Ministers in Luxembourg have outlined proposals for the country’s upcoming legalisation of “recreational” cannabis.

The justice minister Félix Braz and health minister Etienne Schneider have elaborated on the government’s plans to legalise the production, sale, and use of cannabis for recreational purposes – after the move was announced last November.

After returning from a research trip to Canada - where cannabis has been legal since October 2018 – the ministers stated that Luxembourg will permit adults aged 18 and over to possess up to 30 grams of cannabis while in public. Minors aged between 12 and 17 will not be criminalised for possessing up to five grams of the drug, they said, but the ministers did not specify what consequences they may face.

The government also intends to introduce strict regulations on the sale of cannabis. The THC content of cannabis will have an upper limit, which has yet to be fixed, and people who sell cannabis outside of the legal framework will face harsh punishments - "even harsher penalties than now", according to reports.

Luxembourg unveils proposals for cannabis legalisation law

Ask any Cambodian about the key issues facing their country and chances are that crime will be near the top of the list. But on nearly all counts, the country’s justice system is failing.

According to the National Police, 2,969 crimes were committed last year, up from 2,817 in 2017. The number stands in contrast to the nation’s bulging prison population, however.

In November, Interior Minister Sar Kheng revealed that there were 31,008 inmates in Cambodia’s 28 prisons, of which almost 72% were being held in pre-trial detention.

That means there are roughly 190 prisoners per every 100,000 people, a bigger proportion than in most other Southeast Asian nations, and higher as a percentage than even authoritarian China.

The prison population has ballooned in recent years after the government launched in 2017 an anti-drug crackdown, similar in tone but not atrocity to the one Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has championed. As a result, the number of inmates rose by 30% in 2017 alone, mostly for drug-related offenses.

The injustice of Cambodian justice

Earlier this month US and Afghan forces bombed 68 drugs labs in South-western Afghanistan, claiming that they caused the Taliban losses of over $1 million per day. 

write that not only have the effects of these strikes been exaggerated, their promotion obscures a new reality on the ground: a dramatic growth in the methamphetamine industry in Afghanistan, fuelled by a ready supply of a home grown ephedra crop.

It’s an old saying that the definition of madness is to do the same thing again and again and expect a different result. Yet this is what the United States Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) and their counterpart the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) did on 6 May 2019 when they bombed 68 drugs labs in Southwestern Afghanistan. They even repeated the madness of grossly exaggerating the scale of financial losses these raids caused the Taliban, claiming losses of $1 million per day.

This latest raid on drugs labs in Afghanistan follows a year-long campaign that USFOR-A claimed destroyed 200 labs and denied $46 million to the Taliban in revenue. The campaign all but ceased in September 2018 after being subject to considerable criticism for its exaggerated estimates of the amount of drugs destroyed and the values denied to both drug traffickers and the Taliban. In striking inactive labs and misunderstanding the taxation system that operates in these areas, the campaign had a negligible effect on revenues and proved a poor use of resources.

New US airstrikes obscure a dramatic development in the Afghan drugs industry – the proliferation of low cost methamphetamine 

Bree Cassell first injected heroin when she was 15 years old. Despite wanting to do so, she was so scared of the needle that it took two men to hold her thrashing body down, and a third to inject the drug into her vein.

Now 26, Cassell frequents a syringe exchange program in Wilmington, North Carolina, for sterile injection equipment, overdose prevention supplies, and friendly faces.

The small exchange—just a whitewashed room in an aging strip mall—doesn’t boast much. But the two women who run the exchange, Becca Lilly and Bernadette Calicchio, have done their best to make it welcoming and comfortable to people who seek refuge there.

Bright Christmas lights deck the walls and old tables are draped in cheerfully-patterned cloths. The exchange offers free clothing, food and toiletries. On one desk a collection of greeting cards is marked, “Write a card to someone you love. We’ll provide the stamp and mail it.”

In late April I visited the exchange for its inaugural Women’s Day, a Friday afternoon where only women could visit the program. The ladies had decked a long table with snacks and party favors, wrapped in pink crepe paper, to welcome their guests.

While we waited for people to show up, I sat down with Cassell and Lilly to learn about their experiences with drug use. Both were introduced to IV heroin, at 15 and 16 years old respectively, by male friends. Both have engaged in sex work to buy drugs at the request of male partners. Both have experienced the difficulty of finding affordable drug treatment programs for women.

Women who use drugs: Challenges demand self-led harm reduction

GENEVA (17 May 2019) — The ten United Nations human rights treaties are legally binding treaties, adopted by the UN General Assembly and ratified by States. Each Treaty establishes a treaty body (or Committee) comprising elected independent experts who seek to ensure that States parties fulfil their legal obligations under the Conventions. This system of independent scrutiny of the conduct of States by independent experts is a key element of the United Nations human rights system, supported by secretariats in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In April this year, the Chairpersons of all 10 treaty bodies* were informed that six of them are very likely to have sessions in 2019 cancelled for financial reasons – an unprecedented consequence of some UN member States delaying payments due to the organisation.

This means that reviews already scheduled with States, as well as consideration of complaints by individual victims of serious human rights violations - including torture, extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances – will not take place as scheduled. The cancellation of sessions will also have numerous other negative consequences, and will seriously undermine the system of protections which States themselves have put in place over decades.

The Chairpersons of the ten Committees are deeply concerned about the practical consequences of cancelling these sessions and have sent a letter to the UN Secretary General and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, requesting that they, together with Member States, find ways of addressing this situation, as a matter of urgency.

UN budget shortfalls seriously undermine the work of the Human Rights Treaty bodies

A leading Dutch harm reduction organisation, Mainline, launched a crowdfunding campaign (https://www.voordekunst.nl/projecten/8383) to open the first ever museum dedicated to drugs. Read our interview with Machteld Busz, the director of Mainline – and support their cause!

When and why did you decide to create the first museum dedicated to drugs and the people who use them?

Machteld Busz: About two years ago, and we started getting serious in developing the plan about one and a half years ago. Poppi: Drugs Museum Amsterdam is set up as a social enterprise. We want to educate the general public about drugs, drug dependency, drug policies, and drug culture. Secondly, we hope to make profits and return those to our foundation. And third we would love to employ people who use drugs at some point in the future. First things first however; we need to get some funds together to get us off to a flying start.

In the promotional leaflet you promise to “blow our minds” with psychedelic artwork and ancient artefacts. Can you talk a bit more about the preparation of the exhibition? How did you collect artefacts and who were the artists you worked with?

We started collecting drug-related art alongside our ‘normal’ harm reduction work. We rely heavily on friends from the field who share a passion and donated or lent art. Now that we have decided to start a museum we can start a more comprehensive and serious collection. We will start the museum ‘lean’, with a series of exhibitions, events, and art-shows. We want to gradually ‘fill’ the eventual museum. In doing so, we want to combine new technology such as virtual reality, or ‘immersive art’ in the form of a situation room, with science and more traditional art to engage people on a deeper level. That would be the ‘blow your mind’ part!

Poppi: Drugs Museum Amsterdam – Interview with Machteld Busz

By Pien Metaal, Constanza Sánchez, Natalia Rebollo

How to reconcile migrant communities’ right to the enjoyment of cultural life (including the use of traditional plants) with international drug control obligations.

For the past several years, Fundación ICEERS, with the support of allied organisations such as the Transnational Institute (TNI), has been assisting in the legal defense of people with a migrant background who are prosecuted in Spain (or other European countries) for the possession or importation of coca leaf for the purposes of traditional use. These people originate from countries with a legal framework allowing for licit traditional use of coca leaf, such as Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina. These cases have had different outcomes and, when people have been convicted, sentencing has not been uniform. In this sense, communities have struggled to exercise their basic rights to enjoy their own culture, illustrating new challenges for human rights and drug control. These challenges need to be met within the framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a new reference for UN drug control mechanisms and the global drug policy debate at large.

Almost two years ago ICEERS celebrated the positive result of a court case related to coca leaf in Girona, Spain. After three years of uncertainty, the Public Prosecutor decided during trial to withdraw the charges of drug trafficking against a Colombian citizen residing in Catalonia for receiving by mail a 2 kilogram package of ground coca leaf. Although the withdrawal of charges against the accused, who had been charged with a crime against public health, was very welcome news to the person involved, to his family and friends, and to drug policy reformers, the prosecutor’s decision to withdraw charges, unlike an acquittal or a decision by the judge to reject the charges, does not result in any formal legal precedent which could be relied upon by others accused under similar circumstances.

Last November we also learned about the latest court decision from a case related to coca leaf possession in Spain, in which we had worked closely with the defense team for over two years. This case relates to the broader issue of traditional use of this plant, beyond its local native contexts, and how migrants from the Andean Amazon region are deprived of a legitimate cultural practice, which is embedded in the places from which they come.

Coca: Migrants and traditional Use

It was almost dawn. My phone was ringing over and over, but it was the loud banging at the door that woke me up. It was my mother. She had come to tell me that my 19-year-old daughter was dead from a drug overdose.

It was hard to process those words in that moment. My initial despair and grief shifted to rage. I wanted the person who gave my daughter the drugs to pay. It didn’t matter if it was her boyfriend or friends—I wanted to hurt and punish that person.

I had these feelings despite knowing that that person who gave my daughter the heroin that was most likely contaminated with fentanyl—the synthetic opioid that is up to 100 times stronger than morphine—was not responsible for my daughter’s death.

As a person who uses drugs, I know that no one person is to blame. What is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths from drug overdose is a broken drug policy, a system that prioritizes punishment over treatment, and a culture of prohibition that leads us to use drugs alone and in shame.

Indeed, while the nation continues to double down on tough approaches to deal with the overdose crisis, fentanyl will continue to poison the U.S. drug supply, and people will continue to die. More than 70,000 people died of drug overdose in 2017 in the United States—a record. And as law enforcement becomes more intense, the potency of prohibited substances increases.

These punitive approaches and the harm they cause are no more apparent than in drug-induced homicide laws, which make it a crime to give drugs that result in a death. While originally designed to target cartel dealers, they are overwhelmingly used to prosecute friends and loved ones of an individual who has lost their life due to an overdose.

Reframing the blame for the war on drugs

By Michel Kazatchkine and Mary Chinery-Hesse

Over the past three decades, European governments have been moving to protect people who use drugs from drug-related health harms.

Drug use has been recognised as a public health concern, and needle and syringe programmes, safe injection facilities, and drug checking, combined with a wide range of treatment options, have been set up throughout Europe.

Furthermore, ceasing to see people who use drugs as criminal offenders has led many countries in Europe towards de jure or de facto decriminalisation of drug use and possession for personal use.

In Portugal, consumers may be actively directed to these facilities by the police or social services.

These measures have contributed to easing the problems related to open drug markets and other public safety issues and contributed to decreasing the stigma and discrimination associated with drug use.

A fundamental contradiction in EU drug policy

Newly appointed Justice and Correctional Services Minister Ronald Lamola said he was frustrated at how the justice system failed to deal with drug dealers.

Lamola said one of his priorities will be to make sure drug dealers and abusers are prosecuted to clean the streets.

Lamola, who was sworn in as the youngest member of President Cyril Ramaphosa's Cabinet on Thursday, said he wants a drug-free country.

“How do you ensure that people who have been arrested for drug use get prosecuted and [that] is done in a process that enables our justice system to clean the streets of South Africa. That is my key issue at the moment.”

South African Justice Minister, Ronald Lamola, to go after drug dealers, users

From 2014 to 2017, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation conducted 16,000 interviews and assigned 50 researchers to develop the third national survey on drug use by the Brazillian population.

Given its scope, the study was expensive: R$7 million (US$1.75m), paid for by the government, which has now shelved the research, preventing Fiocruz from disclosing it.

Prohibition of its publication was met by surprise from the scientific community. For researchers and specialists in the field, the study has been shelved because it does not confirm the existence of a drug epidemic in the country, as Osmar Terra, the Minister of Citizenship, often proclaims exists.

Senad officially claims that the survey has not been released because Fiocruz failed to comply with the requirements of the public bid procedure. On the other hand. the minister se,s to confirm what experts suspect by attacking the institution and claiming that the survey does not corroborate what is seen "on the streets"

Brazilian minister disagrees with results of drug survey, shelves report and attacks researchers

Starting Salary: £21,744 to £27,422, depending on experience

The International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) is a global network of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that aims to promote objective and open debate on the effectiveness, direction and content of drug policies at the national, regional and international levels. We have over 180 member organisations worldwide, and the IDPC secretariat is based in London and Bangkok.

We are looking to appoint a Team Assistant to contribute to the smooth running of our secretariat operations based in London, and to provide essential administrative and accounting support to a small but dynamic and busy team.

The successful candidate will have proven administrative and accounting experience, and must be highly motivated, flexible, and capable of working both independently and as part of a team. Previous experience and/or interest in health, human rights or drug policy is not essential, but the successful candidate will possess a willingness to combine administrative work with tasks that require more autonomy. Excellent English communication skills are essential, as are IT skills, and experience with financial administration. Competency in other languages is desirable (especially Spanish and/or French), as is previous experience working with Xero. Experience of working for an NGO is also desirable.

The successful candidate will join our highly motivated team, and must be a team player with excellent interpersonal skills. This position is based full time in London, and applicants must have the right to live and work in the United Kingdom.

If you wish to apply for this post, please complete the application form (below) and send it to Sam Singh, ssingh@idpc.net, before 11pm (UK time) on Thursday 6th June 2019.

Shortlisted candidates will need to be available for interviews on the 13th, 14th, 17th or 18th June in London. We regret that we cannot respond directly to unsuccessful applicants.

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