The arbitrary and excessive use of pretrial detention is a massive and widely ignored pattern of human rights abuse that affects—by a conservative estimate—15 million people a year. The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty is universal, but at this moment some 3.3 million people are behind bars waiting for a trial that may be months or even years away. No right is so broadly accepted in theory but so commonly violated in practice. The global overuse of pretrial detention is among the most overlooked human rights crises of our time.

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Presumption of guilt: The global overuse of pretrial detention

A joint contribution by: Professor Dave Bewley-Taylor, Martin Jelsma and Damon Barrett

State-level cannabis reforms, which gathered steam this month, have exposed the inability of the United States to abide by the terms of the legal bedrock of the global drug control system; the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This is something that should force a much-needed conversation about reform to long-standing international agreements. But while ostensibly 'welcoming' the international drug policy reform debate, it is a conversation the US federal government actually wishes to avoid. The result is a new official position on the UN drugs treaties that, despite its seductively progressive tone, serves only to sustain the status quo and may cause damage beyond drug policy.

The 1961 Single Convention has been massively influential. Almost every state in the world is bound to prohibit cultivation, trade and possession of cannabis and a range of other substances such as coca and opium for anything but medical and scientific purposes. Wherever you are, your drugs laws are probably modeled on this agreement.

The United States has been a staunch defender of this legal regime. The treaties are central to its foreign policy on drugs, including in Latin America. But at home the government has been clear that it will not trample on the will of voters with regard to cannabis, even though this places it in breach of the 1961 Convention. So the US faces a predicament; a treaty breach it does not wish to admit within a system it wishes to protect.

Fatal attraction: Brownfield's flexibility doctrine and global drug policy reform

The death of 19-year-old Georgina Bartter at a music festival on the weekend from a suspected ecstasy overdose could possibly have been avoided with a simple harm-minimisation intervention. Pill testing, or drug checking as it’s known in Europe, provides feedback to users on the content of illegal drugs, allowing them to make informed choices.

Taking illicit drugs, especially ecstasy, is not particularly unusual for someone of Bartter’s age. A 2010 survey found more than 11% of 20- to 29-year-olds and 7% of 18- to 19-year-olds had taken the drug in the previous 12 months. According to annual research among 1,000 ecstasy users, 70% of these pills are taken at clubs, festivals and dance parties.

Australia is internationally applauded for our harm-minimisation approach to drugs but we have failed to introduce pill testing, even though it is an intuitively appealing strategy.

Pill-testing kits or booths at venues where pills are known to be consumed could inform users about the content of illicit drugs. As we have equipment that can test drugs in real time, people intending to take them could have them checked beforehand.

Research shows young people are highly supportive of pill testing; more than 82% of the 2,300 young Australians aged between 16 and 25 years surveyed for the Australian National Council on Drugs in 2013 supported its introduction. The finding is consistent with young people’s overall views about drugs: they want better information in order to make informed choices.

Six reasons Australia should pilot ‘pill testing’ party drugs

Pakistan, a country already tormented by regional insurgencies, is fighting a losing battle against a different kind of foe: drug addiction. In the country’s northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), an estimated 11 percent of residents use illicit substances – primarily heroin. Peshwar, the provincial capital of KPK, is a city rife with homeless addicts and dirty needles.

“Pakistan’s illegal drug trade is believed to generate $2 billion a year [making] Pakistan the most heroin-addicted country, per capita, in the world,” wrote David Browne, who covered the mujahideen insurgency in the 1980s, in a recent exposé for 

. “Peshawar is at the center of this phenomenon, in close proximity to extensive opium-poppy fields in the Afghan provinces of Badakhshan, Kunar and Nangarhar, and the rudimentary heroin-processing labs clustered around Landi Kotal in the adjoining Khyber tribal agency.”

The booming drug trade, which goes hand-in-hand with local Islamist groups, has transformed Peshwar from a city popular with tourists for its outdoor bazaars to a violence-ridden wasteland. Public offices are hidden behind extensive barricades and blast walls to protect from suicide bombers. Travelers have been replaced by derelicts, constantly in search of their next hit.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in a report titled “Drug Use in Pakistan 2013,” 6.7 million Pakistanis used drugs last year. A staggering 4.25 million are thought to be drug dependent. Drug rehabilitation programs and other treatments were provided for only 30,000 of the country’s addicts in 2013.

 The rising prevalence of injecting drug users in Pakistan could create an HIV/AIDS crisis

Every deputy in the Health Committee of Congress in Chile agreed to move forward in the discussion for allowing cannabis use and self-cultivation. The initiative comes from the legislature, according to the urgent need to avoid criminalising people who require cannabis or its derivates for treatment of diseases that cause pain and reduce trafficking in more deprived areas, since the government still does not respond to these situations.

All political sectors are open to allowing the medical use of cannabis, although differences persist on the recreational use of the plant - this will be further discussed in Congress.

Currently the law 20.000, which regulates the use of narcotics and psychotropic substances, allows personal consumption, and accepts their therapeutic application, but criminalises all access to these compounds, criminalising consumers with the same sentences as for drug dealers. Although the government has allowed the import of drugs which compounds are derived from cannabis, the protocol is a cumbersome and very costly preparation, so it continues to be difficult to access to them.

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Unanimous support from deputies to legislate marijuana use and self-cultivation in Chile

A national consultation was held in New Delhi today to discuss the emerging challenges faced by India’s drug-using communities. Harsh laws, policies and practices that punish drug users only perpetuate the harms of drug use, and there is increasing evidence that India’s drug laws stifle the country's HIV response.

Organised by India HIV/AIDS Alliance (Alliance India) in collaboration with United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the consultation saw more than 100 stakeholders from government, affected drug-using communities, media, international agencies, and civil society come together to discuss the emerging challenges faced by India’s drug-using communities and synergies to address this crisis of health and rights.

Worldwide 16 million people are estimated to inject drugs, and three million of them are living with HIV. In India, HIV prevalence in this group is 24-times that of the general population. Though progress has been made, the HIV epidemic continues to be fueled by the stigma and discrimination often experienced by drug users. In India, the lack of access to services can effectively be a death sentence for people who inject drugs. While some parts of the country, especially the Northeast, have developed a range of services for this vulnerable population, most other states have few if any such services. Even in places where basic services exist, it remains difficult for beneficiaries to access them.

The simple reality is that drug users are dying due to lack of attention to a variety of their health problems, including Hepatitis C, HIV, overdose, and detoxification. Some of these services remain controversial and currently not part of India’s basic harm reduction service package, while others are often not available where needed.

Harsh drug laws undermine India's HIV response

This panel discussion on "The road to the United Nations General Assembly’s special session on the World Drug Problem 2016 (UNGASS 2016)" was organised by the United Nations University (UNU).

The road to the United Nations General Assembly’s special session on the World Drug Problem 2016 (UNGASS 2016)

The plethora of comment and reflection on the First World War has overlooked the importance of that war for drug and alcohol control. Yet this war was crucial in the establishment of a system of international control for drugs that still endures today. It instituted models of control for alcohol that also had a lengthy life. In 2014, the First World War is still a potent presence so far as drugs and alcohol are concerned.

International drug control had been discussed before the war, but a global system was unlikely. The major initiative had come from the Americans in the early 1900s, driven by twin motives of moral regulation and strategic advantage in the Far East. The Americans believed that “civilising” and converting the Chinese would come through the ending of their opium consumption. Missionaries and the US State Department had trained their sights on the Indo-Chinese opium trade, a trade which civil servants in the British Foreign Office were already bringing to a close. The Shanghai Convention of 1909 retained a Far Eastern focus, but afterwards the compass of potential control widened. There was genuine concern in the British Foreign Office about morphine and cocaine smuggling in southeast Asia and this topic was taken up by the Americans as an important part of the international control agenda.

The Hague Convention of 1912 was the product of this expanded geographical concern. The decision at the Hague that opium, morphine, and cocaine and their use should be confined to “legitimate medical purposes” was central to future international drug control. Earlier enquiries, such as the Indian Royal Commission on Opium of 1895, had defended medical and non-medical use, and indeed had taken the view that it was difficult to distinguish one type of use from the other. But there were further complications about extending control. The German Government refused to adhere to the Convention because it might be only partially applied and therefore damage the German cocaine industry; it insisted that all 34 participating powers had to ratify the Hague Convention before it could come into force. The convention thus had an “all or nothing” aspect that had not been initially intended. As the British Delegates wrote in their Report, “It [the convention] has, for the first time, laid down as a principle of international morality that the various countries concerned cannot stand alone in these measures.”

The German proviso was a delaying tactic and so only those countries committed to further controls went ahead before the outbreak of war. The USA was one, keen to take a prohibitionist stance. The US Harrison Act of 1914, a revenue measure, aimed to restrict access to drugs and to “stamp out” addiction. Other countries were less keen and by the outbreak of the First World War, there had been only eight ratifications. In the UK, rather desultory discussions before the war envisaged simply an extension of existing pharmacy controls and possibly some further restrictions on the dispensing of doctors' prescriptions.

The war changed the situation. In the UK, it brought the Home Office—in 2014 still the lead department for drug policy—into a central role and also more stringent restriction onto the agenda. Two issues caused concern. Smuggling of drugs showed that controls were indeed interdependent at the international level. The UK was the world's major manufacturer of morphine and the exported drug was being diverted into China via Japan. The Home Office introduced a system of import/export certification designed to ensure that all shipments out of the country had a legitimate destination. Morphine was the main smuggled drug but the use of cocaine also seemed to be expanding in some of the combatant countries. It was feared that army efficiency was at risk.

Drugs, alcohol, and the First World War

Doctors in Vancouver, Canada, have become the first medics in North America to administer prescription heroin to drug dependents. The treatment will only be given to a group of patients who failed to respond to traditional therapies.

“For this group the addiction is so severe that no other treatment has been effective,”

 David Byres, vice president of acute clinical programs at Providence Health Care, told Canadian media. 

 The Globe and Mail Newspaper cited Byres as saying. The program will be performed in Providence Crosstown Clinic in Canadian city.

Byres added that the treatment is only prescribed for those patients for whom traditional therapies such as methadone have failed to work at least 11 times. Canadian doctors are trying the treatment on a group of 202 patients, of which 120 have received diacetylmorphine (heroin) prescriptions.

However, only 26 drug dependents will get their first heroin treatment next week, as so far there are only enough drugs for that number of people.

Canada starts prescribing heroin to people dependent on drugs

More than 400,000 children in the United States suffer from epileptic seizures.

Recently, families with children suffering from epilepsy have been moving to Colorado. The big draw is the state's liberal marijuana laws and a special oil called 'Charlotte's web' which uses low THC and high CBD, which is the medicinal extract from the drug.

This week, contributor Crystal Dilworth finds out how exactly it has being used to help children with epilepsy and talks to families being labelled 'marijuana refugees' because they have uprooted their lives in order to get treatment for their children.

Also on this episode, we meet Jason Koger, who lives in small-town Kentucky and Katie Walker who spends her time in rigorous training for the 2016 Paralympic Games in Brazil.

The two lead very different lives, but have a powerful factor in common. Both Jason and Katie wear high-tech prosthetic hands to help them live actively and independently.

Contributor Phil Torres takes a close look at how these amazing bionic arms work, as he goes hunting on a quad bike with Jason; and then meets up with Katie for a run and a bit of baseball.

Click here to read the full article and watch the video.

In the US state of Colorado, marijuana is being used to help children suffering from epileptic seizures

Over the past few years, research has revealed that marijuana can both destroy certain cancer cells and reduce the growth of others. Now, a new study in mice has found that when combined with radiation treatment, cannabis can effectively shrink one of the most aggressive types of brain tumors.

In a paper published Friday in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapies, a team of researchers from St. George's University of London outlined the "dramatic reductions" they observed in high-grade glioma masses, a deadly form of brain cancer, when treated with a combination of radiation and two different marijuana compounds, also known as cannabinoids. In many cases, those tumors shrunk to as low as one-tenth the sizes of those in the control group.

"We've shown that cannabinoids could play a role in treating one of the most aggressive cancers in adults," Dr. Wai Liu, one of the study's lead authors, wrote in an op-ed earlier this week. "The results are promising...it could provide a way of breaking through glioma and saving more lives."

In an email to The Huffington Post, Liu pointed out that while research surrounding marijuana's cancer-fighting properties is nothing new, his team is the first to document its effect on the disease when used alongside radiation. "The results showed that the final effect was superior to the sum of the parts," he said. "Hopefully, these results will support calls for formal trials in humans to test these combinations."

Liu and his colleagues examined mice that had been infected with glioma and subsequently treated with radiation alone or in combination with varying levels of two cannabis compounds: THC, the psychoactive compound associated with the "high" sensation, and CBD, which doesn't produce psychoactive side effects.

Marijuana drastically shrinks aggressive form of brain cancer, new study finds

The human rights impact of drug laws and policies is a new and emerging issue among human rights scholars and advocates. Using the issue of the compulsory detention of people who use drugs as a case study, this lecture will explore how methods for applying international human rights law can serve as a tool to scrutinise drug control issues.