The “War on Drugs” has failed and we all know it, but the stories of why and how it will end are just beginning to be told. That is why Global Exchange is hosting an international video contest, as part of our Peace, Life and Justice Caravan project We want to hear your story, and those of your community!

We invite you to create a 1-3 minute original video on the drug war’s impact in your community and what people are (or aren’t) doing about it. Convey to an international audience the urgency for action to end the drug war tragedy.

The creators of the top 3 videos will win great prizes:

First prize: A chance to join the Caravan as part of the audiovisual team in charge of the documentation of the Caravan for Peace, Life, and Justice, March 28th until April 19th, 2016, from Honduras to New York, with all expenses paid, including airfare, accommodations, transportation, and food!

Upload your video to YouTube and send us the link at caravana2016@gmail.com by March 8, 2016 and generate “votes” in the form of social media shares and likes through March 13, 2016. Winners will be announced March 16, 2016. Details below Your story will be part of the growing movement to end the war on drugs!!

The objective of the Caravan is to open a necessary debate about the war on drugs, promoting a paradigm shift in which governments’ actions cannot be limited to the use of violence while leaving behind fundamental aspects such as education, prevention, public health programs, and real measures against money laundering and the corrupting power of the mafias that control the high-level drug trade.

Each country holds histories of people that reflect concretely the challenges that we face as societies with respect to our drug policies, such as: the stigmatization and persecution of peasant farmers; the drastic penalties against people who sell small amounts of drugs while the large cartels remain intact; the incarceration, murder, and attacks against migrants, young people and people living in poverty who appear as “perfect culprits”; the moral double standard of societies which tolerate the disproportionate use of alcohol but impede information and education about other substances, while recriminating and persecuting the people who use those substances; and the stigmatization of ancestral cultures that use substances and plants that could be alternative treatments for different ailments.

Because it is of great importance to know these stories in order to amplify the perspectives around such a complex issue, which needs to be analyzed from all possible angles, the Caravan for Peace, Life, and Justice is launching an international video contest about drugs and human rights.

The videos will be shared on the Caravan website, on the Strutta website, and through the social networks Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, in order to receive the impressions of the general public (which will be part of the selection criteria); the author is free to share far and wide on their social media platforms.

Videos can be sent from January 28th until (11:59pm) on March 8th, 2016. (The time of submission will be determined by the local time of the sent email.)

Videos can be voted on until (11:59pm) of March 13th, 2016.

The winners will be announced on March 16th, 2016.

Winners will be contacted in order to validate prizes.

Click here to find further information about the selection criterias and the participation form.

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

International video contest on drugs and human rights

Current drug policies continue to have negative health and social impact in CEECA, and also to result in human rights violations, corruption and emergence of new drugs. This negative impact is regarded as a side effect or unintended consequences of zero tolerance policy and criminalization of drug use and drug possession.

High-level decision-makers may not always understand links between police raids and increased overdose mortality. They may not know how criminalization of drug use may lead to police violence against women. The relation between the lack of state support for substitution treatment programs and high HIV mortality rates may be also unclear to those who are in charge of drug policy on the country level.

EHRN encourages you to make these links known to your countries' decision-makers by a strong regional action. Document and submit online examples of 

Based on your submissions, EHRN will produce educational and advocacy materials which you can use in the process of preparation for UNGASS on Drugs and your further drug policy advocacy work.

To submit your examples of unintended consequences of drug policies, please fill in this questionnaire.

Survey: Share your examples of unintended consequences!

In a U.N. meeting on February 9, Geir O. Pedersen, Norway’s permanent U.N. representative, said. “Drug use and related complications are primarily public health issues and should be addressed by the healthcare system, on a basis of humane and evidence-based treatment.” And in a press release on February 12, the Norwegian government announced that it was expanding its drug court program, and called it “voluntary.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. The so-called “alternatives to incarceration” (drug courts and urine testing contracts) which Bent Høie, the Norwegian Minister of Health, among others, is advocating, are based on regular supervised urine controls.

If subjects fail tests, the government will revert back to a punitive sanction: imprisonment, fines, and a criminal record. With relapse being a symptom of addiction, the policy is far from progressive or humane as the government claims. Some alternatives may be worse, due to a net widening-effect – resulting in more people coming into contact with the judicial system and sanctions being more intrusive. In some cases, a sentence will end up being longer when a drug court participant is sent back to prison. The result is a lack of security under the rule of law.

Norway has some of the strictest drug laws in Europe. Mere use will result in a fine and a criminal record, and repeat offenders face prison time. For harder drugs, the limits to when police can give a fine and a criminal record instead of prison are quite low (a single dose). Dealers can receive sentences on par with those handed out for murder, as recently seen in a large cannabis case, where one of the defendants was given 16 years. It is therefore absurd, that ambassador Pedersen, at the same U.N. meeting, went on to claim that “drug related offenses do not meet the threshold of the most serious crimes.”

Pedersen also claimed that “children should not be subject to criminal prosecution.” However, Norway has not reformed its sentencing practice in respect of children. Instead, they are pressured into demeaning and intrusive drug control contracts that frequently do not include any therapy.

Norway promotes forced drug treatment under a false flag 

The government has in recent years increasingly embraced various public health interventions for reducing exposure to harm by people who use drugs. First was the introduction of the needle and syringe programmes and more recently, the Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT) using methadone – a substitute drug for treating heroin addiction – under what is known as the Harm Reduction strategy.

Harm Reduction refers to policies, programme and practices that aim to reduce the dangers associated with use of psychotropic drugs in people unable or unwilling to break drug addiction.

The recent increase in drug use in the country, coupled with the rising HIV epidemic among key populations calls for a critical review of how drug using populations are managed. The National Aids and STIs Control Programme estimates that people who inject drugs are responsible for 3.8 per cent of new HIV infections. The prevalence rate among this population is 18 per cent, three times that of the general population (5.6 per cent).

With an estimated 18,000 people in Kenya who inject drugs, it is crucial to scale up drug dependency treatment.

The MAT programme was consequently initiated and now acts as an effective tool and evidence-based treatment meant to help wean people from injecting drug use and reduce their risk of HIV infection.

It is largely due to successes in this regard that the United States President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) chose to make this programme part of a package of services to address the needs of those most vulnerable to HIV infection. Mathari Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kenya hosts the country’s first-ever MAT programme funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

But these gains notwithstanding, drug policies around the globe have conventionally focused on the principle of deterrence and demand reduction. This has been done through attempts to eliminate production, distribution, sale and use of drugs. To achieve this, severe penalties and fines have been imposed on those involved in the drugs trade or consumption. It was believed that such punishment or the threat of it would reduce, and eventually cripple the global drug market.

It has now been widely admitted that this approach has failed to reduce the scale of the drug market and spawned negative consequences, which include an increased number of people in prisons around the world due to drugs.

Kenya: Drug users need doctors not policemen

In the early 1990s, drug production in Colombia diversified to include heroin as well as cocaine, and since then the country's role in the heroin trade has substantially increased. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Colombia produced approximately 70 to 100 metric tons of heroin between 1998 and 2004. Studies have found an increase in local heroin use since the mid-1990s. This is a strong cause for concern, given the potential for HIV to spread through networks of injection drug users and disseminate to the general public.

In 1999 the Colombian Ministry of Health confirmed the first cases of HIV among people who inject drugs (PWID). The threat of an HIV/AIDS epidemic in Colombia may be especially pressing, as increased incidence of heroin injection has accompanied the rise in heroin use. However, despite such concerns, drug injection in Colombia remains a largely understudied practice.

A recent study by Pedro Mateu-Gelabert, PhD, principal investigator with New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR) and NDRI, Inc., examined injection risk behaviors among heroin injectors in the Colombian cities of Medellín and Pereira to explore the implications for possible increased HIV transmission within PWID.

"The two cities were chosen because they are epicenters for street level drug sales and preliminary research indicated a sizeable number of young PWID in both cities," said Dr. Mateu-Gelabert.

, the study, "Heroin Use and Injection Risk Behaviors in Colombia: Implications for HIV/AIDS Prevention," began with six non-randomly selected PWID "seed" participants over the age of 18, who were chosen to recruit their peers, who in turn recruited their peers. Through six to seven waves of recruitment in each city, the study accumulated a total of 540 participants. Field researchers conducted a structured hour-long interview with each participant, and collected a small blood sample via finger prick to test for HIV. On average, participants were 25 years of age, with the median age being 24. By sample design, all participants injected heroin.

For their first time injecting, most participants (60%) report they were assisted by a close friend, 12% reported they were helped by other known people, and 17% reported they self-injected. On average, participants started injecting drugs at 21 years of age. Participants reported an average of 3.2 injections per day, 73% responded one to three times a day, and the other 27% reported injecting four or more times per day.

"Syringe sharing was quite common among participants," says Dr. Mateu-Gelabert. "42% said they used previously used syringes provided by other PWID. Forty-nine percent of participants also reported sharing cookers, filters, or rinse water."

Implementing harm reduction interventions among people who inject drugs (PWID) to prevent HIV epidemic in Colombia

The Rights Reporter Foundation (RRF) is now accepting submissions to the “Let's Get Real About Drugs!” poster contest, as part of our campaign to raise awareness on alternatives to punitive drug policies. The contest is targeting the 20-year review of global drug control efforts at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs in New York, April 2016. For details and the rules of the contest, please see below.

What is the UNGASS and why is it significant in drug history?

In April 2016, the UN will hold a General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs – a meeting of high-ranking government officials in New York to review the past 20 years of global drug control efforts and to adopt an outcome document. The last UNGASS on drugs took place in New York 20 years ago, in 1998. That meeting was dominated by the slogan “A drug-free world: we can do it!” and, accordingly, the target adopted was to significantly reduce the demand and supply of illicit drugs within 10 years.

Twenty years later, we can see that member states have failed to achieve these targets. The problem is, that drugs are here to stay - a drug-free world is an illusion. However, we have learned in these 20 years what really works instead of more repression: more prevention, more treatment and more harm reduction. What works is not punishment - but investing in public health, respecting human rights and providing social care for vulnerable people. We have robust scientific evidence proving that programs such as needle and syringe programs, community treatment, street outreach, drug consumption rooms, opiate substitution treatment, drug checking, interactive school prevention, social reintegration are not only very effective in reducing drug-related harms, but save money for the whole of society. Still, governments spend trillions of dollars on drug law enforcement, but only a fragment of what would be needed on harm reduction programs. The first draft of the UNGASS outcome document does not event mention harm reduction programs. This is unacceptable in the 21st century!

For further reading on the UNGASS 2016 and its significance, see:

What is UNGASS 2016? (Open Society Foundations)

The International Drug Policy Consortium’s official website

UNGASS: Weighing the Chances (Drugreporter)

We can see from recent UN statements that there is a spirit of reform in the air – but without pressure from civil society, we cannot expect governments to do anything other than congratulate themselves for what they have done already. There is very little knowledge or discussion, amongst the general public, about the failure of the punitive drug policies and the success of harm reduction – therefore we need to raise public awareness of the harms caused by this system, and promote alternatives to the current framework. This is the intended purpose of the posters we are calling for. The posters will be exhibited in New York City during the UNGASS in April.

This contest aims to contribute to the above aim by highlighting the unintended consequences of drug control efforts on public health, crime, environment, human rights – by articulating personal stories and tragedies, lost opportunities and liberties, and the irreversible damage that has been caused to lives and property. We are also looking for posters pointing out what really works instead of punishment: harm reduction and treatment programs, reality-based education, pragmatism, success stories, lives spared and money saved. We are looking for creative, attention-grabbing and poignant images which will graphically express the everyday reality and impact of the global drug war on public health, public security and human rights.

Deadline for poster submission is the 15th of March, 2016

Click here to have more information about the contest rules, recommended topics and prizes.

Let's get real about drugs - Poster contest

In the Republic of Georgia, there is one crime that is punishable with more prison time than rape or even murder: possession of more than one gram of heroin, regardless of intent.

Georgia positions itself as a model for government reform and new thinking. We have one of the youngest prime ministers in the world and government buildings of glass to symbolize transparency and visible change. But on drugs, old-school punitive policies remain the norm. Starting in 2007, the government enacted a policy of wide-scale street sweeps, drug testing, crippling fines, and harsh sentences.

Each year, police in Georgia detain tens of thousands of people in the streets and subject them to urine drug tests. If this single test is positive (contrary to standard practice, no confirmatory test is used) a fine equaling twice the monthly salary of the average Georgian is imposed. Subsequent positive tests during a 12-month period can result in prison time.

A new study by me and colleagues from the addiction research center Alternative Georgia takes a hard look at the impacts of this approach. We found that these punitive measures didn’t stop people from using drugs—in fact, 89 percent of people punished for drug use after positive urine tests returned to drugs immediately.

But the street sweeps did result in behavior change, though presumably not the kind authorities intended: drug users adopted risky practices to avoid being identified by the police.

For instance, many people switched from heroin to buprenorphine or amphetamines to evade standard the drug tests. These drugs are commonly used in a way that requires a group of injectors to collaborate, either because the drug is expensive or because a group of people is required to procure and cook the substance. In either instance, injection often happens with several people sharing a common container, filters, or large-volume syringes used for loading smaller syringes, increasing the risk of blood-borne infections.

Chemicals are used for processing many of the homemade stimulants and opioids that people switched to in order to avoid police detection. Some of these—such as phosphorus, iodine, potassium permanganate, and gasoline—cause serious soft tissue damage, necrosis, gangrene, and neurological side effects.

Police crackdowns have also driven people who use drugs into their homes, where they more often inject alone to avoid detection, increasing their risk of dying from an overdose. And attempts to self-medicate and substitute traditional drugs with new ones have resulted in most drug injectors switching to unstructured poly-substance use, meaning they consume whatever drugs are available at the time, often in combination, in an effort to mimic the effect of their drug of choice.

In Georgia, living proof that harsh punishments don’t stop drug use

With the UN’s drug control policy setting bathed in opaque diplomatic light, civil society advocates are left looking for the subtleties of language and tone to spot any sign of change. The NGOs closest to the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the world’s drug problem in April aren’t expecting dramatic changes, but they do see things moving in the right direction. 

In the words of the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange trip it’s been. Debates at UNGASS 2016, the UN General Assembly’s third grand meeting to discuss and agree policy around drugs, will be inseparable from what happened at the first in 1990 and what took place in the decade that followed, which was characterised by both the UN’s strongest actions to control the supply of and demand for non-medical drugs and growing doubts about the wisdom of the strategy.

That decade was foreshadowed by the 1988 Vienna Convention on Trafficking, which broke new ground in asserting that criminalisation of drug use, and not just trafficking, was also a matter of treaty compliance. It set the stage for UNGASS 1990’s adoption of a Global Programme of Action and the branding of the years 1991–2000 as the United Nations Decade Against Drug Abuse.

The establishment of the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) in 1991 was seen as the beginning of a new era in the fight against drugs. A three-day meeting of the General Assembly in 1993 was intended to foster an unheralded degree of international cooperation in the post-Iron Curtain years. It was to be a new era.

“We have the machinery; we need now to make it work better,” declared the British delegation in 1993.

“In particular, we need a more solid international front in support of the 1988 United Nations Convention. This is an instrument with teeth, and we need to make it bite.”

The confidence in this better engineered project to reduce both the supply and demand for drugs echoed throughout the second grand meeting, UNGASS 1998. “A drug-free world – we can do it!” was the meeting’s slogan – and the concluding line of a UN-funded TV ad featuring helicopters spraying herbicides, fields of burning drug crops, armed soldiers and a farmer processing coffee.

Click here to read the full article, part 1.

Fordham says that, for many countries, acknowledgement of harm reduction does not extend to all types of drug use. Stimulants and crack cocaine fall outside the harm-reduction comfort zone. “And then the real outer limits of harm reduction, what’s still a fight, is around safe injection rooms, drug consumption rooms. That is not accepted at the UN level. It’s seen as too controversial, too much to do with facilitating drug use. And then also heroin-assisted treatment – that’s heroin prescribing for people who are dependent on heroin and finding substitution treatment isn’t working. Those are the outer limits.”

The IDPC has published a list of five UNGASS ‘asks’, which largely concern good faith. But the final one – “commit to the harm reduction approach” – is specific without insisting on a form of words.

“When we say that, we say commit to it in its broadest sense,” says Fordham. “We have this debate with member states about how hard you push for the words ‘harm’ and ‘reduction’ to appear next to each other in a political document. That’s still a difficult fight to win.”

“There will be a fight over it, and it’s a fight worth having,” says Steve Rolles, Senior Policy Analyst at Transform, a British charitable think tank that campaigns for the legalisation and regulation of drugs. “But as long as the principle is captured, I think the semantics may not be the biggest concern.

“The objectors will look increasingly childish and petulant given realities on the ground and in the UN system – harm reduction has a more accepted definition in the UN context, in terms of the UNODC, UNAIDS, World Health Organization (WHO) technical guidelines – so it’s not impossible they will finally cave in, especially if the US changes its position.”

One break from the past is already evident, however. At UNGASS 2016, civil society groups will be more visible and engaged than ever.

“The civil society engagement has been exponentially greater than last time – the reform movement has expanded enormously,” says Rolles.

Click here to read the full article, part 2.

Dunne says the NDP is “quite a significant shift from its predecessors”. And that shift is no more evident than in the policy’s ground-breaking recognition that the harms of illicit drugs may stem from the very laws against them. In launching the policy in September, Dunne said that “the laws we make need to be reasonable, and it is crucial that our enforcement response is proportionate”.

And yet, the policy also says that New Zealand’s Misuse of Drugs Act will not be changed. It’s a political contortion, but one likely to be reflected at UNGASS. Fordham sees a groundswell around the proportionality of drug offence sentences.

“This will be a key debate in the UNGASS process, and for the first time, we’re seeing language coming from member state submissions about the need to address the proportionality of sentences that’s in the submission from the US. Many of the Latin American countries also have a massive incarceration issue.”

She says sentences for low-level drug offences in many countries exceed those for rape, aggravated assault and, in some countries, even murder.

“There’s an acknowledgement that we’ve gone down a route that is far too repressive, and that has created a number of their problems. And has that really made our communities safer? Probably not.”

New Zealand Drug Foundation Executive Director Ross Bell says New Zealand goes into UNGASS in a unique position in that its attempt to find a new way to deal with new drugs, the Psychoactive Substances Act (PSA), has little support at international level. The government would be in an awkward position if a substance that made it through the PSA’s approval process was subsequently scheduled under the UN drug treaties, as mephedrone was last year at Britain’s behest.

Click here to read the full article, part 3.

UNGASS 2016: What prospect for change?

Amnesty International urges UN Member States, ahead of the next inter-sessional meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), to ensure that the respect and protection of human rights are an integral part of the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs and its Outcome Document. More than a month after formal negotiations began in Vienna, crucial references to human rights are still absent from the current draft Outcome Document, while certain recommendations fall below international human rights law and standards.

States must reaffirm their commitment to human rights during the next UN Special Session on Drugs and halt violations committed in the name of drug control

Citing the staggering increase in heroin use and overdose deaths, an upstate New York mayor is proposing the nation's first supervised injection facilities modeled after sites in Canada and Europe, places where addicts can safely shoot up heroin under clinical supervision while receiving health care and counseling.

"One-hundred and twenty-five people will die in America today from opioid overdose, will die in the streets or will die in their homes or will die in gas station bathrooms," Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick told reporters Wednesday, citing federal figures on the epidemic of opioid overdose deaths.

To back his controversial proposal, Myrick, 28, released a report recommending, among other things, treating heroin addiction by allowing users to inject drugs at supervised facilities. Similar centers have been found to reduce the spread of infectious disease, overdose deaths and improperly discarded syringes.

Myrick said the report is a blueprint for cities struggling to deal with a rise in heroin addiction and overdose deaths.

"This is a strategy that sounds as outrageous as the strategy that we came up with to provide sexual education to teenagers, something that was unthinkable in the '70s," said Myrick, whose father was a heroin addict.

Upstate New York mayor proposes nation's first drug injection centers

The EU Drugs Strategy provides a political framework and priorities for actions in the field of drug policies for the period 2013-2020. It builds around two policy fields: drug demand reduction and drug supply reduction; and three cross-cutting themes: coordination, international cooperation and information, research, monitoring and evaluation.

The EU Drugs Strategy requests the Commission to initiate an external mid-term assessment by 2016, in view of preparing a second Action Plan for the period 2017-2020.

In the framework of this evaluation and following the Better Regulation Guidelines, the Commission is conducting a broad stakeholder consultation, including an open public consultation, as outlined also in the roadmap of the evaluation. The stakeholder consultation seeks to gather views from individual citizens, non-profit/private organisations, industry and from national/regional/local public administrations on all 5 objectives of the EU Drugs Strategy and corresponding actions of the Action Plan and on the key evaluation criteria: effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, coherence and EU value added. This public consultation will form part of the evidence base for the evaluation of the EU Drugs Strategy and Action Plan and the work ahead.

A Steering Group, made up all relevant Commission services and the European External Action Service (EEAS) chaired by DG HOME, is consulted regularly at all stages of this evaluation and it has approved the consultation strategy for this evaluation, as well as the questionnaire for the public consultation.

Click here fore more information and learn how to submit your contribution.

Public consultation for the 2016 evaluation of the EU Drugs Strategy and Action Plan on Drugs

Hundreds of people attended the Urban Drug Policies Conference in Warsaw on 17-19 February, supported by the Warsaw municipality and the Polish government agency on drugs. Most of the participants were Polish service providers and city officials. Researchers, policemen and NGOs from other European cities, including Barcelona, Zürich, Frankfurt, Coppenhagen and Lisbon, shared their experiences on best practice in urban drug policies. There were presentations about innovative ways to deal with drug problems, such as drug consumption rooms, cannabis social clubs and heroin maintenance programs, as well as examples of drug coordination mechanisms and the meaningful involvement of civil society. Barriers to access to harm reduction programs, especially opiate substitution treatment, and the challenges posed by new psychoactive substances, were central themes discussed in the sessions. Our Room for Change campaign was presented and two of the campaign movies - Where Do Poles Inject? and Life After the Closure of Needle Exchange in Budapest - were screened at the conference.

At the conference, a drafting committee was created, in which the International Drug Policy Consortium, the Rights Reporter Foundation, Krytyka Polityczna and the Polish Drug Policy Network played a major role in producing a set of recommendations on urban drug policies. The so-called Warsaw Declaration is based on the Prague Declaration (watch our movie about it here), an earlier document on urban drug policies, adopted in 2010. From the more general seven principles of the Prague Declaration, we developed ten concrete and more action-oriented recommendations. Here is a short summary of the ten recommendations:

Policy responses should be coordinated, and decisions should be based on evidence and consultation with civil society.

 Cities should allow innovation in drug policy.

 Police should not target drug users, and should cooperate with health and social services.

 The human rights of drug users should be protected.

 A comprehensive menu of health and social services should be provided, including harm reduction.

. Cities should create regulations and guidelines on safe nightlife and partying.

 Local governments should allocate adequate and sustainable funding for services.

 Local communities should be educated, and forums for dialogue to resolve confilcts should be created.

Local policies should be monitored and evaluated.

 Partnerships and networking should be established among European cities.

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