With opioid overdose deaths hitting record highs throughout the US, and the White House Commission calling for declaring a state of emergency, many are looking for new solutions to addiction and overdose.

But one proposal popular in some circles — the expanded use of drug courts — is not the perfect solution some make it out to be.

Created in the 80s to expedite the overwhelmed court dockets created by the drug war, they have already enjoyed a great deal of fanfare and funding — from both sides of the political aisle. But despite the good intentions that often underpin them, they are a flawed solution.

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Criminal justice reformers are hooked on drug courts, they should kick the habit

Alcoholism is a relentless condition—90 percent of patients suffer a relapse within three years. But Dr. Ben Sessa believes he’s identified a substance that could help improve these outcomes. There’s just one problem: current drug policy makes it exceedingly difficult for him to conduct research into the treatment.

That’s because the substance is MDMA, a Schedule 1 controlled substance, which is classified in both the United Kingdom and the United States as “having no medical benefits” and is thus so strictly regulated that it is almost impossible for clinical researchers to study.

Even though Dr. Sessa is a renowned clinical psychiatrist with 20 years of experience and the backing of a respected university, it’s taken him six years to get the study off the ground. The special license required to work with controlled substances cost him nearly $40,000 and took two years to acquire. The requisite lab security equipment and law enforcement monitoring cost another $50,000.

The war on drugs is holding science back

A bill making its way through the Iranian parliament could spare 5,000 convicted drug smugglers from the death penalty, the ILNA news agency reported on Monday.

“As soon as the new drug law is passed, the death sentence of more than 5,000 prisoners could be converted into prison sentences,” said Hassan Norouzi, a spokesman for parliament.

Mr. Norouzi said lawmakers are still reviewing the draft legislation, and it will not be in its final form until after they return from summer recess.

Scepticism has grown in Iran over the effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring drug smuggling, with government reports showing it has had no impact on reducing the volume and variety of drugs in Iran.

Instead, many are calling for long prison sentences combined with forced labour.

Thumbnail: Flickr CC League of Women Voters of California LWVC

Death penalty: Iranian parliament receive law meant to spare 5,000 drug smugglers

The Canadian federal government has approved the first supervised consumption site in Victoria for illicit drug users, but it will be at least a year before it opens.

“This is going to save lives and take us beyond what our overdose prevention sites are doing,” said Dr. Richard Stanwick, chief medical officer for Island Health. “Now they won’t be a stop-gap measure, they are a bridge.”

An overdose prevention site is operating there under emergency orders as a measure to cope with the overdose crisis. That site is run from a shipping container, with two booths for injection, harm-reduction supplies, a paramedic and outreach workers on-hand.

Victoria’s first supervised drug consumption site will take a year to open 

Contrary to what US Attorney General Jeff Sessions says, the recent shutdown of two major dark web sites – AlphaBay and Hansa – will not reduce the prevalence of online drug marketplaces or solve the opioid crisis. In fact, it may do the opposite.

On July 20, the US Justice Department announced their seizure of AlphaBay, the largest operating dark web marketplace. As part of a coordinated effort with Dutch police, the FBI initially pretended the website shutdown was an exit scam - whereby “the proprietors of a dark web marketplace suddenly abscond with everyone’s money” - to avoid raising suspicion among users. Authorities had correctly expected that AlphaBay customers would then move to other popular websites, including Hansa.

Thumbnail Flickr Dimitris Kalogeropoylos

Closing dark web marketplaces won’t reduce drug use or trafficking

Risma is familiar with the harms that women can face in Indonesian prisons; in 2006, she was sentenced to 18 months incarceration after being caught with a small quantity of drugs. Today, Risma is a health and human rights activist: “I was one of the beneficiaries of an NGO peer education programme in the women’s prison. I was released early for good behaviour and immediately joined the NGO as a volunteer.”

Working as a peer educator, Risma met women who had used drugs and faced debilitating stigma. Unwilling to accept this marginalisation for herself or her peers, Risma set up phone support and counselling to assist women in standing up to fight for their health and rights. “I realised there were many of us.”

The phone calls became meetings, and as the meetings slowly grew, they became known as the Women Butterfly Community. Many — particularly women who had spent time in prison—were ashamed and found it difficult to discuss their traumatic experiences in person. “We cried listening to each other’s stories.”

The Butterfly Community: A movement of women who use drugs in Indonesia

When he was elected president of the Philippines in July 2016, President Rodridgo Duterte promised to negotiate peace agreements with the major insurgent groups that have destabilised much of the country for decades.

His government announced it would commence peace talks with the representatives of the National Democratic Front, the umbrella organisation that represents both the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army. Duterte also committed himself to a peace agreement with the Philippines’ largest insurgent group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

At the time, these seemed like breakthroughs in the making. But the early optimism has dissolved, and the peace talks have stalled. While the government does seem genuinely willing to negotiate, the president seems to be been prioritising another one of his election campaign promises: eradicating crime and drugs.

Philippines’ ongoing war on drugs shatters hopes of peace for a generation

The Philippines’ human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic is a “national emergency,” the head of the AIDS Research Group of the health department’s Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) said on Monday.

Dr. Rossana Ditangco warned that the government’s current approach to the epidemic means that “we can’t control the rapid rise of HIV infection.”

Ditangco is no fear-monger. The latest statistics from the UNAIDS’ 2017 report indicates the rate of HIV infection in the Philippines has become the highest in the Asia Pacific region. That data demonstrates that in 2016, 83 percent of new infections in the Philippines occurred among men who have sex with men and transgender women who have sex with men. The sharp rise in new HIV infections in the Philippines since 2010 stands in sharp contrast to decreasing or stagnant rates of new infections in other parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Philippine Department of Health data indicates that the country’s HIV infection rate grewby 140 percent from 2010 to 2016, with two out of three new HIV infections among 15 to 24-year-old men who have sex with men.

Philippines HIV epidemic declared a 'national emergency'

Women continue to be disproportionately affected by drug use, and face obstacles in accessing treatment, compared to men, according to the President of the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board (INCB).

Viroj Sumyai, who presented the Board's Annual Report on 6 July to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), urged Member States to integrate gender perspectives in the elaboration of their drug policies to address this discrepancy.

According to the report, drug-related harms to women and the resulting consequences for communities are often “sorely under-studied,” and gender-disaggregated data on drug use are rarely collected.

INCB President urges greater access to treatment for women

There is much to celebrate: the end of AIDS may be in sight.

More than three decades into the global HIV pandemic, 18.2 million of the 36.7 million people living with HIV are on life-saving antiretroviral treatment. The UN’s 90-90-90 target for 2020—90 per cent of people living with HIV diagnosed, 90 per cent on treatment and 90 per cent with undetectable levels of the virus—has been declared “feasible.” And US $19 billion has been invested into fighting HIV in low-income and middle-income countries.

But we may be undermining the time, effort and funds spent on HIV prevention and treatment by ignoring a key factor contributing to higher incidence of HIV/AIDS: the global war on drugs.

To win the fight against AIDS, we must end the war on drugs

In September 2008, the mother of a cervical cancer patient in Cali, Colombia, placed a classified ad in the newspaper 

. In it, her daughter pleaded for help: “Pain is killing me because for several days I have been unable to find injectable morphine in any place. Please, Mr. Secretary of Health, do not make us suffer any more.”

The woman in Cali was not alone. Onerous restrictions on opioid analgesics like morphine, the gold standard medication for severe pain, meant that many pharmacies in Colombia simply avoided stocking it, and patients routinely struggled to obtain the medicine their doctors prescribed.

Although Colombia passed model legislation on palliative care in 2014 and some of the restrictions have been lifted, the barriers to access remain high—because decades of drug policy have prioritized strict control of opioids and failed to provide for their use as essential medicines for people in need of palliative care.

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