An erosion of human rights enables the brutal approach to drug policy taken in some Asian countries, says Mangai Balasegaram, but recent teen deaths in the Philippines have sparked massive public outrage, and she asks if this could mark a turning point in President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody War on Drugs.

At 8.45pm on 16 August, Kian delos Santos was gunned down in a dark, dead-end corner in the Manila suburb of Caloocan. He was yet another statistic in a bloody drug war in the Philippines that has left about 7,000 dead. In the preceding week, 90 people had been killed.

This death of delos Santos was different. He was just 17, and CCTV footage conflicted with the account from Police, that this was “nanlaban”, a common justification for killing, meaning he resisted arrest and tried to fire back.

Witnesses told local media that a defenceless delos Santos was beaten and dragged from near his home to where he was found dead, curled in the foetal position, with bullet wounds in his ear and back. The last words of the high school student went viral: “Please stop! Please stop! I have a test tomorrow!”

Stories of a responsible, caring teenager who got up at 5.30am to help run the family store cast further doubt on Police claims.

Public mood swing: Have Asia’s brutal drug wars hit a nerve?

As U.S. and Afghan forces pound Taliban drug factories this week, farmers in the country’s largest opium producing-province and narcotics experts say the strategy just repeats previous failed efforts to stamp out the trade.

U.S. Army General John Nicholson, who heads NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, announced on Monday a new strategy of attacking opium factories, saying he wanted to hit the Taliban “where it hurts, in their narcotics financing”.

Critics say the policy risks further civilian casualties and turning large swathes of the population dependent on poppy cultivation against the Afghan government.

U.S. strikes on Taliban opium labs won't work, say Afghan farmers

The Government of Canada has committed to legalizing, strictly regulating, and restricting access to cannabis. In April 2017, the government introduced Bill C-45, the proposed Cannabis Act. Subject to the approval of Parliament, the Government of Canada intends to bring the proposed Cannabis Act into force no later than July 2018.

We are now seeking feedback on Health Canada's proposed approach to the regulation of cannabis.

Health Canada is seeking your feedback on the Consultation Paper: Proposed Approach to the Regulation of Cannabis. This approach builds on the extensive consultations already conducted by the Task Force on Cannabis Legalization and Regulation and Canada’s existing system of regulated production of cannabis for medical purposes and industrial hemp.

The proposed Cannabis Act would create a strict national framework for controlling the production, distribution, sale and possession of cannabis in Canada. As part of this framework, Health Canada would be responsible for regulating production and setting standards for health and safety. The provinces and territories would oversee the distribution and sale of cannabis, subject to minimum federal conditions.

This consultation relates to Health Canada's proposed approach to the regulation of cannabis

Consultation on the Proposed Approach to the Regulation of Cannabis

On nights when the November rain poured down and he had not slept at all, Jhonny Arcentales had visions of dying, of his body being cast into the dark ocean. He would imagine his wife and their teenage son tossing his clothes into a pit in a cemetery and gathering at the local church for his funeral. It had been more than two months since Arcentales, a 40-year-old fisherman from Ecuador’s central coast, left home, telling his wife he would return in five days. A cuff clamped onto his ankle kept him shackled to a cable along the deck of the ship but for the occasional trip, guarded by a sailor, to defecate into a bucket. Most of the time, he couldn’t move more than an arm’s length in either direction without jostling the next shackled man. “The sea used to be freedom,” he told me. But on the ship, “it was the opposite. Like a prison in the open ocean.”

By day Arcentales would stand against the wall and stare out at the water, his mind blank one moment, the next racing with thoughts of his wife and their newborn son. He had not spoken to his family, though he asked each day to call home. He increasingly felt panicked, fearing his wife would believe he was dead.

Arcentales has wide muscular shoulders from his 25 years hauling fishing nets from the sea. But his meals now consisted of a handful of rice and beans, and he could feel his body shrinking from the undernourishment and immobility. “The moment we would stand up, we would get nauseated, our heads would spin,” he recalled. The 20-some prisoners aboard the vessel — Ecuadorians, Guatemalans and Colombians — would often stand through the night, their backs aching, their bodies frigid from the wind and rain, waiting for the morning sun to rise and dry them.

In the first weeks, Arcentales had turned to his friend Carlos Quijije, another fisherman from the small town of Jaramijó, to calm him. They were chained side by side, and the 26-year-old would offer some perspective. “Relax brother, everything is going to work out,” Arcentales remembered Quijije saying. “They’ll take us to Ecuador, and we will see our families.” But after two months of being shackled aboard the ship, Quijije seemed just as despondent. They often thought they would simply disappear.

The U.S. Coast Guard’s ‘floating Guantánamos’

Everyone knows the story. There is the body, there is the bullet, there is the man who will alternately be called addict or suspect or junkie or pusher or dealer, allegedly or otherwise, depending on who tells the story.

“We will not stop,” said President Rodrigo Duterte, “until the last drug lord… and the last pusher have surrendered, or are put either behind bars or below the ground, if they so wish.”

This is Quezon City, millions strong, sprawling over more than 16,000 hectares, the largest in Metro Manila and the most populated of the country's highly urbanized cities. Two former presidents still live inside its borders, along with a handful of senators and the grandchildren of the late Commonwealth president Manuel L. Quezon, in whose imagination bloomed the vision of a graceful capitol in the city that now carries his name. It is also the city where at least 511 people were recorded killed during the first seven months of Duterte's drug war.

Project Double Barrel went into effect in July of 2016. The leadership went to the police, who were promised protection by the President as long as "you do your duty." The daily broadcasts ran footage of wailing mothers, while corpse after corpse filled the feeds of night shift reporters until operations were suspended in January.

Rappler reviewed police spot reports for 368 incidents of deaths under investigation and fatal armed encounters in Quezon City between July 1, 2016 and January 30, 2017, the first seven months of Project Double Barrel and Barrel Alpha. The reports were accessed at the Criminal Investigation and Detection Unit at the Quezon City Police District (QCPD) headquarters after a request for all reports filed between June 2016 and January 2017.

A request for later reports within the time frame of the drug war's second onslaught was initially approved by the QCPD. It was subsequently denied by higher authorities, who cited “ongoing investigations.”

A spot report is filed in the immediate aftermath of an incident, and includes the date, time, and type – whether it was a stabbing or a shooting, whether it was a police operation or a corpse left by the side of the road, whether the dead were drug suspects or unidentified. It includes the facts of the case as determined by the police. It lists the police personnel present, whether responding or involved, as well as possible perpetrators. When available, the addresses and names of suspects killed are included, as well as the place of incident.

Quezon City's dead fall into two categories. The first are the deaths under investigation. The perpetrators are listed as largely unknown. Some of the bodies were found in street corners and alongside highways, garroted with galvanized wire or stabbed in the chest, faces sometimes wrapped in duct tape, with crystal meth in their pockets and signs calling them addicts or dealers. Others were shot point-blank by riding-in-tandem assailants, or murdered by masked men as they watched television inside shanties.

Although it cannot be categorically said that the victims were involved in drugs, some were on drug watch lists, while a number of others had already surrendered to local authorities.

Rappler identified 216 deaths under investigation in a review of QCPD spot reports. Joy Belmonte, the Vice Mayor of Quezon City, under whose office the anti-illegal drug campaign falls, admitted she was alarmed by the sudden rise of killings. She cautioned against seeing the trend "from a black and white perspective."

Some of the dead, she said, were probably uninvolved in drugs but were targeted because "of the opportunity" to kill with impunity. Others were possible informants murdered by corrupt policemen she called "ninja cops." Still others were victims of vigilante killings.

This is where they do not die: An investigation into the Philippines war on drugs

Under President Joko Widodo (Jokowi), Indonesia’s war on drugs has taken on a deadly edge. Initially, Jokowi focused on judicial executions, declaring in December 2014 that his government would empty death row of its 64 prisoners sentenced on drugs charges in order to tackle a ‘drugs emergency’. Action followed quickly — his government executed 14 narcotics prisoners within six months.

Only four further prisoners have faced the firing squad for drugs crimes since, with no executions now for 15 months. But as judicial executions have receded, fatal shootings of narcotics suspects have surged. Indonesian human rights monitor Kontras estimates police and the National Narcotics Agency (BNN) fatally shot 106 drugs suspects between September 2016 and September 2017, with the vast majority of these shootings taking place in 2017. The shootings have continued since the release of their data, with at least a further six drugs suspects shot dead during October.

As with the judicial executions, this uptick in killings has coincided with hardline rhetoric from Jokowi and his senior law enforcement officials. Jokowi himself was one of the first to speak approvingly of shootings, calling on police on World Anti-Narcotics Day in 2016 to shoot narcotics criminals if the law allowed it (before noting it was fortunate the law did not). National police chief Tito Karnavian was one of those to echo the president’s call. In January, he held a press conference at the police mortuary, telling drugs distributors they would end up there if they resisted arrest.

Indonesia’s fatal war on drugs

A controversial trial of drug testing welfare recipients will almost certainly be postponed after the Turnbull government conceded it was unlikely to win sufficient support from the Senate crossbench.

The trial was to have applied to new welfare recipients from January 1, 2018, but Social Services Minister Christian Porter on Wednesday indicated he was prepared to excise the trial from omnibus welfare legislation so other measures could be approved by Parliament before the end of the year.

"The sticking point, fundamentally, in the legislation has been the drug testing trials for welfare recipients. The bill is critical," Mr Porter told the National Press Club in Canberra.

"So the bulk of that bill, which reforms the compliance system, is so critical to what we are trying to achieve that I wouldn't want to sacrifice the bulk of that in terms of timeliness while we are still negotiating around drug testing."

The package of welfare changes includes the drug test trial but also seeks to replace seven payments with one, impose tougher compliance measures on working-age recipients and remove drug and alcohol abuse as valid exemptions for meeting mutual obligation requirements for payments.

Labor, the Greens and several members of the crossbench are opposed to the drug test trial.

Although the Senate will sit for another two weeks before the end of the year, one of those weeks will be devoted to debating same-sex marriage legislation, leaving only four days to deal with other legislation.

Negotiations have been further complicated by the citizenship soap opera engulfing the Parliament with another key member of the crossbench, South Australian senator Skye Kakoschke-Moore, resigning on Wednesday.

As many as 1750 young people and job seekers in western Sydney, 2500 in Logan, Queensland and 750 in Mandurah, Western Australia, would be drug tested and face strict welfare quarantining measures should the Senate approve the government's contentious welfare crackdown.

Under the two-year trial - a policy that was first unveiled in the May budget - 5000 new recipients of Newstart Allowance and Youth Allowance will be drug tested for illicit substances such as ice, ecstasy and marijuana across three locations.

The trial would be accompanied by strict income management measures. People who test positive to two drug tests will have 80 per cent of their welfare payment redirected to a cashless welfare card, which quarantines the money for use on essential goods and services such as groceries.

Controversial drug trial for welfare recipients in Australia to be postponed

The war raging in Rocinha, Latin America’s largest favela, has already been lost. Rooted in a dispute between gangs for control of drug trafficking, it has disrupted the daily life of the community in Rio de Janeiro since mid-September. With the sound of shots coming from all sides, schools and shops are constantly forced to close. Recently, a stray bullet killed a Spanish tourist. The war is not the only thing being lost.

For decades, Brazil has had the same drug policy approach. Police, weapons and numerous arrests. It does not take an expert to conclude the obvious: the strategy has failed. Drug trafficking and consumption have only increased. Einstein is credited with a saying – though apparently it is not his – that applies well to the case: insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

In a case still before the Brazilian supreme court, I voted for decriminalising the possession of marijuana for private consumption. The case has been suspended and no date has been set for its resumption. I also proposed to open a broad debate on the legalisation of marijuana, to begin with – and then, if successful, cocaine. The subject is extremely delicate, and the outcome hinges on a decision from the legislature.

Brazil must legalise drugs – its existing policy just destroys lives

In October 2017, authorities in Berlin repealed their zero tolerance policy towards cannabis possession in a city park – bringing cannabis legislation into the headlines, and reigniting the debate. So what exactly is happening with cannabis in the German capital?

In April 2015, Berlin authorities introduced a zero-tolerance policy on cannabis possession in Görlitzer Park – affectionately referred to as 

 – in the Kreuzberg district. Authorities decided to crack down in Görli because it had “become a symbol of drug selling in Berlin,” according to the mayor of Kreuzberg, Monika Herrmann. Due to its location, in between two of Berlin’s party hotspots, the park had become known as a “24 hours drug supermarket”, Herrmann added, attracting tourists and locals alike. People who wanted to smoke in public or sell small amounts avoided Görli and went elsewhere in the city; the approach simply resulted in a shift of sale and consumption areas, and a rise in law enforcement costs.

This made the park the only area in the city in which Berlin’s narcotics law was fully enforced. Officially, the cultivation, possession, and trade of cannabis are criminal offences in Berlin. However, if someone is found to be carrying up to 15 grams of cannabis, they are very unlikely to be prosecuted – unless they are deemed to be promoting cannabis use to minors.

Berlin has acknowledged the futility of fighting cannabis use – what comes next?

MEXICO CITY, Mexico – Mexican drug cartels are forcing indigenous children and teens to join their ranks, torturing or killing those who refuse, the United Nations warned Friday, November 17.

The UN's special rapporteur on indigenous rights, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, said she is "particularly worried" about violence against minors after speaking with indigenous communities around Mexico during a 10-day tour.

"In areas affected by organized crime and the production and trafficking of drugs, the only choice left to young people is to join these groups or be tortured, disappeared or killed," she told a press conference at the end of her visit.

Mexico drug cartels force-recruiting indigenous children – UN

PETALING JAYA: Padang Serai MP N Surendran has slammed amendments to the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952, saying the new bill tabled for first reading in Parliament today does not remove the mandatory death penalty and breaches the doctrine of separation of powers.

Surendran, who is also a lawyer, said according to the new Section 39B (2A), only those who received a certificate from the public prosecutor verifying that they were only the couriers and had assisted in disrupting drug trafficking activities would be spared the death penalty.

“The court still has no option but to sentence to death all those accused persons who are denied the attorney-general’s certificate.

“Thus, the attorney-general and his prosecutors will effectively hold the power to decide whether an accused person faces the hangman’s noose or not,” he said in a statement.

He added that the court would be unable to question the giving or denial of the certificate, as the bill provides that this be done at the “sole discretion” of the public prosecutor.

On Aug 7, the cabinet unanimously agreed to allow judges to impose an appropriate penalty on drug traffickers instead of the mandatory death sentence under an amendment to Section 39B of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952.

Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Azalina Othman Said said the cabinet had decided that the act should allow judges the right to decide on more appropriate sentences such as jail terms.

In the past, she said, judges had been forced to pass the death sentence on drug traffickers as no other sentences were available.

Death penalty for drug traffickers: New bill in Malaysia not enough, says MP

United Nations (UN) human rights experts, including special rapporteur Agnes Callamard, have renewed their call for the Philippine government to promptly investigate the killings in the country despite President Rodrigo Duterte’s strong condemnation and threats against the group for criticizing his brutal drive against illegal drugs.

The three rapporteurs – Callamard as special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; Michel Forst as special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; and Diego García-Sayán as special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers – issued a joint statement last Thursday from Geneva, Switzerland seeking probe into the killings in the Philippines.

The most recent attack was Duterte’s threat to slap Callamard if the latter would investigate him for the alleged extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.