Nguyen Thy Yem and her husband, Bouy Thanh Men, have been using drugs since they married a decade ago. Together, they do meth and heroin in the backstreets of the capital. But Thanh Men insists that he and his wife are users, not dealers. Nonetheless, his wife now faces drug-dealing charges after being arrested on January 10.

She and four others scooped up in the raid in Chbar Ampov district are just a few of the many recently snared in a new nationwide crackdown on drugs. She is also one of the many languishing in pre-trial detention in Prey Sar prison.

In the first two weeks of the year, authorities say they have arrested more than a thousand dealers and drug users. While analysts and government officials recognise a rise in drug use, they say the recent explosion in arrests could exacerbate two already thorny problems: prison overcrowding and a backlog of drug cases stuck in the courts.

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Cambodia: Drug crackdown pushes courts and prisons to breaking point

Scientists believe that a radical treatment involving the horse tranquilliser, ketamine, could help overcome alcohol addiction by “erasing” drink-related memories.

Psychologists based at University College London are testing whether a one-off dose of the drug could help hazardous drinkers who are trying to reduce their alcohol intake. Alcohol addiction is notoriously difficult to treat, and there are few effective therapies available.

Using a recreational drug to treat addiction may sound counterintuitive, but the researchers say there is a growing body of research suggesting that ketamine can be used to disrupt harmful patterns of behaviour.

Radical ketamine therapy could treat alcohol addiction

Governments with this organizational disorder may habitually relate to the world by vigilant scanning of civil society for clues or suggestions that may validate their fears or biases. Paranoid governments are eager to expand control and surveillance and reduce individual rights. They think they are in danger and look for signs and threats of that danger, potentially not appreciating other evidence.

Governments suffering from PGD tend to create enemy images, that is, negative perceptions of individuals, a group of individuals and/or other governments based on paranoid delusions. They tend to distort experience by misconstructing the neutral or friendly actions of these groups as hostile or contemptuous.

The scientific literature describes two kinds of enemy images: the internal (perceived as working within society) and the external (perceived as working outside of society). It is a common delusion among governments with PGD that the groups or individuals identified as the internal enemy are the foreign agents of the external enemy.

Paranoid Government Disorder: A new global epidemic?

The Bolivian government plans to expand the legal production of coca leaves, the raw material from which cocaine is produced, in a bid to reduce illegal cultivation of the plants.

Since 2004, the Bolivian government has allowed coca cultivation to take place on up to 12,000 hectares of land. The government has now proposed that a further 8,000 hectares of land be designated for coca leaf production.

Bolivia, the third largest producer of cocaine in the world, originally introduced legal coca cultivation for domestic consumption due to the violence and corruption being caused by the illegal cocaine trade.

Bolivian Government proposes increasing land for legal coca cultivation

Despite a tumultuous 2016, Colombia ended the year on a hopeful note. On Dec. 10, President Juan Manuel Santos accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to broker peace with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest rebel group. In his acceptance speech, Santos said that “the impossible had become possible” – after more than 50 years of fighting, conflict with the FARC was officially over.

Implementing that peace will put Santos’ words to the test. Just days before his speech in Oslo, Congress approved a revised peace deal after an earlier version had been rejected by voters in a plebiscite in October. In order to get the new deal passed, Santos was forced to make concessions to opponents of the original agreement – even on the points seemingly most important to him. That meant revisiting provisions for land reform, transitional justice and, of particular relevance to Santos’ Nobel Prize speech, drug policy.

Santos’ lecture in Oslo constituted a landmark rebuke of the global approach to the so-called war on drugs. He forcefully reiterated earlier calls for the world to “urgently rethink” the way it addresses the global drug trade, noting the high price that Colombia had paid in “deaths and sacrifices” in those efforts.

How Santos’ new peace deal aggravated Colombia’s drug war

Israel plans to decriminalise personal marijuana use, Gilad Erdan, the nation’s Public Security Minister, said on Thursday, adopting an approach similar to some US states and European countries.

Mr Erdan said that if the Government approves his new policy, those caught smoking marijuana would be fined rather than arrested and prosecuted. Criminal procedures would be launched only against those caught repeatedly.

“Police will be able to redirect resources ... away from normative personal users and focus instead on dangerous drugs,” he told a news conference in Tel Aviv.

Israel to decriminalise cannabis for personal use

The summit focused on two key issues in modern Irish drug policy: upcoming legislation to create a legal framework for supervised injecting facilities, and decriminalising possession of illicit drugs for personal use.

Guest of honour, Madame Ruth Dreifuss, the former President of Switzerland who was attending in her capacity as Chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy explained the necessity of the summit:

At their inception, approaches based on prohibition were aimed at protecting public health, yet criminalisation has had the adverse effect, fuelling global epidemics such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C. Harm reduction measures, including the boldest of them such as safe injection facilities, combined with decriminalisation, have proven the most effective in addressing the issue while preserving people’s dignity and reducing public expenditures.

The Dublin Drug Policy Summit

Officials in Seattle on Friday approved the nation’s first “safe-injection” sites for users of heroin and other illegal drugs, calling the move a drastic but necessary response to an epidemic of addiction that is claiming tens of thousands of lives each year.

The sites — which offer addicts clean needles, medical supervision and quick access to drugs that reverse the effects of an overdose — have long been popular in Europe. Now, with the U.S. death toll rising, the idea is gaining traction in a number of American cities, including Boston, New York City and Ithaca, N.Y.

While opponents say the sites promote illegal drug use, supporters say they can keep people alive and steer them toward treatment. They compare supervised injection facilities to the needle exchanges that became popular in the 1980s and 1990s as a way to stanch the spread of HIV and hepatitis C among intravenous drug users.

Awash in overdoses, Seattle creates safe sites for users to inject illegal drugs

The time has come for me to step aside as executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

This is just about the toughest decision I've ever made but it feels like the right time for me personally and also for DPA. It's almost twenty-three years since I started The Lindesmith Center and approaching seventeen years since we merged with the Drug Policy Foundation to create DPA. We've grown from little more than an idea into a remarkable advocacy organization that has built, led and defined a new political and cultural movement.

Ethan Nadelmann's farewell letter to Drug Policy Alliance staff

As the Tunisian parliament considers a legislative revision to the country’s notoriously strict drug law, human rights organisations are urging lawmakers to reduce penalties.

Last week, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Avocats sans Frontières, and the Tunisian League for Human Rights sent a joint letter to the Tunisian parliament calling for an end to imprisonment as a punishment for “recreational” drug use and possession.

The letter was sent as a response to the legislature’s ongoing reconsideration of Tunisia’s primary piece of drug legislation, Law 52, which has been described as “draconian” and responsible for “a disastrous toll on the lives of thousands of citizens” by Tunisia’s HRW director, Amna Guellali.

Tunisian lawmakers reconsidering “draconian” drug law

At a meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, EHRN is launching its first project with the European Commission in the field of drug policy. The project, titled “Drug Policy Impact Assessment for Change in Central and Eastern Europe”, will focus on the Central and Eastern Europe region, with pilot actions in the three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The aim of the project is to involve various groups – from legislators and law enforcement to civil society activists – to work on drug policy evaluation mechanisms and promote transparent and evidence-based decision-making processes for national drug policies. A strategic importance is given to obtaining a national and regional consensus on changes needed to meet the targets of EU Drugs Strategy and, in general, to improve public health and human rights in the area of drug policy.

A two-day meeting, taking place on 30-31 January, is dedicated to setting country-specific goals and objectives of the project, identifying partnerships in each country as well as starting the process of creating the methodology for drug policy impact assessment in the region.

Drug policy impact assessment for change in Central and Eastern Europe

The five leading candidates in the upcoming French presidential election, who hail from across the political spectrum, offer markedly different approaches to cannabis policy.

French voters will go to the polls in April to elect a new president, as incumbent François Hollande steps down. Each of the five leading candidates has expressed their view on cannabis prohibition – an issue that hasn’t traditionally been up for debate in mainstream French politics.

France has some of the most repressive cannabis laws in the European Union according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). The possession of cannabis, even for personal use, can be punished by up to 10 years in prison, or with a fine of up to €7.5 million.

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