By Ilona Szabó de Carvalho, Executive-director, Igarapé Institute

Latin America is the world's most violent region. It is home to one tenth of the world's population - and more than one third of its homicides. Brazil, a regional powerhouse, tops the global charts with close to 60,000 murders a year. Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico and Venezuela are some of the most dangerous countries on the planet. It is estimated that at least half of the violent deaths occurring there are drug-related.

The war on drugs is contributing to sky-high rates of lethal violence not just in Latin America, but in parts of the US, Europe, Africa and Asia. After governments started criminalizing drug producers, petty dealers and consumers, human rights violations spiraled upward. Many countries experienced dramatic expansions in their prison populations. Meanwhile, the profits of organized crime groups continued to soar to $320 billion per year, and their ability to buy-off politicians, police and judges grew.

Virtually everyone now agrees that the war on drugs has been a spectacular failure by almost every measure. Richard Branson, a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, has said that if the drug war were a business, he'd have closed it down 40 years ago. Even the UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) now publicly admits that the term is "unhelpful" and is exploring a more balanced approach that includes both law enforcement and harm reduction strategies, putting health and safety first and decriminalizing drug users.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy is now making a few very basic recommendations to UNGASS. All of them are intended to do what the original drug conventions mandated - put people’s health, community safety and human rights first.

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

The war on drugs has failed. Now what?

By Alex Wodak, Emeritus Consultant, St Vincent's Hospital, Darlinghurst

As senior law enforcement officials line up to say Australia cannot arrest its way out of our illicit drug problems, some politicians have expressed opposing viewsabout drug consumption rooms. This debate is now raging in Melbourne.

Drug consumption rooms enable people to use drugs under the supervision of trained staff. Generally established close to large drug markets, they have been shown to reduce the spread of HIV and hepatitis C, reduce deaths and injuries due to drug overdose, reduce ambulance call-outs, increase referral to health and social services including detoxification and drug addiction treatment and reduce public drug injecting and numbers of discarded needles.

The annual cost of Sydney’s Medically Supervised Injecting Centre is about A$3 million, roughly equivalent to the annual cost of imprisoning about 30 people. While the benefits of incarceration can be difficult to identify, the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre produces larger financial savings than it costs to run.

Another benefit of drug consumption rooms is providing authorities with rapid feedback about the drugs currently used in the street.

Drug consumption rooms are remarkably effective at attracting isolated people with almost no contact with any health or social service. Many have off-the-scale mental and physical health problems.

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

Why Australia needs drug consumption rooms

Not so long ago, the Silk Road was not only a bustling black market for drugs but a living representation of every cryptoanarchist’s dream: a trusted trading ground on the Internet where neither the government’s laws nor the Drug War they’ve spawned could reach. Today, that illicit narco-utopia is long gone, its once-secret server in an evidence storage room and its creator Ross Ulbricht fighting a last ditch appeal to escape life in prison.

But more than two years since the FBI’s Silk Road takedown, the dark web markets Ulbricht inspired are suffering a less tangible but more fundamental kind of failure: the Silk Road’s dream has died, too.

The Silk Road’s dark-web dream is dead

Mexico's government has launched a Web site with information aimed at facilitating a series of public debates on marijuana use, the first of which will be held on Jan. 26 in the Caribbean resort city of Cancun and focus on public health and prevention.

The site, which seeks to promote a "broad and inclusive" discussion, was presented Tuesday at a press conference by Mexico's deputy human rights secretary, Roberto Campa.

In keeping with the goal of designing new public policy through the debates, the Web site will provide the public with information about relevant domestic and international legislation.

The Web site will include links to information about marijuana legislation in 14 countries and three U.S. states, as well as academic research and articles on regulation, public health, public safety, marijuana consumption, medicinal use of the drug, human rights, the prison system and economic development.

 Mexico launches website ahead of marijuana debates

Cocaine's route from the jungles of Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru to the cash cow that is the European drug market is continuing to mutate and flourish amid the war on drugs.

Over the past decade, the narrative has been about the emergence of a new route into Europe's back door, from Colombia to West Africa and overland through the Sahara dessert up to the North African coast. In season three of 

 on HBO, Ben Anderson explored the trips narcotics take from South America through Africa and met up with smugglers as well as a DEA special agent who explained the routes and how they operate.

Since then, according to Europe's top cocaine trafficking analysts, the sands have shifted once more, leaving the world's anti-drug patrols again scrambling to keep up. Some aspects have remained fairly stable: Spain, Belgium, and Holland are still the main arrival points for cocaine from South America, and cocaine consumption remains relatively high in Europe compared to the rest of the world, especially in the heavy tooting nations of Spain and the UK.

But in terms of trafficking routes into the continent, much like the global drug scene as a whole, it's a story about diversification and proliferation.

"Cocaine traffickers are diversifying their routes and methods," Dr. Axel Klein, an international drug trade expert from the EU's Cocaine Route Programme, told me. "We are seeing a rise in shipments to the Balkan countries, for example to the Greek port of Piraeus, where smugglers are taking advantage of the disintegration of law enforcement. Also to Turkey, Montenegro, and Albania."

This has all been made possible, says Dr. Klein, because of the declining power of Colombian cartels. "European groups can just buy it in Colombia and ship it over, so we are also seeing a rise in the amount of pleasure craft being used across the Atlantic."

He also points to the increasing emergence of cocaine extraction labs in Europe. Inside these labs, which have recently been found in Spain, Portugal, and Poland, chemists extract cocaine from innocuous looking goods such as wooden pallets or bottles of alcohol that have been impregnated with the drug.

Shifting sands: Cocaine's new routes into Europe

The Tennessee Cannabis Coalition met Sunday night in Nashville to gear up for the upcoming legislative session.

The activist group said 76 percent of Tennesseans support medical marijuana.

They hope increased awareness will lead to voting on the issue.

The coalition said the positive news from states that have legalized marijuana could help raise awareness here in Tennessee.

“The data that’s coming out of Colorado is incredibly promising,” said Tennessee Cannabis Coalition founder Cecily Friday-Shamim.

“We’re seeing a reduction in vehicle fatalities, we’re seeing a reduction in violent crime, you know we’re seeing a lot of positive things coming out of legal states.”

This year, six states will vote on to legalize marijuana.

Legalized marijuana gaining support in Tennessee

With the New Year, the Obama administration has unleashed a new campaign of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids targeting Central American women and children who fled to the U.S. in 2014 to escape violence in their home countries. Some 17,000 are at immediate risk of being dragged from their homes and families and being detained and deported.

"Our borders are not open to illegal migration; if you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values," Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement announcing the action.

Some 121 people were arrested in raids last weekend, Johnson said, with many of them housed in family residential centers before their imminent deportation. The raids took place in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas. Johnson's statement noted that back in November, the administration had broadened its deportation actions beyond "criminals and threats to public safety" (including at least 250,000 people deported for drug offenses) to include those who threaten "border security" by having arrived uninvited after Jan. 1, 2014.

Why is the Obama Administration sending refugees back to narco war nightmare the U.S. helped create?

On March 25, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence declared a public health disaster emergency after a substantial number of HIV diagnoses were reported in Scott County. According to the CDC, the majority of cases were linked to syringe-sharing partners. Approximately 10% of the population in Austin, a rural community in Scott County, inject opioids on a daily basis, the release said. Since last year, 184 new HIV infections were diagnosed in the community of 4,200 residents.

Researchers implement HIV ‘Treatment as Prevention’ model

To curb the spread of infection, researchers from the Indiana University (IU) School of Medicine and the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS in British Columbia will employ the “Treatment as Prevention” model, which involves strategies and technologies that have previously shown to increase access to early and continuous HIV care and reduce stigma, according to the release.

Prevention strategy focuses on HIV epidemic in Indiana

Baltimore is known to many as the heroin capital of the US. If William Richards has anything to do with it, it may also become the nation’s most psychedelic city.

For the past 15 years, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine program co-founded by Richards has dosed hundreds of people with a variety of psychedelic drugs. Richards, who specializes in the psychology of religion, sees the “sacred molecules” in such chemicals as nothing more than keys to what is already in the brain.

The drug most often and reliably used in his program is psilocybin. Found in magic mushrooms, it induces mystical experiences. It has shown promising results in treating conditions from anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to addiction, and may be able to improve the lives and spiritual practices of otherwise healthy people.

Richards, who began studying psychedelics in Germany in 1963, is convinced such drugs can transform people’s lives for the better. Instead of using the term “psychedelic drugs”, he calls chemicals such as LSD and psilocybin “entheogens”, which means “generating god within”.

Baltimore psychologist pioneers team using psychedelics as ‘sacred’ medicine 

When gang violence erupted in British Columbia in 2009, the federal government acted at light speed to implement measures to contain the violence. That rapid response stands in stark contrast to the feds’ lethargy in dealing with the very things the gangs were fighting over: drugs.

Drug overdoses are nothing new, of course, especially in Western Canada. But at the onset of the gang war, something new did appear: fentanyl, a synthetic opioid about 100 times more potent than morphine.

According to the Canadian Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use, fentanyl was detected in more than 1,000 drug-poisoning deaths in Canada from 2009 to 2014. Furthermore, fentanyl-detected deaths increased by nearly 700 per cent from 2012 to 2014 in B.C., and by more than 2,000 per cent from 2011 to 2014 in Alberta. The trend continued unabated last year, with record numbers of fentanyl-detected deaths in both provinces.

Clearly this is a crisis situation. And when you’re faced with such a situation, you have to act fast, particularly when you have the means to avert the crisis. We have the means. It’s called naloxone, a drug that blocks opioids in the brain, thereby preventing or reversing an overdose. Naloxone has been used in Canadian emergency rooms for more than 40 years, and many provinces have recently started providing Take Home Naloxone kits to people who use drugs, along with training in recognizing and reversing overdoses.

No excuse for Canadian government’s slow response to fentanyl crisis 

Medical cannabis is set to hit pharmacy shelves in Israel in the form of cigarettes, cookies and oil, while the number of doctors permitted to prescribe the natural painkiller and the number of farmers allowed to grow it will substantially increase, according to a Health Ministry reform.

At the same time, the entire production and supply chain will be strictly supervised to ensure that medical cannabis, also known as marijuana, is kept out of the recreational drug market, the Yedioth Ahronoth daily newspaper reported Tuesday.

“We’re working to reorganize the field of medical cannabis in order to lighten the process for those who need it and, on the other hand, to make it harder for the material to trickle into the regular market,” Health Minister Yaakov Litzman said Monday. “There is no reason to make things difficult for whoever really needs it, just because there’s someone who exploits it illegally.”

Medical cannabis set to hit pharmacy shelves

DENVER — Two years into Colorado’s experiment with legalized cannabis, marijuana has become a bit passé. Marijuana stores have lost their novelty, and no one remarks anymore when there’s the tell-tale aroma in the air. People puff on portable vaporizers everywhere you look: in bars, on the sidewalk, or while stuck in traffic on the way home from work. It’s impossible to know whether they’re inhaling tobacco or cannabis — nor does it matter, legally. Decades of social stigma have evaporated; all signs indicate legal marijuana is here to stay.

But several developments over the past few weeks suggest that legalization might not be as stable and permanent as it seems. Last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that aimed to help launch the world’s first marijuanacredit union. The ruling came on the heels of the settlement of a racketeering lawsuit that could be among the first of many to plague cannabis businesses, and a post office threat to forbid all marijuana advertising from going through the mail. All three events are reminders that marijuana markets around the country are built on shaky ground, and 2016 could be the year that these precarious arrangements show ever more signs of wear, or even in some cases come tumbling down.

That’s because the seemingly unstoppable force that is the marijuana legalization crusade is finally hitting the immovable object that is federal law. While lawmakers and business stakeholders have proven adept at creatively building state-by-state marijuana regulations and industries where none before existed, as recent events make clear, there is only so far they can go before running headfirst into the fact that, according to the U.S. Controlled Substances Act, the product at the center of all this action is still 100 percent illegal.

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