Concerns are growing over the disruption in treatment for people living with HIV and tuberculosis in Eastern Ukraine where fighting in the rebel-controlled territories of Donetsk and Luhansk has interrupted crucial medical supplies.

Following a decision by the Ukrainian government to halt supplies to these areas, and with the border now blocked, major stockouts of antiretroviral drugs, opioid substitution therapy (OST) and other life-saving treatments are anticipated by the end of February. More than 300 OST patients in Donetsk and Luhansk have lost access to treatment since the conflict began. A further 550 patients on methadone will run out of drugs imminently if emergency supplies cannot be delivered.

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Lives at stake in eastern Ukraine

Attorney General Eric Holder issued an order establishing a new policy prohibiting federal agencies from accepting civil asset forfeiture assets seized by state and local law enforcement agencies unless the owner is convicted of a crime.The U.S. Treasury Department, which has its own forfeiture program, is issuing a similar policy. The Department of Justice becomes involved after a state or local law enforcement agency seizes property pursuant to state law and requests that a federal agency take the seized asset and forfeit it under federal law.

Attorney General Holder ends incentive for law enforcement to seize property in the USA

In the coming years, Myanmar will legally sell coffee to China instead of illicitly selling opium; at least that is how the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is planning (again) to tackle rising poppy cultivation in the country.

A recent New York Times report into Myanmar's rising opium poppy cultivation highlighted how the UNODC is trying to promote an alternative development program that would allow poor farmers in southern Shan State where the majority is grown to abandon their poppy fields and replace them with an expensive, high-grade variety of coffee.

Alternative crop programs for Myanmar opium farmers: Doomed to fail?

Marco Archer Cardoso Moreira, 53, was arrested in 2003 after police at Jakarta airport found 13.4 kg of cocaine hidden in his hang glider. Brazil says he was the first Brazilian national to be executed abroad and has warned it will damage relations. Five other convicts from Indonesia, Malawi, Nigeria, Vietnam and the Netherlands, were executed on Sunday.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said in a statement that she was "outraged and dismayed". "Relations between the two countries have been affected," said Ms Rousseff. "The Brazilian ambassador to Jakarta has been recalled for consultations," she added. The Netherlands has also recalled its ambassador, after Foreign Minister Bert Koenders called the execution of Dutch citizen Ang Kiem Soe, 52, "an unacceptable denial of human dignity and integrity". Indonesia has some of the world's toughest drug laws. The country resumed executions in 2013 after an unofficial four-year moratorium.

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

Brazil 'outraged' by Indonesia drug trafficking execution

In this lecture at a conference at Edinburgh Law School, Dr Rick Lines gives an overview of his work on interpretive approaches to international drug control law.

The 'fifth stage' of drug control: International law, dynamic interpretation and human rights

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. In 2011, fatal drug overdoses in the UK (3,338) exceeded the number of road accident deaths (1,960). These deaths are preventable. Jamie Bridge joins us to talk about how rethinking both product design and service design have the potential to save lives in the administration of overdose medication. Naloxone was developed in the 1960s

Rethinking overdose intervention

When people get cancer, most endure agonizing pain and other distressing psychological symptoms. In Uganda, many cancers go undetected until late when curative treatment may not be available. More often than not, the solution for such patients is palliative care.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines palliative care as an approach that improves the quality of a patient facing life-threatening illnesses through early identification and treatment of physical, psychosocial and spiritual pain. It’s usually availed to cancer and HIV/Aids patients. In recent years, Uganda has made progress in awareness, palliative care policy formulation and human resource development, according to a new report, integrating palliative Care by the African Palliative Care Association (APCA).

“There is good progress in palliative care policy formulation on the continent. The final draft of a national palliative care policy has been developed and is undergoing the approval processes of the ministry of Health before presentation to the cabinet and parliament for final ratification,” said Dr Emmanuel Luyirika, the executive director of APCA.

This national policy will ensure that palliative care is entrenched into the Ugandan healthcare system. The report also notes that 147 professionals, including; 98 health workers and 49 district-based legal practitioners and paralegals in Uganda were trained in palliative care between 2013 and 2014.

The factors slowing down palliative care service provision in Uganda include inadequately trained health professionals, lack of clear understanding and targets for palliative care, inadequate awareness, support and training institutions.

Palliative care improving in Uganda

The wars of Africa are fueled by narcotics. That is an exaggerated over-simplification, but what is less well known than it should be is that many of the internal conflicts of today’s Africa are driven in part, sometimes a substantial part, by profits being made from the trafficking of hard drugs and precursor chemicals. The battles in Mali, in the Central African Republic, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia are influenced by criminal drug syndicates allied to al-Qaeda-linked insurgents. The Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria also has its narcotics component. “Follow the money” is an aphorism relevant for Africa as well as the Middle East.

In the last decade, there has been increasingly big money made from moving cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, marijuana (hashish), and similar drugs first from Colombia and Venezuela into Africa and north to Europe and, more recently, from Pakistan and India through East Africa to Europe. Once largely confined to West Africa, both the narcotics trade and personal use of such hard drugs has spread to eastern, central, and southern Africa. Almost none of Africa’s 54 nations is without a drug problem, the crime and criminal gangs that shepherd and promote it, the vast proceeds and corruption that accompany and facilitate both trade and abuse, and the social ills that follow.

According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), about 30 tons or $2 billion worth of cocaine passes through West Africa from Latin America to Europe every year, up from about half that amount in 2010. Those totals represent 35 percent of all cocaine smuggled into Europe. About 2000 West Africans are arrested in Europe for cocaine trafficking, about 30 percent of the total number of foreigners caught in Europe for this offence. Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia grow coca and transform coca leaves into cocaine. Where it was once flown directly to West Africa from Colombia, now most of the Europe-bound cocaine that passes through Africa is spirited across the Atlantic Ocean from Venezuela, where crime and corruption are rampant and controls lax. A decade or so ago, ship transport was in vogue. Propeller aircraft followed. Now most of the cocaine from Venezuela to West Africa arrives by jet aircraft, sometimes even combined with otherwise legal cargo.

Drugs, crime, and terror in Africa

Experts are calling it the African “Smack Track”: a circuitous route to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan to Europe, passing through east Africa. Two drug busts in November, netting 712kg of the stuff, closed a record year for heroin seizures off the coast of Kenya. The haul is less a sign of improved policing and more evidence of the growing importance of the route. The largest seizure took place in April, when an Australian warship found more than a tonne of heroin hidden among sacks of cement on a dhow in international waters.

Most heroin from Afghanistan travels to Europe by two main routes: a northern one through Central Asia and a western one via Iran. The minor “southern route” through east Africa has existed since the 1980s, but last year’s seizures—totalling some 3,500kg, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)—point to a growth in traffic.

Alan Cole of UNODC says the shift was caused by “improved law enforcement in central Europe and the conflict in Syria”. Stricter border-security checks along the Balkan Route, combined with the increasing risk of getting caught up in expanding wars in the Middle East have made the overland passage less attractive.

Instead smugglers have taken to the seas. Shipments of heroin are unloaded from dhows and cargo ships off the shores of Kenya and Tanzania, and taken ashore on small speedboats. They are then broken up into still smaller packages before being “muled” to Europe from international airports in Kenya and Ethiopia. Sometimes they are consolidated and sent by lorry to South Africa for onward shipping. Some of the heroin enters the African market to feed nascent demand, particularly in Zanzibar, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, where heroin use is slowly rising. Heroin is also smuggled to consumers in South Africa and Nigeria.

East African states are being undermined by heroin smuggling

Women are frequently marginalized from harm reduction services in Iran despite the growing number of females battling problematic drug use. A handful of media organizations recently ran the story of a "rising" number of women in Iran addicted to drugs, drawing attention once again to an issue that piqued the press' interest earlier last year.

Accurate figures on people suffering from addiction in Iran are notoriously difficult to come by, thoughThe Washington Post reported last May that Iran's Drug Control Headquarters put the number at around 3 million, of which 700,000 are women. Most jarring among the statistics is the fact that the number of female problematic users has doubled in a two-year period.

Opium and its derivatives, along with crystal meth, or 

 (meaning “glass”), are the most popular drugs among Iranian women. Targeting the country's flourishing female middle class, the selling of under-the-counter meth as a slimming aid even used to be relatively widespread among beauty salons until a crackdown in the past couple of years. And, this phenomenon of course says nothing of society's marginalized -- homeless women, sex workers -- who suffer from addiction.

One might imagine that given Iran's track record on drug policy -- the country has some of the most draconian measures in the world and still imposes the death penalty for drug offenses -- services for those addicted would be virtually non-existent. Somewhat surprisingly, this is not always the case, with harm reduction programs such as needle exchanges, opioid substitution, and rehabilitation centers all available, if only on a small-scale.

However, many of these initiatives have been designed solely with the male population of drug users in mind, making them extremely hard to access for women. Drug use -- particularly addiction -- in any society is typically faced with stigma and discrimination, but for Iranian women this is amplified considerably.

Drug addiction in Iran: Women marginalised from services

Asia Catalyst is now accepting applications from community-based organisations in Cambodia, China, Myanmar, and Viet Nam that wish to develop advocacy strategies and implement community-led activities to address challenges that people living with HIV (PLHIV) and key populations encounter when seeking medical attention.

The Regional Rights Training Program, conducted in English, is an intensive one-year capacity-building program aimed at building skills in developing community-based advocacy campaigns to respond to discrimination in healthcare settings through a series of hands-on workshops, peer support and individualized coaching. The aim of the program is that each organization will develop knowledge and a set of skills to better analyze the barriers that lead to challenges for PLHIV and key populations to access quality healthcare services; learn how to design a community-based research project; and develop and implement a local or national campaign using their research results.

Please see below additional details, and for the application form for this program. Applications are due by January 24, 2015.

Call for applications: Asia Catalyst Regional Program

A recent large-scale online study entitled “Clubbing and Youth Health” concluded that recreational drug use is very common in party settings among Serbian youth. The younger generations, driven by their curiosity, often lack adequate harm reduction tools and information, leaving them unprepared to face numerous risks related to unsafe drug and alcohol use. The study brings evidence for the need to make party harm reduction services widely available across the country. This led Re-Generation in cooperation with Drugreporter to dedicate the latest episode of our Drugfacts infographic series to the issue of harm reduction in party settings in Serbia.

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