Last Friday, the government launched its policy on Ireland’s approach to the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use, following the report of the working group set up to examine the issue. In essence, the new policy adopts a staged approach to dealing with possession.

The first time a person is caught, they will be diverted for a (mandatory) health assessment with HSE. The second time, the gardaí will have the option to apply an adult caution under the adult cautioning scheme. The third time, the person will have used all their chances and will face criminal prosecution.

For those who have been following the policy as it developed to this stage, they will know that this is a policy born of compromise – an attempt to reconcile health and criminal justice in the context of personal drug use. However, there should have been no compromise, personal drug use is a health issue, pure and simple.

As a result, the policy is not likely to achieve its goals – adopting a health led approach, connecting people who use drugs with health services and breaking down the stigma associated with drug use.

In this piece, we look at the main reasons as to why this is the case.

The Irish government's new drug policy will do nothing to end the stigmatisation of drug users

A ‘health based’ approach to drug enforcement is one step closer to being written into law after the third reading of the Misuse of Drugs Act Amendment Bill. Don Rowe reports.

The Misuse of Drugs Act Amendment bill has passed its third reading tonight in what MPs and harm reduction advocates are calling the most significant reform in the Act’s 44 year history.

Under the amendment, the police right to exercise discretion when it comes to prosecuting drug-related crimes will be codified into law for the first time. Police will now be required to avoid prosecution in cases where a health-based or therapeutic approach would prove more beneficial.

Police were previously empowered to exercise their discretion, operating under a system of decriminalisation de jure, however while politically convenient, it led to a disproportionate rate of Māori convictions.

In an impassioned speech during debate, Chlöe Swarbrick, who has led the Green’s reform efforts, called the bill “a triumph for compassion and a triumph for common sense”.

“The arc of moral history is long but today it bends towards justice.”

In New Zealand, the ‘most significant drug reform in 40 years’ is about to become law

Este artigo expõe de que forma mulheres negras têm sido criminalmente punidas no Brasil. Resgata-se que desde o período da escravidão no Brasil, mulheres negras eram punidas por meio do estupro sistemático. Contemporaneamente, quando mulheres são punidas criminalmente, a elas é reservado o lugar de anormalidade, desequilíbrio emocional, desestabilidade moral, levando a diagnósticos “incorrigíveis” como loucura e histeria, corroborando inclusive para sustentar uma esfera privada de punição por redes religiosas e estabelecimentos psiquiátricos. Constata-se que 62% das mulheres está confinada pela tipificação de associação ou tráfico. Este dado leva o artigo a questionar por fim a precariedade da guerra às drogas e levantar a necessidade de potencializar a voz das mulheres em situação prisional como uma pauta emergente de direitos humanos.

Mulheres negras na mira: Guerra às drogas e cárcere como política de extermínio

Professor Carl Hart, a Neuroscientist Drug Researcher at the Colombia University, on Wednesday arrived in Accra to deliver a public lecture on drug policy reforms.

He said, he was tipping Ghana to be the first African country to consider decriminalisation of drug use, especially marijuana.

He noted that this would be a good step for Ghana since other countries had done so, because they see drug users as their own brothers and sisters.

Prof Hart made these remarks in an interview with the Ghana News Agency upon his arrival at the Kotoka International Airport in Accra.

Studies had consistently failed to establish the existence of a link between the harshness of a country’s drug laws and its levels of drug use.

The widespread criminalisation and punishment of people who use drugs, the over-crowded prisons, mean that the war on drugs is, to a significant degree, a war on drug users — a war on people.

Prof Hart is headlining the first public lecture on drug policy on Thursday, July 18, as the main speaker, an event organised by the POS Foundation, in collaboration with the West Africa Drug Policy Network and Crime Check Foundation.

The overall objective of the lecture is to engage communities, citizens and government officials on approaching drug policy formulation, compliance and implementation from a human right and public health perspective.

Prof Hart in Ghana to deliver lecture on drug policy reforms

For six weeks this summer I had the extraordinary opportunity to visit harm reduction programs all over Western Europe. In Belgium I toured a safe consumption site where people smoke and inject drugs under medical supervision. In Switzerland I explored Geneva, where physicians prescribe heroin to mitigate the dangers of unregulated street drugs. In Amsterdam I stopped by the drug user union credited with launching the world’s first official syringe exchange program.

Coming from North Carolina, where harm reduction programs have barely begun to take root, I considered the European tour akin to visiting the motherland. Finally I would see “real” harm reduction programs, evolved after decades of fine-tuning. But Europe also showed me something I hadn’t expected.

Every program I visited was clean and medical, government-funded and seamlessly integrated into public health policy. But to my surprise, I saw little evidence of drug user-led activism. The edgy, scrappy side of harm reduction⁠—that agitation for change so visible in the United States⁠—seemed absent.

In Western Europe “everything has been professionalized, so the basic idea of harm reduction has faded away,” said Katrin Schiffer of Correlation European Harm Reduction Network, whom I interviewed at her office in Amsterdam. “Even the people who work in harm reduction have trouble explaining what it is.”

At first I wondered if these programs had always lacked an active drug user component. But after interviewing experts in several countries and researching the history of European harm reduction, I found that drug user-led activism was critical to launching the programs that exist today.

When harm reduction expansion stifles activism: A lesson from Europe

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) recently released its most in-depth study of organised crime in Southeast Asia in over five years. According to the report, Southeast Asia’s crime syndicates have expanded their activities in the global trade of illicit goods, driving corruption in the region and heavily influencing the economies of areas where they operate.

Jeremy Douglas, the UNODC regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, says organised crime now threatens to destabilise the region and presents a major barrier to sustainable development.

The growth of organised crime stems largely from the success of the ASEAN drug trade. The methamphetamine trade is now worth an estimated US$61.4 billion per year across the Asia-Pacific. The Southeast Asian market alone accounts for US$25.7 billion of that— more than the GDP of Cambodia. Heroin trafficking has decreased but still generates an estimated US$10.3 billion per year across the Asia-Pacific, with Southeast Asia contributing US$6.3 billion to the figure.

ASEAN’s drug trade rakes in profits despite strict laws

Recently, during a technical stop on President Jair Bolsonaro’s trip to the G20 Summit in Japan, Spanish police arrested a Brazilian Army Air Force sergeant at the Seville airport for transporting 39 kilos of cocaine. A few months earlier, a police inspector and a customs agent from the port of Algeciras were arrested for their connection to an organization dedicated to drug trafficking in the Strait of Gibraltar: they provided key information on which containers were to be registered, and when. The trial of Joaquin “El Chapo

 Guzman has revealed the corruption that entangles not only the drug trafficking business in Mexico, but also the drug war launched by Mexican authorities, allegedly reaching the highest levels of the administration of former President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Concerns over corruption related to illicit drug trafficking have increased in recent years. It has become an important concern of governments, citizens, civil society, and international organizations, particularly where corruption is widespread or affects the highest levels of the judiciary, security forces, administration or politics. And now, over more than two decades ago, this link began to gain relevance in the international agenda.

Corruption is present throughout the chain of illegal drug trafficking, especially at international or cross-border activities, which involves many types of intermediaries: military, police, officials, border and customs agents, illegal armed actors, and organized criminal groups. But to really understand and deconstruct the connection between drugs and corruption it is necessary to analyze it, not as the result of individual decisions by heartless drug traffickers and officials with no ethics, but as a consequence of deeper relations between the state and the economy of illicit drugs.

Corruption and illegal drugs: Reconstructing links, reversing the causes

Drug policy has often been considered a “third rail” issue in British politics. While some have been more willing to propose a change in policy recent years (e.g. the Liberal Democrat’s floated the idea of cannabis decriminalisation in their most recent manifesto) there is still a fear among many politicians that taking it up as a political issue will lead to repercussions from a hostile electorate.

However our latest polling shows the public actually have quite liberal attitudes on this topic.

When you ask a straight up question on the legalisation of cannabis, the public are almost equally divided: 43% support legalisation and 41% oppose it. The remaining 15% don’t know.

But a simple question like this covers up more nuanced views – not least because drugs policy doesn’t have to be a black and white choice between prohibition and legalisation. Some suggest a third way where substances are decriminalised, meaning that while their sale and possession remain illegal but it is regarded as a minor offence (akin to parking in the wrong place) rather than a criminal one.

When you ask the public to choose between these three options, just under a quarter (24%) support decriminalisation and just over a quarter (27%) support legalisation. This compares to four in ten (40%) who think the current policy is best. So although the current policy comes out highest on its own, when combined a majority (51%) back a more liberal policy, whether it be legalisation or decriminalisation.

 In the UK, a majority support liberalising policy towards cannabis

On 30 May 2019, Italy’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, published a note of information on the legality of selling low-THC cannabis. This followed attempts to prosecute entrepreneurs who were openly selling cannabis flower and other extracts. The products were marketed in a way to avoid the attention of law enforcement by using labels such as ‘collectors item’ or ‘not for consumption’. The sellers claimed that these cannabis products contained less than 0.2 % THC (the main psychoactive chemical in cannabis) and therefore were not controlled under the narcotics law. The Italian Law 242 of 2016 states that cultivation of certain varieties of hemp plants containing less than 0.2 % THC is permitted without any licence, and the plants could be used to produce various specified products including food and cosmetics. The court’s note of information stated that ‘the marketing of 

 and, in particular, of leaves, inflorescences [flowers], oil, resin, obtained from the cultivation of the aforementioned hemp variety, does not fall within the scope of application of Law 242 of 2016’, which exhaustively lists the products that may be marketed. Therefore, sale and marketing to the public of products derived from cannabis is an offence under the Italian drug control law ‘unless the products are in practice devoid of narcotic effects’ (‘privi di efficacia drogante’). It is not yet known how this last phrase will be interpreted.

Italy and Sweden: court decisions on low-THC cannabis products

This article presents the way in which black women have been criminally punished in Brazil. It recalls how black women were punished with systematic rape during the slavery period. In contemporary times, when women are criminally punished they are considered abnormal, emotionally unbalanced and morally unstable, which leads to diagnoses of “incurable” ills such as madness and hysteria, which serve to corroborate a private sphere of punishment by religious networks and psychiatric establishments. 62% of women are confined due to guilt by association or drug trafficking. This piece of information leads the article to question the precarious nature of the war on drugs and to raise the need to strengthen the voices of women in prison – an emerging item on the human rights agenda.

Black women under fire: The war on drugs and incarceration as a policy of extermination

Over the last few months, two important conferences on drug policy and harm reduction took place in Europe: activists were sharing best practices and tools at the International Harm Reduction Conference in Porto, whereas researchers were presenting their findings at the annual conference of the 

International Society for the Study of Drug Policy

 in Paris. The two conferences shared the topic but crucially did not form joint advocacy efforts. What drug policy movement needs now is to connect these two worlds. Here are my highlights from both conferences.

 like probably always was the place where every person is not just tolerated but welcomed with a warm hug. Coming from Russia, where harm reduction is not really a mainstream, it felt like a huge opposition gathering. The topics I followed were drug policy, human rights and providing funding for harm reduction.

In accordance with the slogan of the conference — “people before politics” — quite a lot was said about human rights. We, as a society, tend to blame individuals and trust the system to fix them, but it is in fact more fair to blame the system and the state, and give individuals the tools and autonomy to change it. Changing the existing drug policies is a political process, as well as citizen discussion, so we need to use the 

 further. For example, professor Rodrigo Uprimny who is also one of the members of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural rights spoke about the “Berlin wall” between Geneva as the home of human rights and Vienna as the host of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs. “We should build the bridge and make drug policy a human rights issue,” he said. The first step was done by the Chief Executives Board of the 31 UN agencies which, right before CND, adopted a common 

 on drug policy that endorsed decriminalisation of possession and use of drugs.

 said in her talk, by documenting the harm caused by repressive drug policies we can easily show what putting politics before people means. If only we could do the same with stigma and discrimination that these policies entail. People who use drugs are 

, stalked by the police, and at the same time have a hard time accessing legal aid almost everywhere in the world. There was a special session at the conference aimed at discussing the practices of paralawyers, or street lawyers, as a solution to this issue. Such programs of peer help to victims of human rights violations or violence have been implemented in Denmark, Indonesia, and Russia, among others, and they were proven to be effective even in such severe circumstances as in the case of the Philippines.

For people coming from countries with draconian drug policies, like myself, the Portugese officials said a lot of groundbreaking things like ”criminal justice is never good for issues related to drug use” coming from the police representative or everyones favorite from a member of parliament Ricardo Baptista-Leite ”harm reduction and love have one thing in common they both should be unconditional”. To get to the world with a human-rights-based drug policy, we should encourage politicians to meet with people who use drugs, and, more generally, make people living at the margins of the community visible to the community and be helpful not only to people who use drugs but also to politicians and the police, ”allow them to take credit and praise them.”

The future is intersectional

The Civil Society Task Force (CSTF) was a joint initiative of the Vienna and New York NGO Committees on Drugs, with the goal of ensuring and supporting strong civil society participation in the build-up to the High-Level Ministerial Segment of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs in March 2019, and at the meeting itself. For more information about the CSTF and its work, please visit www.cstfondrugs.org.

This short survey has been designed to evaluate the levels of participation and satisfaction of civil society organisations with the CSTF and the Ministerial Segment. We estimate that this survey should take around 10 minutes to complete online.The survey will stay online until September 20, 2019.

The survey has been prepared in English. To translate into other languages, please open the survey with the Google Chrome browser, and right click for the option to translate. You may respond to the survey in any language.