Unsanctioned grassroots initiatives—from the unofficial to the plain illegal—are both the origins and the soul of the harm reduction movement. From syringe programs and drug-checking services to safe consumption sites and heroin-assisted treatment, harm reductionists have long been willing to move much faster than evolving laws and regulations to protect marginalized people’s health and save lives.

While these interventions are now legal in many places, they remain illegal or unsanctioned in many more. Amid a crisis of drug-related deaths in many parts of the world—and despite concerns in some places that medicalization has sidelined drug-user activism—the determination not to waste time waiting for the official go-ahead while people are dying remains strong.

In the US, harm reductionists working in the face of formidable political barriers nevertheless have cause for hope. “I think we’re in a moment of change in the US,” Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who is now the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, told 

. “I think it’s not out of the question … that we might see a major change in how the US approaches a host of drug policies.”

From my perspective in Canada, where harm reduction regulation is further advanced but still sorely lacking, I looked into several areas where forward-thinking activists and practitioners are driving change today.

Five of the ways unsanctioned harm reduction continues to blaze trails

Two thirds of beneficiaries who fail drug tests are still hit with sanctions, despite an admission last year it "doesn't help people become employed and independent".

People on benefits were put forward for almost 40,000 roles that required drug testing in the year to June, 2019. Clients could be referred to multiple roles that needed drug testing.

Of the tests carried out, 114 failed. That included those who refused the test or did not turn up. It is not known how many tests were actually carried out.

Last year, the Ministry of Social Development's (MSD) deputy chief executive Viv Rickard said applying sanctions did not help.

"For normal New Zealanders, they will think we can stop their benefit.

"Of course we can, but that's not our mode of approach, that's not our operating model because doing that doesn't help people become employed and independent," he told 1 NEWS at the time.

Despite this view, official information obtained by 1 NEWS showed the Ministry went on to impose 72 sanctions.

The Green Party called it a breach of trust.

"I take that as Work and Income breaking their promise to people and I think that really undermines the trust in the system," said Green MP Jan Logie.

Last year, Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni said she agreed the sanctions were "stigmatising".

"But it's a hangover from the previous Government".

National Party leader Simon Bridges said today he did not think the Government would change the policy.

"It's like so many areas, we're seeing the Government is pretty part-time and incompetent. They're failing to deliver on their promises."

Today, Mr Rickard emailed a response saying sanctions "are a legal obligation and any changes to any sanctions would require changes to the Social Security Act".

In New-Zealand, beneficiaries failing drugs tests still hit with sanctions

A Mexican judge has granted two people the right to recreational cocaine use, in the first ruling of its kind, the organisation behind the cases said.

The court said it would allow both claimants to "possess, transport and use cocaine" but not sell it, according to Mexico United Against Crime (MUCD).

MUCD, which seeks to end the country's "war on drugs", called the ruling a "historic step".

The decision must be reviewed by a higher court before it is enforced.

MUCD said the Mexico City court ordered the country's health authority, Cofepris, to authorise the two claimants' use of cocaine.

A Cofepris official told the AFP news agency that it had taken steps to block the court order, which was handed down in May. The official said that such authorisation would be outside of its legal remit.

The ruling will only come into effect if a panel of judges side with the original decision. If they do approve the ruling, it will only apply to the two people who brought the cases, whose identities were withheld.

In a statement on Tuesday, MUCD said the cases represent "another step in the fight to construct alternative drug policies that allow [Mexico] to redirect its security efforts and better address public health."

Mexico judge approves recreational cocaine for two users

Every Tuesday afternoon at 4:45 p.m., Melody Cooper’s siblings and mother meet for bingo at Our Lady of Sorrows, a Catholic school in East Vancouver. Cooper, 44, smiled and spoke warmly of the tradition. But she said her heroin addiction—something she’d struggled with for 17 years—has kept her far too busy to join them.

“They’ve always gone together, but I haven’t,” Cooper recounted from a coffee shop in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. “Stress has always been a struggle. Trying to get my next fix, wondering where I’m going to get it from. Lots of worries. Very little sleep.”

When fentanyl emerged as a problem in British Columbia in 2013, the dangerous synthetic opioid gradually replaced heroin on the streets of the Downtown Eastside, widely known as ground zero for the opioid crisis in Canada. Across the province, overdose deaths soared: In 2013, there were 333 fatal overdoses, 15 percent involving fentanyl. In 2018, there were 1,514, and the number involving fentanyl had risen to 87 percent.

Cooper said she grew increasingly convinced she would end up among them. “I had close friends dying left and right, all around me,” she recalled. “It scared the shit out of me.”

Cooper concedes she still injects drugs every day, but what’s different is where she gets those drugs. For more than a decade, the first person Cooper interacted with most mornings was a dealer. Now it’s a nurse.

In September 2016, Cooper was nicknamed “Patient Zero” in an experimental program initiated by PHS Community Services Society (PHS), a nonprofit that operates the supportive-housing building where she lives. Twice a day, Cooper receives doses of hydromorphone, a prescription painkiller that’s better known by one of its brand names, Dilaudid. Hydromorphone is a powerful opioid that’s similar enough to heroin that it eliminates the feelings of withdrawal that Cooper once feared. More than that, access to a guaranteed supply safe from contamination has brought stability to Cooper’s life, enough to reconnect with family and take a part-time job—the first in her life. “And you know you’re not going to die from it,” she said.

Canada might have found a back door to end the war on drugs

The Jamaican Government is finalising legislation to allow for marijuana producers to export the weed.

Minister of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries Audley Shaw says producers could potentially earn $30 million per gallon for exported marijuana oil.

“I have set a target for the end of September for the regulations to be promulgated,” said Shaw on Wednesday night at the official opening of the Sensi herb house at the Pulse Centre in Kingston.

“I want us to start exporting extracted oil and buds from Jamaica to external markets. Canada wants it, Australia is crying out for it and Germany. All over the world, they want the Jamaican brand,” he said.

The Cannabis Licensing Authority, CLA, has granted 54 licences to date for cultivation, processing, selling, transporting and research. The next tier will see the inclusion of export permits following the enactment of the import-export regulations. The draft regulations have moved through various bodies for review, including Shaw’s ministry, the Ministry of Justice, Attorney General’s Department and the Chief Parliamentary Counsel, and is now at the CLA for final review.

Once enacted, the regulations will give CLA jurisdiction to handle requests for the import and export of ganja buds and resin oil.

“In other words, CLA will have the authority to grant export permits,” Shaw said.

“When a licensee extracts 50 gallons of marijuana oil produced in Jamaica, you know what the value of that 50 gallon container of oil is worth? – 15 million Canadian dollars, yes,” he added.

It puts one gallon at roughly CDN$300,000 or about $30 million.

“It is real figure and might even be conservative. But 50 gallons is a whole heap of product,” said ganja entrepreneur Lloyd Tomlinson, who is a part-owner of Marigold Limited. Sensi is a subsidiary of Marigold. It joins a growing field of medical marijuana retail operators, which includes forerunner Kaya and Epican.

Jamaican ganja export regulations to be finalised September

By Sheila Coronel, Mariel Padilla, David Mora, and the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, for The Atlantic

MANILA—All Jefferson Soriano wanted was to go to bed. But the power was out, his tiny room felt like a furnace, and his friend Manuel Borbe had come by. The pair walked outside to chat and get some air, eventually stopping for a late-night coffee along a busy road.

Soriano and Borbe had lived nearly their entire lives in the area, a shantytown in a Manila community called Holy Spirit, and had met as teens on a neighborhood basketball court. They had been friends ever since, growing up together, and now both were new fathers in their 30s struggling to make ends meet—Soriano by working odd jobs in grocery stores and fast-food restaurants, Borbe as a construction worker.

At the time, Rodrigo Duterte’s first year as president of the Philippines was coming to a close, a violent period during which the government prosecuted a war on drugs, in which police swept down, arrested suspected drug sellers, and conducted sting operations against them. Officers were given wide latitude to shoot, and kill, suspected drug dealers—ostensibly in self defense—and Holy Spirit was one of the offensive’s epicenters.

Soriano and Borbe had themselves been caught up in police raids: The former had been reported for his contact with drug dealers, the latter had previously surrendered to police and admitted that he was a user of crystal meth, or 

. In fact, just a month before, policemen had barged into Soriano’s home while he was in the bathroom naked and dragged him outside as he begged for his life. They took him to the police station and, he says, beat him as they questioned him about his association with drug dealers.

So that night—June 15, 2017—Borbe was anxious, worried for his wife and infant son were he to be arrested, or worse, killed. “My time,” he told Soriano as they sipped coffee, “will soon be up.”

While they sat and chatted, a car drove past, its headlights casting a glow on a tall, well-built man standing on the corner on the opposite side of the street. He was soon joined by another man, who arrived on a motorcycle. Each was clad in the same attire—a dark jacket, shorts, and a balaclava.

“Bro, cops,” Soriano told Borbe, believing that the men, despite their face coverings, were police officers. Their stocky build, their posture—hands on their sides, as though they were about to draw their guns—reminded him of the many policemen he’d had run-ins with over the years. Before either friend could do anything, one of the men raised his arm and fired a pistol. Borbe slumped to the ground, taking a fatal shot to the head. Soriano tried to run, but other shooters were waiting at nearby street corners, and fired at him from different directions, hitting him in the neck and leg. As he lay bleeding on the pavement, pretending to be dead, Soriano recalls, he heard the gunmen mount their motorcycles to flee, only for one of the bikes not to start, forcing two of the men to push it downhill to get away.

“The only thought I had in my mind then,” he said in an interview this year in Manila, where he is in hiding, fearing for his life, “was that I had to live for the sake of my son.”

Borbe’s death was posted on the police blotter and investigators were sent to the scene. Journalists arrived shortly after and reported the incident in the news. Photographs were taken, showing Borbe’s corpse splayed on the street corner, the blood from his head wound flowing into the storm drain.

Yet this well-publicized killing is not included in any official count of drug casualties. It has not been fully investigated. It is unclear who the shooters were. As we have found, that is far from unusual: Borbe is only one among a huge number of uncounted victims of Duterte’s drug war.

The uncounted dead of Duterte's drug war

GENEVA, 14 August 2019—UNAIDS warmly welcomes the appointment of Winnie Byanyima as its new Executive Director. Ms Byanyima has more than 30 years of experience in political leadership, diplomacy and humanitarian engagement.

“I am honoured to be joining UNAIDS as the Executive Director at such a critical time in the response to HIV,” said Ms Byanyima. “The end of AIDS as a public health threat by 2030 is a goal that is within the world’s reach, but I do not underestimate the scale of the challenge ahead. Working with all its partners, UNAIDS must continue to speak up for the people left behind and champion human rights as the only way to end the epidemic.”

The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, appointed Ms Byanyima as the UNAIDS Executive Director and United Nations Under-Secretary-General following a comprehensive selection process that involved a search committee constituted by members of the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board. The UNAIDS Committee of Cosponsoring Organizations made the final recommendation on the appointment to the Secretary-General.

Ms Byanyima brings a wealth of experience and commitment in harnessing the power of governments, multilateral agencies, the private sector and civil society to end the AIDS epidemic around the world. Ms Byanyima has been the Executive Director of Oxfam International since 2013. Prior to that, she served for seven years as the Director of Gender and Development at the United Nations Development Programme.

Ms Byanyima began her career as a champion of marginalized communities and women 30 years ago as a member of parliament in the National Assembly of Uganda. In 2004, she became the Director of Women and Development at the African Union Commission, working on the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, an international human rights instrument that became an important tool for reducing the disproportionate effect of HIV on the lives of women in Africa.

UNAIDS welcomes the appointment of Winnie Byanyima as its new Executive Director

On the occasion of the Global Day of Action of the Suport. Don’t Punish campaign, during Pride month, Re Generation organised a screening of the film “Chem-Sex and the city” in Belgrade. The film was produced with the support of the Drugreporter Video Advocacy Network. Watch the video and read Irena Molnar’s report!

This short documentary premiered at the International Harm Reduction Film Festival in April this year in Portugal. It was made within Re Generation’s video advocacy public campaign to raise awareness of psychoactive substance issues. As Belgrade’s chemsex scene is on the rise (read more about chemsex here!), and more and more people are getting into it, the cases of overdose and sexual assaults are more and more frequent. With this event marking the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, we wanted to raise awareness and make an open and safe space for people engaging in chemsex, to ask questions, talk about their experiences and seek any advice they may need.

This event – co-organised with the LGBTI Equal Rights Association and supported by the Pride Info Center – marked the beginning of an open dialogue on chemsex as a new phenomenon in Serbia, and as a result, we started new cooperation and mapping of the needs of communities practicing chemsex in Serbia, with an aim to create services that would respond to their specific needs.

Chemsex and the City

In November 2018, the United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) adopted the UN system common position on international drug control policy through effective inter-agency collaboration. This forward-thinking document calls for strong support for policies that promote health, human rights, including equality and non-discrimination, and sustainable development. In particular, the document calls for the promotion of alternatives to conviction and punishment, including the decriminalisation of drug possession for personal use, the principle of proportionality, and harm reduction interventions. To achieve these goals, the Common Position acknowledges the importance of inter-agency cooperation.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres today announced the appointment of Jan Beagle of New Zealand as Special Adviser on System-wide Implementation of Chief Executive Board (CEB) decisions.

As part of his ongoing efforts to ensure system-wide coherence, the Secretary-General has decided to enhance the focus on system-wide implementation of the decisions, strategies and policies adopted by the CEB. The Special Adviser will advise the Secretary-General, the Deputy Secretary-General, the Chef de Cabinet and senior management in the system on ways to leverage system-wide agreements and accelerate implementation at global, regional and country levels.

Ms. Beagle has over four decades of distinguished service to the United Nations, including most recently as Under-Secretary-General for Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance. Previously, she served as Deputy Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Deputy Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva, and Assistant Secretary-General for Human Resources Management. She has also held senior positions in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, the Office of the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations Department of Political and Security Council Affairs.

Secretary-General appoints Jan Beagle of New Zealand Special Adviser on system-wide implementation of Chief Executive Board decisions

This week the Guardian revealed that police attempts to tackle violent crime had brought about a sharp rise in the use of stop-and-search powers by some of England’s major forces. Boris Johnson, most likely to be Britain’s next prime minister, has said he wants to increase the powers further. Critics say stop-and-search powers disproportionately target black people and undermine community relations.

Jamal talks to Anushka Asthana about the impact a recent stop and search has had on him – a search that ended in him being charged with assaulting a police officer. Adam Elliott-Cooper discusses the history of stop and search, a policy he believes has always been racist, while Mike Shiner examines its efficacy. There is little evidence he says, to support the use of stop and search in combating violent crime.

Stop and search is discriminatory, so why is it on the rise in the UK?

Cannabis has long been part of traditional medicine in Asia. In Japan, the earliest traces can be found as far back as 8,000 BC – this may be the earliest ever recorded.

It is only since the mid-twentieth century that usage has become heavily restricted, due to changing western opinions and the enforcement of UN drug treaties. As a result, attitudes across Asia have now become some of the most conservative in the world.

However, that stance is beginning to soften. Thailand’s recent legalisation of medical cannabis represents a watershed moment for the continent as they followed the lead of South Korea, who surprised many to become the first east Asian country to legalise medical cannabis in November 2018.

Experts now predict that other countries in the region will follow suit and legalise the plant for medicinal purposes. Prohibition Partners estimates that by 2024 the legal cannabis market in Asia – which is home to more than half the world’s population – could be worth upwards of $8.5bn.

And it’s estimated that Japan and China could share 90 per cent of this market – even though conservative attitudes in the two countries have become predominant, with laws that are still far stricter than in Europe or the US. This is evidenced by comparing recreational usage, where only 1.4 per cent of people aged between 15 and 64 in Japan have ever tried cannabis, compared to 29 per cent in the UK and 40 per cent in the US and Canada.

So why is the Japanese government now looking to heed the World Health Organisation’s proposal that cannabis be reclassified to reflect the mounting evidence of its medical benefits? It is not because of any change in Japan’s conservative values – it is instead an economic imperative.

Japan’s conservative attitude to cannabis is softening

In the face of a repressive government, Russian harm reduction and legal aid organizations are working to end HIV in one of the world’s few countries where new infections are actually increasing.

, profiles service providers who are working with—and often are themselves—people who use drugs, do sex work, are HIV positive, and are queer or trans. People who share these experiences are targeted by state policies through policies like the ban on opioid substitution medications, drug user and HIV registries, and “gay propaganda” laws.

, as its title conveys, simultaneously invokes pessimism and optimism. The police show indifference to harassment and abuse of sex workers, and injection drug users face hostile medical providers at seemingly every turn. Prevention campaigns feature posters calling for the end of HIV—yet proven methods for decreasing transmission risk, like sterile syringes, and care for people who are positive, like antiretroviral therapy, continue to be inaccessible.

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