By Patpicha Tanakasempipat, Panarat Thepgumpanat

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand approved marijuana for medical use and research on Tuesday, the first legalization of the drug in a region with some of the world’s strictest drug laws.

The junta-appointed parliament in Thailand, a country which until the 1930s had a tradition of using marijuana to relieve pain and fatigue, voted to amend the Narcotic Act of 1979 in an extra parliamentary session handling a rush of bills before the New Year’s holidays.

“This is a New Year’s gift from the National Legislative Assembly to the government and the Thai people,” said Somchai Sawangkarn, chairman of the drafting committee, in a televised parliamentary session.

While countries from Colombia to Canada have legalized marijuana for medical or even recreational use, the drug remains illegal and taboo across much of Southeast Asia, which has some of the world’s harshest punishments for drug law violations.

Marijuana traffickers can be subject to the death penalty in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Thailand approves medical marijuana in New Year's 'gift'

The New Zealand government will hold a referendum on personal cannabis use at the 2020 general election - and it will be binding.

Justice Minister Andrew Little announced Cabinet had made the decision on Monday on his way into caucus on Tuesday morning.

"It will be held at the 2020 general election. The agreement is that it will be binding. There is a bit of detail to still to work through," Little said.

National Leader Simon Bridges suggested that the government was attempting to distract from the general election itself, but said he didn't have a problem with the referendum being binding.

"I'm pretty cynical that you've got a government here that wants to distract from the core issues of a general election," Bridges said.

He suspected two other discussed referendums would also be included on euthanasia and electoral reform, although Little has talked down those prospects.

Bridges would be voting against cannabis legalisation and said he hadn't smoked marijuana at any point in his life.

Little said he would not be using a mooted "citizens assembly" for policy development, something the Green Party had pushed for.

The Green Party negotiated the referendum during 'confidence and supply' talks to form the government.

New Zealand to hold cannabis referendum in 2020

An article published December 7 by the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington, DC think tank, is under fire for promoting the idea that harm reduction approaches—like syringe exchange and naloxone—may encourage “riskier opioid use” and increase rates of opioid-related deaths.

The focus of the criticism is the choice of which articles to cite—and which not to cite—by the authors of the Institution’s “research roundup.” The paper was written by Jennifer L. Doleac, an associate professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, Anita Mukherjee, an assistant professor of Risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Molly Schnell, a postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

“New work by Packham and Wells (2018) suggests that syringe exchange programs—a staple of harm-reduction efforts—reduce HIV rates as intended but unintentionally increase opioid-related mortality by making it easier, cheaper, and safer to use heroin” the authors state.

But as many readers pointed out, the Packham and Wells article is a 

meaning it has not yet been subjected to peer review, nor published in any journal. The authors simultaneously 

cite decades of existing peer-reviewed studies that show syringe exchange programs do 

Public health experts call for retraction of Brookings Institution opioid “research roundup”

Despite nearly a half-century of destructive and ineffective policy initiatives, the “war on drugs” rages on.

In Afghanistan and Colombia, opium poppy and coca cultivation are at some of the highest levels on record. Traffickers and other high-ranking actors in the illicit markets are as wealthy and powerful as ever. Meanwhile, the already-marginalized people who grow these plants—who are mostly peasants and small-scale farmers—continue to be the ones bearing the weight of criminalization.

The situation in the United States is hardly better. According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 72,000 people died because of an overdose in 2017 alone. For perspective, that is a higher death toll than all U.S. military casualties in the Vietnam and Iraq wars, combined. Yet many legislators in places such as Ohio and Maine are still resistant to the kind of public health interventions—such as supervised injection facilities—that have a proven track record of saving lives.

In countries such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, meanwhile, policymakers aren’t merely accepting a failed status quo—they’re actually going backward. Following the example set by the Philippines’ “war on drugs,” some nations are responding to policy failure with little more than vicious and deadly brute force.

Discouraging as this backsliding is, it isn’t the whole story. Positive changes are underway in the most unlikely of places. South Africa recently decriminalized the consumption of cannabis at home. Citizen action and grassroots mobilization in the United Kingdom lead to the government legalizing medical marijuana, and a range of countries, such as Ireland and Ghana, are considering the benefits of the decriminalization of drugs following the documented successes of Portugal’s progressive policies.

As the number of human rights abuses in name of the “war on drugs” have risen, so, too, has a robust network of drug policy reform advocates from around the world, all of whom are ready to challenge these human rights violations and push for better, smarter, and more humane solutions.

Over the last decade, the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program and its grantees have proudly supported these brave individuals and civil society groups. And together, we’ve won significant victories for the reform movement—and for the larger project of reducing the role of criminalization in drug control policy as much as possible while simultaneously advancing public safety and health.

In the face of backlash, in other words, the reform community is stronger than ever. And as we look back over the last 10 years of global drug policies, we can see four crucial areas where great strides have been made which the movement can build on in the years to come.

A pivotal decade for the movement to end the “war on drugs”

Months before the U.S. Senate pushed through new legislation this week that steers the federal prison system in a slightly gentler direction, liberals and conservatives debated whether the First Step Act would live up to its name. Would there be a second step, or would this be an excuse to declare “mission accomplished?”

Its passage late Tuesday was widely hailed as the most significant criminal justice reform bill in nearly a decade. Yet while the bill should reduce the sentences of at least 9,000 federal prisoners and defendants next year, few supporters would say that its impact is anything but modest within the 180,000-prisoner federal system.

But just as important as the reductions in mandatory sentences for drug crimes, long-awaited relief for inmates skipped over by a crack sentencing revision eight years ago, and millions of dollars in new prison programs, the First Step Act’s widespread support in Congress and opinion polls demonstrates an appetite for more change, according to conservatives and liberals who joined forces to pass the measure.

“There’s going to be a second step and a third step,” said Mark Holden, general counsel for Koch Industries, who leads the Koch network’s criminal justice reform efforts. “There’s a lot more to do.”

The hope is that the First Step Act could put Congress on a path paved by several states in recent years, including red bastions like Texas, Louisiana and Georgia, in an effort to make prisons less crowded and more focused on rehabilitation.

One possible next target is an array of conspiracy statutes, which can transform low-level offenses into compound felonies.

Among the narratives that helped drive support for reducing mandatory minimum sentences was the case of Alice Johnson, a grandmother given a life sentence for being part of a conspiracy that committed nonviolent drug and money-laundering crimes. In June, after the advocacy of reality-television star Kim Kardashian, President Trump issued Johnson a pardon, and her story became an argument prisoner advocates pointed to for why drug sentences needed to be reduced.

Okay, what’s the "Second Step" in the United States?

In the US state of Colorado, use and sale of cannabis for recreational purposes has been legal since January 2014, and it has been commercialised for medical purposes since 2009. The main arguments for legalisation were that it would increase law enforcement efficiency, revenue and individual freedom.

The state government instructed the state Department of Public Safety to report on key statistics of cannabis-related topics including crime, impaired driving, hospital visits, usage rates, effects on youth. A second biennial report was released in October 2018. The main findings are as follows:

The number of serious crimes of illegal production and sale of cannabis fell considerably between 2008 and 2014, when they started to rise again. Cannabis-related organised crime cases varied over the period 2008 to 2013 but significantly increased between 2014 and 2017.

The number of plants seized in Colorado by the DEA has varied since 2008, from 5 000 to 40 000 plants per year. Other seizures of plants grown on public lands have also fluctuated, but they steadily increased since 2014; in 2017, the National Forest Service seized over 70 000 plants.

The number and weight of cannabis products seized by the US postal service has increased every year since 2010. The number of seizures of Colorado-sourced herbal cannabis in other states peaked in 2015 and declined since, but increasingly more concentrates and edibles are being found.

The percentage of arrests for cannabis-only impairment by the Colorado State Patrol has remained at 6-8 % since 2014. The share of drivers involved in fatal crashes who tested positive for any cannabinoid has increased from 11 % to 21 % over the last 4 years, but the percentage that tested positive above the state-defined level of impairment of 5 ng/ml blood-THC fell from 11.6 % in 2016 to 7.5 % in 2017 (recording blood-THC levels started only in 2016).

Cannabis-related hospitalisations have increased steadily since 2000. Calls to poison centres have levelled off since 2014, when stricter regulation and prevention measures were introduced to control edible products.

School year 2016/17 was the first in which cannabis-related expulsions or law enforcement interventions were recorded separately, and it showed that cannabis was the single biggest reason for expulsions and interventions. Nevertheless, since school year 2009/10, the graduation rate has risen and the drop-out rate has fallen.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) questions about 500 young people in the state to compare with other states, and the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey (HKCS) now questions nearly 50 000 students.

The rate of last-month cannabis use among 12- to 17-year-olds reported via NSDUH for the 2015/16 school year (9.1 %) was the lowest it has been since 2007/08.

According to HKCS, the proportion of high school students reporting trying cannabis (lifetime use) or reporting past 30-day use did not vary to a statistically significant degree from 2005 to 2017.

Cannabis taxes make up about 1.52 % of all tax revenue collected in the state.

Colorado publishes latest statistics on impact of cannabis legalisation

The International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) is delighted to announce that it is recruiting a consultant to conduct a comprehensive donor scoping exercise with a view to identifying and securing new funding streams for the medium and longer term in support of IDPC’s theory of change and strategic plan (a new plan will be developed in 2019 with the IDPC network for the 2020-2023 period). Specifically, the consultant will lead the donor mapping process with a view to:

Identify new potential donors whose priorities align with IDPC’s objectives, providing contact names or suggested grant application avenues.

Identify new potential donors who could be influenced to consider supporting the work of IDPC, providing contact names or suggested grant application avenues.

Produce a fundraising and donor engagement strategy for IDPC for the coming 5 to 10 years.

To lead on a comprehensive donor scoping exercise that explores opportunities among IDPC’s traditional donor base as well as opportunities from less traditional sources – such as corporations and potential high net worth individuals. This should include a detailed analysis of donor architecture (looking at both national, regional and global levels) and an identification of priority issues mapped against IDPC’s strategic priorities and theory of change. Opportunities to influence donor priorities should also be identified.

To produce a report detailing the results of the donor scoping exercise.

To develop a fundraising and donor engagement strategy for IDPC for the coming 5 to 10 year period.

It is expected that the work will start in mid-February 2019, with Tasks 1 and 2 completed by mid-March 2019 followed by a discussion with the IDPC Executive Director to review results before the completion of Task 3 which would then be completed by mid-April 2019.

IDPC seeks ‘expressions of interest’ from consultants with the skills, experience and ability to support this work as outlined in this ToR. It is anticipated that the work will take approximately 20 days in total. Please send a short expression of interest that details relevant skills and experience for the task, expected remuneration as well as a confirmation of availability to complete the work as per the timeline detailed. 

Please send your expression of interest to Ann Fordham (afordham@idpc.net)by no later than Thursday, 31January 2019.

For more information, please read the Terms of Reference below.

IDPC recruits consultant for donor scoping and engagement 

Around the world, people have experienced one of the most widespread and shameful human rights failures of our time—the global war on drugs. Barely a day passes without some tragedy or abuse fuelled by misguided drug policies hitting the headlines. Day by day, the costs of the war on drugs are tallied in the suffering, death, and missed opportunities across the entire drugs market chain, from production to use.

Today, 70 years to the day since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we might pause to reflect on the totality of these daily injustices. Decades of experience tells us that on this day, we have a crucial question to ponder about our approach to drugs: what do we value more, living up to the promise of the Universal Declaration or chasing the illusion of a “drug-free society”?

Human rights day message — Put human rights in global drug policy

Urgent action is needed to save Harm Reduction in Europe - a short video from the Harm Reduction Conference organized by Correlation - European Harm Reduction Network in Bucharest, Romania.

4th European harm reduction conference: A time to act

Helsinki City Council has approved an initiative to consider the introduction of a safer drug consumption room (DCR) in the city, which would be Finland’s first.

The initiative was proposed by Green Party city councillor, Dr. Kati Juva, to reduce drug overdoses and the transmission of infectious diseases, to provide support and treatment to those in need, and to reduce potentially dangerous drug-related behaviour in Helsinki. Dr. Juva’s proposal was supported by most of her fellow councillors and was passed on 7 November, meaning the Council will now research the details of the proposition in-depth prior to coming to a final decision.

Drug consumption rooms are harm reduction facilities which allow people to self-administer drugs in a safe and hygienic environment. They reduce disease transmission and risky injecting behaviour as all drug use takes place under the supervision of trained medical staff, and service users are provided with sterile equipment. The presence of staff also prevents deadly overdoses from taking places; across the ten countries operating DCRs around the world, there has never been a fatal drug overdose within such a facility.

Helsinki may open Finland’s first drug consumption room

A panel of high-level drug policy experts on November 19th at IPI took up the question of how much progress had been made on 10-year goals enunciated in 2009, and they concluded that the results were very disappointing. The panel was addressing the subject, “The Future of Drug Policies, and the Lessons Learned,” at a policy forum co-sponsored by IPI, IDPC, and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

“It is difficult to credibly claim any progress, given the reality of a robust and growing illicit drug market coupled with an unprecedented rise in both drug-related harms as well as the devastating policy harms,“ said Ann Fordham, Executive Director of the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC). “We cannot keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, that is the definition of insanity.”

She said it was “time that the international community moves away from these damaging and unrealistic drug free goals and considers adopting more meaningful goals and targets in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and international human rights commitments. In formulating social and public policies, it’s fundamental to consider the impact on the lives of people and communities on public health and on human rights, both at the core of the values of the United Nations.”

Panel takes sobering read of status of international drug policies

By Jonas von Hoffmann, Raúl Bejarano Romero

Around the world, there is a steady shift towards the legalisation of marijuana. But how should governments considering such a move ensure it is done effectively, fairly and safely?

Mexico is a good test case. The Mexican Supreme Court recently ruled that the prohibition of marijuana was unconstitutional, but the new government supports legalisation, so the question no longer is if Mexico should legalise cannabis, but how.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s incoming administration has presented an initiative to regulate cannabis from seed to smoke. Legal cannabis would be accessible for recreational, medicinal and industrial uses through a commercial market, non-profit associations, so-called “cannabis clubs”, and home cultivation; all overseen by the establishment of an Instituto Mexicano de Regulación y Control del Cannabis.

But how good is this proposal, how can we tell – and is it a good model for other countries to follow? We analyse the proposal according to the “Ten Ps of marijuana legalisation”, a list of issues developed by drug policy expert Beau Kilmer that should be considered when legalising marijuana. They are: production, profit motive, promotion, prevention, policing and enforcement, penalties, potency, purity, price and permanency.

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