picture of the situation in drug cultivation areas in eight selected countries in Asia, Latin America and the Balkans - and what we can learn from this for the development of a sustainable drug policy.

It became clear that the situation is very different - but has one thing in common: Pre-existing problems have worsened since the pandemic began in early 2020. The Covid-19 crisis provides the ideal breeding ground for the spread of illicit economies. Smallholder farmers in areas of drug crop cultivation are now more at risk than ever of slipping deeper into illegality. Yet there are also those who manage to resist this on their own.

Poverty and a lack of alternatives in structurally weak rural areas, where the state is hardly present, are driving people into illegal cultivation. Their lives are already characterised by insecurity and marginalisation: they have no access to a functioning infrastructure, markets, political participation, basic services or educational institutions. Violence and conflict are often part of everyday life. The economic downturn only makes them more dependent on drug crop cultivation.

Resilience and vulnerability in times of the pandemic

Do you use drugs? How many? How often? These are among the questions posed in the latest European Web Survey on Drugs, launched today by the 

 Targeted at people, aged 18 and over, who have used drugs, the survey aims to improve understanding of patterns of drug use in Europe and help shape future drug policies and interventions (1).

The voluntary, anonymous survey — one of the agency’s targeted ‘leading-edge’ monitoring methods — will run this year in 31 countries and 28 languages (2). As in previous years, it will be promoted nationally by the Reitox focal points and their partners, as well as through targeted social media advertisements.

New to this year’s round is the participation of the agency’s partners from the

 area through the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA7) and EU4Monitoring Drugs (EU4MD) projects.

Web-based surveys have the benefit of reaching people who use drugs directly. They are quick and cheap to set up, provide new data rapidly and can help spot emerging trends. If the same questions are used, along with a rigorous translation process, then these surveys can also allow for cross-national comparisons.

The new questionnaire, which will run for six weeks, is structured in modules on: socio-demographics, drug using patterns, access to treatment, access to drugs (amounts usually bought and prices paid) and how COVID-19 has affected patterns of drug use. Its findings will contribute to the emerging knowledge base on drug-using practices in Europe and on the quantities of drugs used. This will help enhance market size estimates at national and European level and contribute to policy development more widely.

While web surveys are not representative of the general population, when carefully conducted and combined with traditional data-collection methods, they can help paint a more detailed, realistic and timely picture of drug use and drug markets in Europe. As such, they are a key ingredient in the EMCDDA’s responsiveness to an ever-shifting drugs problem.

EMCDDA launches 2021 European Web Survey on Drugs to assess patterns of drug use in over 30 countries

MEXICO CITY — Lawmakers in Mexico approved a bill Wednesday night to legalize recreational marijuana, a milestone for the country, which is in the throes of a drug war and could become the world’s largest cannabis market, leaving the United States between two pot-selling neighbors.

The 316-to-129 vote in Mexico’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, came more than two years after the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that the country’s ban on recreational marijuana was unconstitutional and more than three years after the country legalized medicinal cannabis.

The chamber approved the bill in general terms Wednesday evening before moving on to a lengthy discussion of possible revisions introduced by individual lawmakers. In its final form, though, the measure is widely expected to sail through the Senate before being sent to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has signaled support for legalization.

The measure, as of Wednesday night, would allow adults to smoke marijuana and, with a permit, grow a small number of cannabis plants at home. It would also grant licenses for producers — from small farmers to commercial growers — to cultivate and sell the crop.

Mexico set to legalise marijuana, becoming world’s largest market

On this International Women’s Day, let’s pause for reflection on the changes of the past 12 months. The COVID19 pandemic has impacted heavily on women worldwide, accentuating pre- existing inequalities. In general, mainstream awareness of these deepening and unacceptable disparities remains very low. One of the barriers to awareness and change has been a tendency towards “otherism” in portrayal and perceptions of women who use drugs.

Intersectionality refers to the ways in which different aspects of a person’s identity can expose them to overlapping forms of discrimination and marginalisation. With its roots in the black feminist movement, awareness of intersectionality is very useful for understanding and addressing inequities experienced by women who use drugs. WHRIN work in this space can help to identify where this is affecting women who use drugs, bringing into focus the interrelation of systems of oppression. We can better identify specific needs and help ensure compassionate and effective policies and health options.

Intersectionality and women who use drugs. WHRIN statement on International Women’s Day 2021

A new global Aids strategy is being developed at the United Nations. This really should be breaking news and the subject of major attention around the world. Unfortunately, it is not.

“Epidemics are like large signposts,” the German doctor and founder of social medicine Rudolf Virchow wrote in 1848, “[and] form an inseparable part of the cultural history of mankind.” However, the international community appears to have lost an understanding of the enduring significance of the global response to the HIV/Aids epidemic. The signposts for this are nevertheless all around if we care to look. One topical example is the question: How come Covid-19 vaccines were developed relatively quickly?

As Professor Glenda Gray, the president of the South African Medical Research Council, explained to 

 on 30 November 2020, it has everything to do with the response to HIV:

“Covid-19, Ebola and Zika [virus] have benefited enormously from all the work that has gone into developing platforms for HIV vaccines, so if we had not invested all this money into HIV, we would not have solutions for Ebola, Zika and SARS-CoV-2. It’s because of those platforms that we’ve been able to nimbly move to the next pathogen.”

In a world where recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic is top of the political agenda and vital for everyone’s future, we would do well to relearn some vital lessons about the nature and transformative potential that the HIV/Aids response has exemplified. This is not only because the Aids crisis will remain serious for the foreseeable future – it is also because the global response to HIV/Aids is one of the only successes the international community has had in the past two decades (even if some may describe this success as relative, given the scale of challenges still before us). We need to learn from and build on success. It is rare these days that we have such an opportunity.

News