The Justice Department is urging the U.S. Sentencing Commission to approve a measure that would make potentially thousands of non-violent drug offenders now serving time in federal prison eligible for reduced sentences.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who supported the commission's April action to cut prison time for certain future drug offenses, is supporting a proposal set for a vote next month that would apply the changes retroactively for current inmates.

The commission has estimated that full retro-activity could apply to more than 50,000 of the more than 215,000 inmates in the overcrowded federal prison system. But the Justice Department is advocating for more limited eligibility, about 20,000.

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Reduced sentences urged for non-violent drug offenders in the USA

Senator Vicente Sotto III on Sunday slammed a move in the House of the Representatives to legalize marijuana “for medical use,” calling it a backdoor move to legalize an illegal drug that will open the door to abuse among the youth.

Instead of patients benefiting from its medical use – primarily as a pain killer for patients with severely painful chronic ailments or with terminal diseases like cancer - the biggest winners would be the drug syndicates which are already making a killing from this illegal drug, Sotto said.

A Bill has been filed in Congress seeking to legalize marijuana use for medical purposes, citing studies abroad of its beneficial effects. The Bill seeks to create a regulatory body under the Department of Health that will oversee the use of cannabis for medical purposes. The move is gaining traction among lawmakers who favor of marijuana use for treatment of debilitating diseases.

But Sotto sees a far greater societal damage if marijuana is allowed even under the guise of medical use. “This is a big business for drug traffickers and if we legalize marijuana this will become a bigger business for them,” Sotto added.

Warning of a national disaster, Sotto said the immediate victims are the impressionable youth who may find that smoking pot is just as acceptable.

 Philippines Senator Sotto slams 'backdoor move' to legalise marijuana

On May 23, the World Health Organization passed its first ever stand-alone palliative care resolution. It calls on all member states to integrate palliative care and pain relief into their national health systems.

World Health Organization resolutions serve to encourage member states to make policy changes and to provide guidance on global health policy that should be implemented at the country level. This historic resolution calls on all member states to integrate palliative care and pain relief into their national health systems.

This resolution is important because it requires the WHO to develop a global implementation plan to:

work with national governments to integrate palliative care into national health policies;

educate and train health care professionals;

remove legislative barriers restricting access to opioid medications for pain relief;

ensure essential palliative care medicines are available;

provide palliative care across all levels of care including inpatient facilities and home care.

Why is a global palliative care plan needed?

More than 6 billion people worldwide have little access to pain relieving medications for the control of pain. The WHO estimates that of the 58 million people dying annually, about 80 percent would benefit from palliative care in their final days of life.

The world is experiencing a “silver tsunami,” with a growing number of older persons and a heavy burden of noncommunicable diseases like cancer, heart disease, and neuro-degenerative diseases. The majority of people who need palliative care live in low- and middle-income countries where there is little access to even basic palliative care services. Adults and children with life-threatening illnesses require treatment and palliative care at the same time, so their pain and symptoms can be managed and they and their families can receive the psychological, social, and spiritual support they need.

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A global victory for palliative care

A destructive threat is jeopardizing progress in West Africa and beyond: with local collusion international drug cartels are undermining our countries and communities, and devastating lives.

After looking at the evidence, consulting experts from the region and around the world, and visiting some of the most affected countries and communities in West Africa, the West Africa Commission on Drugs makes bold recommandations tackling this issue.

West Africa has a Drug Problem - Animation

West African governments must treat drugs as a public health issue and consider partial decriminalisation to stop the region becoming "a new front line in the failed "war on drugs", a panel of expertsconvened by Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, has warned.

In a stark assessment of the corrosive effect the international drug trade is having on the area's security and development, the West Africa Commission on Drugs (WACD) says the region's combination of "political instability, unemployment and corruption" is proving increasingly attractive to those trafficking cocaine and heroin from South America and Asia into Europe and the US.

Its report – Not Just in Transit: Drugs, the State and Society in West Africa – notes that the area has also become a producer and exporter of synthetic drugs such as amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), which are not only consumed in the region but also shipped to south-east Asia.

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

West Africa needs to look at partially decriminalising drugs, says thinktank

In Africa, cancer now kills more people than malaria, Aids and tuberculosis combined. But tonight’s edition of this news strand from the developing world, the last in the series, reports on a health scandal in Senegal in which the needs of terminally ill cancer patients are being neglected.

Channel 4 newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy travels to the West African country to look at a bureaucratic system that is leaving patients to suffer in agony for no good reason. He cuts an impressive figure as he confronts a representative of the Senegalese National Pharmacy and the country’s health minister and visits several hospitals where the suffering of the patients makes for distressing viewing.

Why dying children are being denied of morphine in Senegal

The BC Court of Appeal began hearing the case of Joseph Lloyd, a Downtown Eastside resident who successfully challenged the federal law on mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences. Mr. Lloyd was convicted of possession for the purpose of trafficking which carries a new 1-year mandatory minimum jail term since March 2012, when the 

 alternately known as Bill C-10 and the “Omnibus Crime Bill” amended section 5 of the 

In January of this year Provincial Court Judge Galati heard Mr. Lloyd's case, and found the mandatory minimum sentence for drug trafficking could lead to cruel and unusual punishment, declaring it to be of no force and effect. The Federal Crown appealed the sentence, and Pivot and the BCCLA were granted leave to intervene in April.

Mandatory Minimums Challenge Heard by B.C. Court of Appeal

The proliferation of new psychoactive substances (NPS) and legal highs has changed the drug world forever and thrown a spanner into the Drug War machinery.

This armoury of chemicals, and the way they are produced and sold, has left policy makers dazed and confused amid a hail of chemical formulae, brands, legal loopholes, underground chemistry labs, virtual currencies and online encryption.

At the start of the Drug War, the enemies were more honest, simply made from plants. Later came LSD, speed and ecstasy, which were made in labs, but everyone knew what they were. Then the NPS revolution happened in the 2000s, and the enemy had changed.

Synthetic solutions: the global response to ‘legal’ highs

Participants in the Staying Safe hepatitis C prevention project gave invaluable insight into life-saving protective practices. The findings could be used to make harm reduction messages much more relevant.

The Staying Safe study is a hepatitis C prevention project with a difference. Instead of focusing on risk practices and transmission events, such as the sharing of needles and syringes, we were interested in how protective practices arose and were maintained over time. Here, people who had been injecting for the long-term and who did not have hepatitis C were the experts – or the ‘cases’, with those who had hepatitis C also interviewed as ‘controls’.

The process included developing a life history timeline, which helped to jog people’s memories about significant events, but more importantly allowed us to explore the interconnection between people’s protective and risk practices and what was going on in their lives at the time.

Experts by experience

On 2 June a nine-year-old boy died at the hands of his parents as a result of their desperation to end his unrelieved pain. The parents then committed suicide

The 2 June edition of The Times of India reports on the death of nine-year-old Karthik at the hands of his parents while in a hospital at Kanhangad in Kasaragod district, where the boy had been undergoing treatment.

The incident came to light when the staff nurse went to the room where Karthick had been admitted and found the boy hanging from a window. The bodies of his parents were found hanging from the ceiling fan.

Innocent lives lost in India due to unrelieved pain

On Thursday 26th June 2014, hundreds of activists in more than 50 cities around the world will make their voices heard as part of the global

 campaign – funded through the CAHR project.

 is a global campaign calling for governments to put an end to the expensive and counter-productive war on drugs. The criminalisation of people who use drugs around the world has not reduced drug use or supply – but costs in excess of $100 billion per year to enforce, and has driven HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis epidemics among this population. It has also fuelled human rights violations and led to the mass incarceration of the vulnerable and the poor.

The campaign calls for investments in harm reduction responses, and for the decriminalisation of people who use drugs and the removal of other laws that impede public health services.

50 cities confirmed for the "Global Day of Action" on June 26th

Georgia has held transparent elections and it has pledged to create an independent court system and to honor media rights. But when it comes to government policy on illegal narcotics, the South Caucasus country is still not ready for European integration, experts contend.

In Georgia, as in many other formerly Soviet republics, drug laws focus primarily on the prosecution and punishment of users, rather than on treatment or prevention. In much of the European Union, the approach toward illegal narcotics use is more integrated.

The differences could become more pronounced once Tbilisi signs an agreement on closer long-term ties with the European Union -- a deal often cast as a major step toward eventual membership. The association agreement is slated to be signed on June 27.

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