The GIZ Global Partnership on Drug Policies and Development (GPDPD) and the LSE IDEAS International Drug Policy Project (IDPP) are pleased to announce a pilot for a new 'Innovation Lab on Drug Policies and Human Development'.

“this pilot, the first of its kind globally, represents a truly unique collaboration between a development agency and one of the world’s leading university-affiliated think tanks. It will enable the design of innovative drug-sensitive development policies through ongoing discussions with governments, international organisations and development bodies and ultimately to facilitate policy implementation.”

The immediate objective of the Innovation Lab pilot is to translate the April 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) outcome document and recent international debates into smart drugs-related development policies in affected countries.

The GIZ Global Partnership on Drug Policies and Development (GPDPD) is implemented on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and under the political auspices of the Federal Drug Commissioner of the Federal Government of Germany. It seeks to promote a development and health oriented approach to drug policy internationally.

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LSD IDEAS and GIZ GPDPD launch pilot 'Innovation lab on drug policies and human development'

The Swedish government has launched an investigation on how to prevent drug-related deaths. Last month, Health Minister Gabriel Wikström announced that he wants needle exchange programmes to be managed by county councils instead of councils. County councils cover larger areas in the country. The report will be delivered in April next year.

"Needle exchange programmes are an important measure towards disease control, which we know from Swedish, as well as international, experiences. The aim of these propositions is to make needle exchange programmes available all over the country. This will give us new opportunities to meet groups that have previously been difficult to get hold of," Wikström said in a press release.

For decades, a majority of Swedish political parties have claimed that harm reduction programmes such as needle exchange programmes and drug consumption rooms "encourage" drug use rather than do good. But according to the 2016 annual report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Sweden has the second highest death rate from drug use in Europe. Only Estonia has higher drug-related deaths per capita. According to Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare, 48 percent of drug-related deaths in 2014 were caused by an overdose.

In November last year, UN's Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Flavia Pansieri, criticised Sweden's views on drugs. She told public broadcaster SVT that she was "surprised to see that [Sweden] lags behind a number of other countries in terms of its policies on drugs."

Stockholm's needle exchange programme has been available since 2012. The programmes have since become available at several places including Malmö, Jönköping, and Kalmar. And according to the Public Health Agency of Sweden, they're actually working. "For the individual, these efforts can improve the chances to a life without serious or deadly infectious disease. For society as a whole it all comes down to improving the possibilities of equal health," Johan Carlson, director general of the Public Health Agency said in a statement.

Sweden's battle against drugs and prejudice

While we have seen a surge in new psychoactive substances in recent years, there has also been a rediscovery in the West of old herbal narcotics that have traditionally been used in different parts of the world. One example is khat, the leaves of which are chewed for a mild stimulant effect in some societies in the Horn of Africa – it was banned in the UK in 2014. Another plant to come to the attention of the authorities is kratom, a tropical tree from Southeast Asia that has just been banned by the US Drug Enforcement Agency.

) is a tropical tree that grows between four and 16 metres high and is indigenous to Southeast Asia, the Philippines and New Guinea. Like coca leaves in the central Andes, the chopped fresh or dried leaves of the kratom tree have been chewed for centuries or made into tea to combat fatigue.

The DEA’s ban places kratom as a schedule 1 controlled substance, alongside drugs like cannabis, heroin, MDMA (ecstasy) and LSD. It joins an ever-expanding list of psychoactive drugs deemed to have “no currently accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse”. There has been quite an uproar about this among kratom users, although both the arguments for and against lack consistent evidence.

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Banning kratom won’t stop users or solve the drugs health crisis – so why continue this losing war?

The NGO Delegation to the Programme Coordinating Board of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS Programme Coordinating Board (UNAIDS PCB) has 

The NGO Delegation is now recruiting for:

One Latin America and the Caribbean Delegate 

Applications from people living with HIV, key populations, women and young people are particularly encouraged.

The NGO Delegation's terms of reference and mission/vision/principles, as well as the call for nominations of NGO delegates are attached to this email.

 The UNAIDS PCB is the governing body on all programming issues concerning policy, strategy, finance, monitoring and evaluation of UNAIDS. It is composed of 22 Member States, 11 Cosponsors, and an 

 of 10 civil society representatives, 2 per UN region. For more information about the UNAIDS PCB, please visit this 

The NGO Delegation is integral to the effective inclusion of community voices, representing the perspectives of civil society, including people living with HIV, within UNAIDS programs and policies. It is a unique opportunity for committed activists and advocates to make a difference in HIV and AIDS policy implementation globally and in their regions. UNAIDS was the first UN program to have formal civil society representation on its governing body through the NGO Delegation. For more information about the NGO Delegation, please visit this 

NGO Delegation to the UNAIDS PCB recruits three delegates

This short film, narrated by Jay Z (Shawn Carter) and featuring the artwork of Molly Crabapple, is part history lesson about the war on drugs and part vision statement. As Ms. Crabapple’s haunting images flash by, the film takes us from the Nixon administration and the Rockefeller drug laws — the draconian 1973 statutes enacted in New York that exploded the state’s prison population and ushered in a period of similar sentencing schemes for other states — through the extraordinary growth in our nation’s prison population to the emerging aboveground marijuana market of today. We learn how African-Americans can make up around 13 percent of the United States population — yet 

 of those arrested for drug law violations, even though they use and sell drugs at the same rate as whites.

The project came about when, last year, Dream Hampton, the filmmaker and a co-author of Jay Z’s book “Decoded,” approached the Drug Policy Alliance about collaborating with Revolve Impact, the social impact agency she works with. Revolve Impact connects artists and influencers to community organizers, and with marijuana legalization taking hold across the nation — and about to be considered in her own state, California — Ms. Hampton wanted to tackle the contradiction raised by Michelle Alexander, the author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” in 2014: Why were white men poised to get rich doing the very same thing that African-American boys and men had long been going to prison for? Ms. Hampton proposed creating an animated video that the D.P.A. would produce about the impact of the drug war in African-American communities.

Jay Z: ‘The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail’

Prisoners convicted of drug offences in Belarus are being forced to wear identifying badges and endure harsh conditions as part of the government’s increasingly repressive drug policy.

Over the past two years, the Belarusian government has ramped up its punitive approach towards people who commit drug offences. The intensification has been spearheaded by the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, a self-described authoritarian who has ruled the country since 1994, and is commonly referred to as “Europe’s last dictator”.

Lukashenko specifically advocates the systemic marginalisation of people who commit drug offences. In 2014, he demanded that people incarcerated for drug offences be segregated from other prisoners, and kept in “intolerable imprisonment conditions”. Indeed, later that year, the state began allocating specific prisons for “drug addicts” to be sent to, according to 

In April 2016, Siarhei Daroshka, the country’s interior minister, declared that people imprisoned for drug offences must face harsher “moral and living conditions” than people incarcerated for any other crimes.

Belarus Drug Offenders Singled Out in “Intolerable Prison Conditions”

The Russian government has a notoriously punitive attitude towards drugs. Substitution treatments are banned and the only option for recovering addicts is to go cold turkey. But three drug users who have struggled for years with their addiction and have become life-threateningly ill as a result, claim that this policy is an abuse of their human rights, and are taking the Russian state to court.

Though opioid substitution therapy (OST) – such as methadone or buprenorphine which are commonly used to treat heroin addiction in the UK – is banned in Russia, these replacement therapies are globally recognised as one of the most effective treatments of opioid addiction. Russian activists Alexey Kurmanayevskiy, Irina Abdyusheva Teplinskaya and Ivan Anoshkin have exhausted all available treatments in Russia without success, and over the years of battling with their addictions, have contracted HIV (the UN estimates that half of Russia’s new HIV cases last year were injecting drug users). They believe that being denied this treatment violates international human rights law (pdf) – in particular, the prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment (article 3) and discrimination (article 14).

In an attempt to gain access to what they see as vital and potentially life-saving healthcare, Kurmanayevskiy, Teplinskaya and Anoshkin have attempted to use Russia’s domestic legal system without success. After four years of litigation and evidence collection, they have submitted their applications to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, seeking a judgment against the legal prohibition of OST in Russia.

How three drug users took on the might of the Russian state

This week, the White House issued its yearly report on the nations on the front lines of the war on drugs. Predictably, it listed Bolivia as one of three countries that “failed demonstrably” to do enough to combat the drug trade. President Evo Morales of Bolivia responded, as he does each year, with defiance.

“The world knows that our counternarcotics model is better without the Americans,” Mr. Morales said during an event on Tuesday, alluding to his expulsion of American drug enforcement agents in 2008.

The yearly condemnation of Bolivia has been futile. So far, that country’s experience with its drug strategy is showing more promise than Washington’s forced-eradication model.

Over the past decade, the Bolivian government has sought to gradually curb the cultivation of coca — the plant processed to make cocaine — by establishing a tightly regulated market for its consumption as a nonnarcotic stimulant. (Bolivians have been chewing coca leaf and using it to make tea for generations.) The government eradicates unauthorized crops after negotiating with, and finding alternatives for, growers.

How Bolivia fights the drug scourge

ECOWAS Ministers of Justice and Interior have on the 5th of September 2016, adopted the ECOWAS Drug Action Plan to Address Illicit Drug Trafficking and Organized Crimes in the West Africa.

The 15-Member State’ Ministers including the Minister of Justice of Mauritania, have by this action at the end of their ministerial meeting, given more Philip to the resolve to chart a holistic course that is consistent with the collective wish of the ECOWAS Heads of State and Government, stakeholders and the people of West Africa to rid the region of the menace of drug trafficking and all forms of organised crimes.

By adopting the Action Plan, ECOWAS Commission, Member States, and all her partners will also now have a common strategic framework to guide their work in countering illicit drug trafficking, organized crimes and drug abuse in the region.

The Ministerial meeting was preceded by the meeting of Drug Demand Reduction, Law Enforcement and Legal/Judicial Cooperation from ECOWAS Member States and Mauritania who reviewed, validated and recommended for approval by the Ministers, of the ECOWAS Drug Action Plan 2016-2020. The recommendation was contained in the 9-page Final Report submitted to Minsters for their consideration.

ECOWAS ministers adopt action plan to address illicit drug trafficking, organised crimes and drug abuse in West Africa

CapeTalk/702's Eusebius Mackaiser spoke to Shaun Shelly of Addiction Division, Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at University of Cape Town, about the possibilities of decriminalising the use of recreational drugs.

Recreational drugs are mind-altering chemical substances that are used for non-medicinal, leisure purposes. Among them are methamphetamine, cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin, phencyclidine (PCP), MDMA or Ecstasy, and cannabis.

When asked how dangerous different kinds of drugs are, Shelly said that everything has inherent risk that can either be reduced or increased.

In the field of drugs, it is inherently policy that has made the use of drugs particularly dangerous.

— Shaun Shelly, Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at UCT

He says the problem comes when there is criminalisation of drugs, adding that he believes we've had centuries of non-problematic use of cannabis in Africa until the colonials decided to burn it.

Should drugs be decriminalised?

Faced with stark numbers of brain trauma and psychological distress cases among combat veterans, the nation’s largest active veteran’s organization has thrown its weight behind the growing movement to push for relaxing federal restrictions on marijuana.

The American Legion, the nation’s largest wartime veterans organization, took a position on medical marijuana for the first time last week. At its national convention, it passed a resolution calling on Congress to amend its laws to “at a minimum ... recognize cannabis as a drug with potential medical value”.

Marijuana is currently classified by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as a Schedule 1 drug, putting it alongside drugs such as heroin and cocaine. The designation, which the DEA reaffirmed last month, means that the federal government officially believes there is no “accepted medical use” for the drug.

“It’s a tool in a toolbox,” said William Detweiler, who serves as the chairman of the American Legion’s traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) committee and who is a past national commander of the organization. “We’re not advocating the use of marijuana or any other drugs,” but he said veterans “have a right to anything that may help them”.

Darrin Harris Frisby/Drug Policy Alliance

Veterans group pushes to ease marijuana restictions to treat PTSD

Crystal meth is a popular drug in Indonesia. Recent years have seen an increase in the number of meth users, locally known under the street name shabu. However, so far, harm reduction services don’t target meth users. Mainline and local partner Karisma started an innovative pilot in Indonesia to change this.

The reason why Mainline finds it important to develop interventions that target this group of people who use drugs (PWUD) is that the research conducted by the Atma Jaya University in Jakarta shows that Shabu users are at increased risk of HIV infection and other STIs. This is true whether people snort, smoke or inject their drugs. The research also showed that Crystal meth users avoid existing HIV intervention programmes in Indonesia. They associate these services with heroin users and don’t identify with them.

The aim of the new harm reduction pilot is to reach this hidden population and address their health needs. A special peer-driven outreach team will experiment with different outreach strategies to reach the often hidden subgroups of crystal meth users. One can think of Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), sex workers and their clients, people who work night shifts or even students. Experimenting with new ways of outreach work will help to develop best practices on how to provide harm reduction to meth users. By documenting the lessons learned and strong data collection, we hope to develop a set of specific harm reductions interventions that can be replicated in other regions in Indonesia.

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