Drug courts are promoted as a more humane alternative to incarceration for people who use drugs in the United States. But in our recent study, we found judges in New York were ordering patients to stop treatment with methadone or buprenorphine as a condition of participation in, or graduation from the drug court. This practice is unjust, ungrounded in medical evidence, and bad for patients and the public.

Methadone and buprenorphine are medicines prescribed to reduce cravings for and injection of heroin and other opioids. Medical evidence on opioid dependency shows that relapse to opioid use is generally the rule, rather than the exception, when people who are dependent on opioids stop taking them. This is especially true when they stop abruptly.

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

Drug courts and drug treatment: Dismissing science and patients’ rights

The Swedish Drug Users Union have launched a new project that collects and gather data about the side effects from the substitution medication Suboxone in swedish patients. The goal is to collect the data from different sources, including Facebook and a online survey, and make a final report that shows the many side effects their members have reported during the last couple of years.

Subscribe here to the weekly newsletter from the SDUU -

 The weekly newsletter from the Swedish Drug Users Union have been a great success. If you want to find out whats going on at the Swedish Drug Users Union, you can now subscribe to their e-mails. They usually contain activities at the Stockholm office, news from their local user unions and links to interesting news stories. Published only in swedish, but you could always use Google Translate.

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

Side effects from Suboxone in Sweden

The critically acclaimed documentary about hepatitis C in Sweden is now available online with english subtitles. 'The Hidden and Forgotten Plague - A film about hepatitis C' is produced by The Swedish Drug Users Union and have already been viewed and downloaded thousands of times. The film is 46 minutes long and part of an educational project started by the SDUU called The Hepatitis Portal.

Subscribe here to the weekly newsletter from the SDUU -

 The weekly newsletter from the Swedish Drug Users Union have been a great success. If you want to find out whats going on at the Swedish Drug Users Union, you can now subscribe to their e-mails. They usually contain activities at the Stockholm office, news from their local user unions and links to interesting news stories. Published only in swedish, but you could always use Google Translate.

The hidden and forgotten plague - A film about hepatitis C in Sweden

Britain is to opt out of a European Union regime for regulating legal highs that would result in only the most harmful new psychoactive substances being subject to full criminalisation.

Announcing the decision – which could attract sanctions from Brussels –the Home Office crime prevention minister, Norman Baker, said he "strongly disputes"' the EU claim that 20% of legal highs have "legitimate commercial and industrial uses". The issue could presage a fresh clash between London and Brussels as the proposed EU drugs directive does not include provision for a UK opt-out.

Legal highs: UK to opt out of new EU regulation regime

Despite an aggressive crackdown on drugs, Thailand’s fight against methamphetamines is failing, activists say. With supply and demand rising, these highly addictive substances, commonly known as “meth”, are now the drug of choice.

“The punitive measures never work,” Bijay Pandey, chair of the Asian Network of People who Use Drugs, told IRIN. “I really don’t think the strategy addresses anything to promote the health and rights of those who use drugs.”

Thai authorities, under pressure by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) - a 10-member economic bloc - to achieve a drug-free region by 2015, stepped up efforts in 2011 to stem the upward trend of usage of meth and other amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS).

Advocates warn that the drug trade has not been deterred by strict tactics that have led to staggering arrest figures, stiffer penalties for drug offences, heightened stigma for drug users, and an upsurge in compulsory drug treatment. The United Nations has criticized this as ineffective, with high relapse rates and a threat to detainee health and human rights.

Rethinking Thailand’s war on methamphetamines

As Bolivia assumed the presidency of the United Nations Group of 77 (G-77), President Evo Morales used this opportunity to push his pro-coca agenda, likely hoping to capitalize on the international attention surrounding moves towards drug reform elsewhere in the region.

On January 8, Morales marked the beginning of Bolivia's one year term chairing the United Nations (UN) coalition of developing nations with a speech promoting the use of coca leaf and calling for its removal from the UN list of banned drugs.

Morales also highlighted Bolivia's success in obtaining recognition of the legitimate use of coca leaf within the country from the UN after it rejoined the UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which it had left in protest over coca's banned status. In a press conference following the speech, Morales also spoke about the country's successes following the "nationalization" of Bolivia's counter-narcotics efforts, referring to the severing of ties with US anti-drug bodies.

Bolivia uses G77 post to put coca legalisation on international agenda

On 27-28 November, TNI, in collaboration with GIZ and the Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB), organized the 5th Southeast Asia Informal Drug Policy Dialogue on ‘Drugs and Development in Southeast Asia’ in Bangkok.

Specific attention was paid on how to implement alternative development programmes in conflict areas, and how to involve affected communities in policy making and implementation. There was also a discussion on the state of drug law reform efforts in the region and the scaling up of harm reduction, and recent developments in international drug policy. This included key drug policy issues relevant for the region related to the mid-term review of the 2009 Political Declaration at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in March 2014, preparations for which started in September 2013, and the UNGASS on drugs which will take place in 2016.

The meeting was attended by government officials, NGO representatives and drug policy and rural development experts from Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, China, Malaysia, India, Cambodia and Vietnam and from international agencies.

TNI organised 5th Southeast Asia Informal Drug Policy Dialogue 

Puerto Rico’s legislature is taking another stab at decriminalizing weed. The island’s lower house is making preparations to begin debate mid-month on a bill that would eliminate jail penalties for possession of up to 14 grams of marijuana, Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día reports. The measure was passed by the Puerto Rican Senate last year, but failed to make it through the House.

Rep. Luis Vega Ramos of the governing Popular Democratic Party, who heads the House Judiciary Committee where the proposal will be considered, said Gov. Alejandro García Padilla is open to the proposal.

“There’s some factors that are forcing us to rethink this issue,” Vega Ramos told El Nuevo Día. “There’s the problem of jail overcrowding, and we have to evaluate whether jail sentences are the right way to treat people who consume marijuana.”

Puerto Rico marijuana reform gets a second life 

The Global Fund will cease funding HIV treatment services operating in compulsory drug treatment centres in Viet Nam.

When it signed an $85 million HIV grant with the country’s Ministry of Health in May 2013, the Global Fund said its support for services provided at the drug treatment centres was contingent on the identification by government of an international, independent NGO to monitor conditions in the centres. Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other organisations have expressed concerns about human rights abuses in the centres, including forced labour and inhumane treatment of detainees. (See GFO article)

In mid-December, the Global Fund's director of communications Seth Faison told GFO that the Fund has informed the Vietnamese government it is not prepared to accept its proposed scheme to have the Vietnamese Red Cross visit some of the centres twice a year. “We intend within the next six months to negotiate an exit strategy and to reprogram our funding outside of [the drug treatment] centers,” Mr Faison said.

The Global Fund has been financing HIV treatment at the centres for about 900 patients, and intends to divert this funding to a similarly sized cohort of patients outside. The Fund is also seeking a commitment from the government that it will fund the treatment of patients inside the centres.

Global Fund to end funding for HIV services in drug treatment centres in Viet Nam

Barely a week after an opinion poll showed that 65% of the Dutch are in favour of regulating cannabis production just as in Uruguay, the minister of Justice and Security of The Netherlands, Ivo Opstelten, told parliament that he will not allow regulated cannabis cultivation to supply the coffeeshops in the country. Two in three large municipal councils back regulated cannabis cultivation, but the minister will probably not allow a single one of the 25 proposals to experiment with regulated cultivation that have been submitted.

The Netherlands is ready to regulate cannabis

The Mexican drug war is a killing machine. The level of violence and slaughter is similar to conventional warfare. In just six years, 70,000 people have been killed, but some estimate the number is a staggering 120,000.1 More than 20,000 people have disappeared and a quarter of a million have been displaced. 2 A major investigation into narcofosas (mass graves) in Mexico by the magazine Milenio found the corpses of 24,000 people. 3 Entire cities and towns have erupted into war zones chock-full with military checkpoints and drug cartel roadblocks.

This bloody war, ostensibly to rid the country of illegal drugs and drug trafficking, has been a grisly failure. Mexico continues to be a major exporter of heroin and marijuana and a central transshipment point for cocaine from Andean South America bound for the United States. Drugs cross the heavily fortified US-Mexican border far more easily than do migrants seeking work in the United States. The power of the drug cartels to kill, corrupt, and elude capture has grown exponentially as have their profits.

Former president Felipe Calderón unleashed 

 upon his inauguration in 2006. For six years as the death toll climbed and drugs flowed unimpeded through the country, 

insisted that the war was being won. Calderón had no sympathy for those murdered in drug war violence.

The drug warriors in Mexico are junior partners in the war on drugs. It is on the other side of the border, thousands of miles away in Washington, DC and Langley, Virginia where the senior partners call the shots. The drug warriors in the White House, the Congress, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have blood on their hands, too. For almost a century, American politicians and federal antidrug agencies have dictated drug policy to their neighbor. Coercing Mexico to enforce total drug prohibition has been a central and enduring source of tension between the two countries.

The political economy of Mexico's drug war

On January 1st, 420 days after the citizens of Colorado voted to legalise marijuana, around 37 pot shops across the state opened their doors to all-comers. Stoners in Denver and other cities braved freezing temperatures and two-hour queues to be part of this historic moment, for Colorado has become the first jurisdiction anywhere in the world to oversee a legal, regulated market for recreational marijuana (20 states plus Washington, DC, allow patients with doctors' recommendations to buy the stuff).

Amendment 64, the measure approved by 55% of voters in November 2012, set certain parameters for Colorado's marijuana regime, including maximum tax rates and the rights of cities and counties to exclude pot shops from their jurisdictions. But the details were worked out by officials and legislators over the course of 2013. Unlike many states (including Washington, which has also legalised marijuana but not yet licensed recreational outlets) Colorado's medical-marijuana system is well regulated; not only did that make full legalisation an easier sell to voters, it provided a foundation for the recreational industry.

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