GENEVA (1 November 2018) — The UN Human Rights Committee, which monitors implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, today published a new general comment: a comprehensive text providing legal guidance on article 6, the right to life.

“The right to life is the prerequisite for the enjoyment of all other human rights,” explained Yuval Shany, Chair of the Human Rights Committee. “The general comment provides a rich and authoritative statement of the obligations deriving from the right to life, which the Committee defines as ‘the supreme right.’”

The Human Rights Committee, made up of 18 independent experts, is charged with watching over the Covenant by examining the human rights situation in each of the 172 countries that ratified it. Those countries are also referred to as States parties. In addition to reviewing the human rights situation in the States parties, the Committee also examines, discusses and writes guidance on how States parties ought to interpret and apply the Covenant on a practical level. The Human Rights Committee speaks for itself, not for the United Nations.

UN Human Rights Committee publishes new general comment on the ‘right to life’

The Zimbabwe Civil Liberties and Drug Network (ZCLDN) has this year held two capacity building workshops on promoting harm reduction in the country’s prisons. The two workshops held in August and October were attended by senior Zimbabwe Prison and Correctional Services officers and middle management officers.

The capacity building workshop was attended by senior officers from the Harare Metro province based at the Harare Central, Chikurubi Maximum, Women and Farm prisons. ZCLDN director, Wilson Box said the workshops were meant to enhance knowledge of drug and substance use among prison officers and change attitudes and values towards drug use and reduce risk behavior associated with substance use among key populations including drug users. “Prisoners are key populations and they are vulnerable to be infected by diseases. Therefore, there is need for humane treatment of prisoners including those who use drugs and we need to introduce the concept of harm reduction and drug policy reform,” Box said. The prison officers went through the process of implementing and disseminating drug use and harm reduction strategies to inmates

Zimbabwean prison officers undergo training on promoting harm reduction

Ontario’s corrections ministry says it does not track the number of opioid overdoses in its jails, even though prisoners have died and staff are routinely treating inmates for overdoses.

That has observers of the jail system wondering how the province expects to combat a major health crisis and keep people safe without a full statistical picture of the drug overdose problem.

Last May, this newspaper sent a freedom-of-information request to the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, asking how many overdoses there have been in provincial jails, and how many times staff have administered the antidote naloxone.

Five months later, the answer has arrived.

The number of overdoses and cases where naloxone is used are “not maintained in a central databank,” the ministry says in a letter.

As a result, counting up the totals would require “an extensive manual search within each inmate’s file in each provincial jail covering the specified time period.”

We also asked how many drugs seizures there were in jails during two six-month periods in 2017 and 2018. The ministry says it seized suspected drugs 206 times from May to October on 2017, and 111 times in the five months after that (with figures not available for the sixth month).

Even then, it cautions that jail staff can’t really say whether the seized materials are drugs, since this would require testing.

Ministry spokesman Brent Ross sent a statement Monday saying that “the ministry is developing a tracking system for naloxone use, which will act as an indicator of the number of overdoses taking place.” He said he can’t speculate when the tracking system will begin, “but work is ongoing.”

Drugs in jails: Canadian ministry says it doesn't keep track of overdoses and naloxone use

By Heather Knight, San Francisco Cronicle

San Francisco likes to think of itself as on the cutting edge of everything. If it’s smart and compassionate public policy, the thinking goes, it probably started here.

But any quick walk around downtown - with widespread human misery on full display - makes it obvious our city doesn't have all the answers. So who does? When it comes to drug policy, experts from around the world are looking to Portugal.

Portugal? It doesn’t come up in most San Franciscans’ daily conversations, but maybe it should.

On Monday morning, I got the chance to interview Dr. Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, a physician and Portugal’s national drug coordinator. He helped his country craft its drug policies — which are widely praised as both humane and effective.

Neither adjective would be used to describe San Francisco’s drug policy, which seems to revolve around looking the other way as users inject in public, toss their dirty needles on the sidewalks, and become sitting ducks for dealers who flock to the Tenderloin and South of Market, where they find ready markets.

Portugal’s drug policy shows what common-sense approach looks like

In June, the Chinese government hosted a delegation of East African government officials and HIV and drug treatment workers to share their experience of innovative harm reduction techniques being implemented in Yunnan province. The African delegates observed and learned about local approaches to needle and syringe exchange, community-based drug treatment, and take-home methadone treatment.

The take-home methadone programme was initiated by AIDS Care China (ACC, the Alliance Linking Organisation in China), which has advocated effectively to gain government support to scale up this model and for implementing other innovative harm reduction interventions.

Tina Luo, Executive Director of ACC, described her organisation’s approach to advocacy in China, and how it differs from the approach of its counterparts in other countries: “What AIDS Care China does is very innovative. Our approach is to lead from behind, not with protests or direct action, but rather work with the government.”

ACC partners with communities and government to develop and pilot innovative methods that are responsive to both the programmatic needs and political imperatives at play in China. They then use the results from the pilots to gain buy-in from municipal, provincial, and national officials. Once the higher echelons of the government are convinced of the interventions’ effectiveness, they are scaled up, funding is allocated, and policies are changed. The good practices are then promoted within China and abroad to consolidate support throughout the government and in communities.

Promoting harm reduction in China by sharing good practice abroad

Global Drug Survey (GDS) runs the world’s largest drug survey. GDS is comprised of a network of international experts in the field of drugs, health, epidemiology and public policy. GDS uses an encrypted, online survey platform to conduct annual anonymous surveys. Over the last 6 years over 550,000 people have taken part in our surveys.

Now in its 8th year, our latest survey GDS2019 which launches in November 2018, will be translated into 23 languages with partners in over 35 countries. Partnering with global media and news networks from across the globe and working with harm reduction organisations and the entertainment industry, GDS focuses on issues that are often ignored by traditional research organisations and government funded centres.

Because we are independent we are free to explore issues of relevance to people to use drugs and can focus our attention on achieving our mission of making drug use safer regardless of the legal status of the drug. All our research is approved by university ethics committees and to date has led to 50 peer reviewed publications in the last 6 years.

Global Drug Survey 2019

On October 28, repressive drug policy secured a powerful platform in Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest democracy, with the election of far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. He raked in 55 percent of the vote.

Bolsonaro’s military background informs his violent approach to drug policy. The former artillery unit captain has frequently expressed support for police killings of people merely 

 of drug trafficking. This position echoes that of Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, who is currently conducting a large-scale drug war that has killed, without trial, over 12,000 people suspected of drug-law violations.

Bolsonaro’s potential drug policies are ideologically rooted in broader social bigotry. He has a long track record of advocating a military dictatorship, publicly disparaging women, gay people and Afro-Brazilian and indigenous communities. Indigenous leaders in Brazil have expressed fears of genocide, at the prospect of Bolsonaro’s election. Bolsonaro has also suggested that drug use causes people to become gay, and that drug legalization "benefits" traffickers, rapists and hostage takers.” He offers no evidence for these beliefs.

Though some US publications repeat Bolsonaro’s message that he is like Trump, some experts in Brazil warn that, given the context, Bolsonaro may be even more dangerous.

Brazil heading for an even deadlier drug war after election of president Jair Bolsonaro

LONDON (29 OCTOBER) – Bangladesh’s parliament passed a bill on 27 October that expands use of the death penalty for drug offenses in the country. The Narcotics Control Act 2018, an update to the 1990 Act, now makes the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine pills – known as ‘yaba’ – punishable by death.

Crimes related to other illicit substances, such as heroin and cocaine, already face the death penalty in Bangladesh under the 1990 Act. It is unclear if the country has ever executed anyone for drug offenses. Bangladesh’s government launched a brutal crackdown on the drug trade in May, which has resulted in the possible extrajudicial killings of over 200 people, and imprisonment of more than 25,000.

Naomi Burke-Shyne, executive director of Harm Reduction International, said: “There is no evidence that imposing the death penalty for drugs offences has any impact on the drug trade. This punishment is in clear violation of international human rights law, and most often impacts upon the most poor and vulnerable people. Bangladesh’s violent drug war and regressive move to expand the scope of its death penalty laws will only lead to a further breakdown of human rights in the country.”

According to Harm Reduction International’s research, at least 33 countries have the death penalty for drugs in law, though only a handful – such as Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, Indonesia and Singapore – have carried out executions in recent years. This year has seen a marked decline in the number of executions carried out for drug offences, primarily due to a 2017 law reform in Iran.

Burke-Shyne added: “There is a clear trend globally toward ending use of the death penalty for drugs, highlighted by Malaysia’s recent announcement of plans for total abolition. Our research shows that only those countries on the extreme fringe of the international community remain committed to executing people for drugs. Bangladesh’s move bucks the trend toward abolition, and risks placing the country firmly in the category of pariah state.”

Over 4,000 people have been executed for drugs in the past decade, while the UN Office on Drugs and Crime admitted in 2018 that “both the range of drugs and drug markets are expanding and diversifying as never before.”

Harm Reduction International condemns new Bangladesh law expanding use of the death penalty for drugs

For decades poor farmers in countries like Jamaica and Morocco have risked the wrath of governments and gangsters to grow cannabis as a cash crop.

But as Canada becomes the first country in the Group of Seven leading industrial nations to fully legalize marijuana, those countries where the crop has traditionally been grown risk losing out on new legal markets worth billions of dollars.When people think of cannabis production in developing countries, they tend to picture drug cartels and bandits.The truth, says Martin Jelsma of the Transnational Institute (TNI), a Dutch drug-policy research organization, is that most growers are poor farmers, often women, who cultivate marijuana on small holdings in the hills and mountains.

Canada's legalization of marijuana could hurt farmers in poorer countries

Among more than 72,000 deaths in the U.S. last year, fentanyl—a highly potent prescription opioid often used to lace other heroin or cocaine, but hard for drug users to detect—factored into many of cases.

In the search for solutions, a team of researchers led by Brandon Marshall, an associate professor of epidemiology at Brown University's School of Public Health, provided rapid-acting fentanyl test strips to young adults at risk of overdose in the state. New research by the team found that most of those young adults used the strips—and many who detected fentanyl reported changing their behavior to reduce overdose risk.

"We found that fentanyl test strips are an effective harm-reduction tool to prevent overdose," Marshall said. "Harm reduction is important because everyone deserves to be able to take care of themselves and make informed decisions about their health, whether they use drugs or not. These tests strips could be a life-saving intervention for many young adults who use drugs."

The findings were published on Thursday, Oct. 18, in the International Journal of Drug Policy.

The fentanyl test strips work like an over-the-counter pregnancy test, said Max Krieger, a research assistant in Marshall's lab and the lead author of the study. Each single-use strip is dipped into water containing a bit of drug residue, and after a minute, either one or two red lines appear—one line means the liquid contains fentanyl, and two lines means the test did not detect the drug.

Fentanyl test strips prove useful in preventing overdoses

To explain why he grows coca, the raw material for cocaine, rather than food crops on his 5-acre farm in southern Colombia, Luis Tapia does the math.

Every three months, Tapia, 60, harvests the bright green coca leaves with his bare hands, then mixes them with gasoline, sulfuric acid and other chemicals to make coca paste. He then sells the paste to drug traffickers who turn it into powder cocaine. A pound of paste, he says, sells for more than one ton of corn.

"That's why everyone grows coca," Tapia says.

Last year, Colombian farmers like Tapia produced 422,550 acres of coca, the largest coca crop in Colombia's history, according to a United Nations survey released last month. That's enough to make about 1,500 tons of cocaine, the report said.

Colombia is growing record amounts of coca, the key ingredient in cocaine

Thailand is on the verge of becoming the first country in Asia to legalize medical marijuana, with some advocates saying that nationwide legalization for recreational use might not be far behind.

It would be a landmark decision in a part of the world with some of the harshest drug laws on Earth. Thailand has the largest prison population in Southeast Asia, and the sixth-largest in the world. Inmates convicted of minor drug offenses make up the largest percentage of that population, and only 15 years ago, the country embarked on its own Dutere-style war on drugs that left hundreds of alleged drug dealers dead - including several weed dealers.

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