Something happened in Baltimore last year. The coronavirus pandemic hit, and State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby announced that the city would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the deadly virus.

And then crime went down in Baltimore. A lot. While violent crime and homicides skyrocketed in most other big American cities last year, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20 percent from last March to this month, property crime decreased 36 percent, and there were 13 fewer homicides compared with the previous year. This happened while 39 percent fewer people entered the city’s criminal justice system in the one-year period, and 20 percent fewer people landed in jail after Mosby’s office dismissed more than 1,400 pending cases and tossed out more than 1,400 warrants for nonviolent crimes.

So on Friday, Mosby made her temporary steps permanent. She announced Baltimore City will continue to decline prosecution of all drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic and misdemeanor cases, and will partner with a local behavioral health service to aggressively reach out to drug users, sex workers and people in psychiatric crisis to direct them into treatment rather than the back of a patrol car.

United States: After crime plummeted in 2020, Baltimore will stop drug, sex prosecutions

The commonwealth of Virginia has become the first state in the South to legalize marijuana for adults.

Starting July 1, those ages 21 and older will be permitted to possess up to one ounce of marijuana and they’ll be able to home-cultivate up to four marijuana plants. Retail sales of cannabis products are expected to start no later than July 1, 2024.

Virginia’s decision to legalize follows similar actions in recent days by lawmakers in New York and New Mexico. In New York, the governor signed legislation legalizing the adult-use market on March 31, while New Mexico’s governor is expected to sign similar legislation into law any day now.

For those keeping score at home, in total 17 states and the District of Columbia will have enacted adult-use legalization legislation by this summer.

The first southern US state legalizes marijuana — what it means nationally

Three tons—this is the Italian requirement of medical cannabis for the current year (together with San Marino and Vatican City) predicted by the INCB (International Narcotics Control Board), the watchdog of international narcotics conventions. The figure is up 50% on the previous year and more than double what was predicted in 2018. However, by the end of the year, only about 1,000 kg of cannabis will actually be dispensed. In Italy, medical cannabis is now a mirage for too many patients.

In the last 60 days, there are 16 regions where there have been problems with the supply of medical cannabis, as documented by the patients themselves on monitorcannabis.it. Yet it’s enough to take a look at the specialized groups on social media to come across desperate messages from patients who cannot find the type of cannabis required by their therapeutic plan and risk interrupting their treatment. It is an unresolved problem that has persisted since 2017, despite the pledges made and legal regulations.

Medical cannabis is in high demand, but Italy is restricting supply

Between August and October last year, more than 300 New Zealanders faced court for possession of cannabis.

Campaigners say this reflects a lack of change in how police handle low-level drug offending, despite an amendment in the Misuse of Drugs Act in 2019 that gave police more discretion over whether to prosecute. But police say the stats don’t show the full picture of their current approach to the issue.

Statistics compiled by the Drug Foundation from police data show that in September, 127 people ended up in court for possessing or procuring cannabis for personal use. That was marginally higher than the number of people who faced court in the same month for possession of methamphetamine.

The figures also showed that while more low-level drug offenders were being put through non-court actions since the law change, overall the number of drug offences police are processing is increasing.

Hundreds still ending up in court for cannabis possession in New Zealand

The British government’s decision to reclassify GHB from a class C to a class B drug will be ineffective in stopping deaths linked to the substance, according to drug experts.

A potent sedative known as “G” or “liquid ecstasy”, the drug – a clear liquid often dispensed with a pipette – is used in the chemsex scene and by a growing number of clubbers because of its euphoric high. However, it has also been used by offenders in high-profile rape and murder cases, such as serial killer Stephen Port, who used the drug to sedate four men he later raped and killed, and Reynhard Sinaga, who raped and assaulted 40 men.

Home Secretary Priti Patel announced the move, which will lead to tougher sentences for possession and supply of the drug, on Tuesday, following a recommendation from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) in November. The ACMD said the drug has been linked to thousands of emergency hospital admissions and 219 deaths over the past ten years. In 2019, there were 27 deaths linked to GHB in England and Wales.

Taking the right dose of GHB is notoriously tricky; the difference between getting high and overdosing is a matter of milligrams. The drug – derived from the industrial cleaning solvent GBL, which is used to manufacture spandex and paint stripper – is also addictive, thought to be harder to withdraw from than heroin, and dangerous when mixed with alcohol.

United Kingdom: 'Tinkering' with GHB laws will not prevent deaths or serious crimes

In the hospital, I had no idea what the diagnoses they had given me meant, neither the MRSA part—referring to a group of bacteria that cause hard-to-treat staph infections—nor hepatitis C.

But I learned many lessons. One was that we need to inform ourselves when nobody else takes the trouble. Hospital policy and our medical system create deadly barriers for people who use drugs. We are then not able to access the help we need and are left to deal with life-threatening infections by ourselves. When they have security searches and room sitters, leave us in pain and withdrawal and refuse to allow any guests for us, we leave against medical advice.

My developing these infections had really been a toss-up, it turned out. People who inject drugs are at their most vulnerable to hep C transmission in their first two years of injecting. I would hypothesize that this vulnerability has only increased at a time when more people, in my experience, now begin their drug use injecting, rather than coming to it via snorting or smoking.

I hoped I would never have another experience like that, but that is not my reality.

Here I am again. Here is the truth, after seven or eight months of shame and secrecy. Throughout that time, I have been hiding wounds and abscesses. Terrified, I have taken different assortments of antibiotics from Canada, and watched myself get closer to death day by day.

I hid my wounds for months and nearly lost my life: Stigma kills drug users

PARIS -- France’s government launched a two-year nationwide experiment with medical marijuana Friday with a view to its eventual legalization.

Some 3,000 patients around the country will be given medical cannabis treatments and their health will be monitored by the national medicines watchdog, the Health Ministry said in a statement. The first prescription was issued Friday at the Clermont-Ferrand University Hospital in southern France.

The goal is to gather data about the effectiveness and safety of therapeutic marijuana, and to prepare eventual logistical circuits for future distribution, the ministry said.

Among those eligible will be cancer patients, people with nerve pain that is not treatable by other methods, people with certain forms of epilepsy and people in palliative care.

France launches 2-year experiment with medical marijuana

Colombia’s government is moving closer to reinstating a program, suspended in 2015, that would spray herbicides from aircraft over territories where coca is cultivated. Twenty-five U.S. and Colombian organizations have joined on this letter to President Joe Biden urging him to avoid supporting a renewed “fumigation” program, succinctly laying out the reasons why this would be an unfortunate policy mistake. The letter was shared with the White House on March 26.

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
The White House
Washington, DC

We write out of strong concern about the imminent restart of a program that your administration is inheriting from its predecessor: an effort to eradicate coca in Colombia by spraying herbicides from aircraft. 

We encourage you not to provide funding for this program

, which not only failed to achieve past objectives, but sends a message of cruelty and callousness with which the United States should no longer be associated. It will undermine the peace accords that are a powerful legacy of the Obama-Biden administration.

Aerial fumigation can bring short-term reductions in the number of acres planted with coca. But past experience shows not only that these gains reverse quickly, but that the strategy undermines other U.S. and Colombian security objectives. Recurring to fumigation is like going back in time, ignoring much that we have learned about what does and does not work.

Many of our organizations have published studies documenting the harm that fumigation has done in the past. The December 2020 report of the U.S. government’s bipartisan Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission found that forced eradication brought “enormous costs and dismal results.” Just since the end of February, we have seen strong critiques of forced eradication and fumigation from the International Crisis Group; the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a Colombian business sector think tank; a list of over 200 scholars, and seven UN human rights rapporteurs.

Between 1994 and 2015, a U.S.-backed program supported a fleet of aircraft, and teams of contract pilots and maintenance personnel, that sprayed the herbicide glyphosate over 4.42 million acres of Colombian territory—a land area 3 1/2 times the size of Delaware. In 2015 the Colombian government suspended the spray program, citing public health concerns based on a World Health Organization study finding glyphosate to be “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

For a few years afterward, the Colombian government failed to replace the strategy with anything—neither eradication nor assistance to affected areas. During the late 2010s, Colombia’s coca crop increased to record levels. Nearly all of the increase 

happened in the exact municipalities and communities where fumigation had been heaviest

. After 20 years of constant eradication, farmers continue to face the same on-the-ground reality.

Most Colombian producers of the coca bush are not organized crime-tied criminals or supporters of illegal armed groups. They are families with small plots of land. Estimates of the number of families who make a living off of coca vary from “more than 119,500” to 215,000. If one assumes four people per family, then more than 2 percent of Colombia’s 50 million people depend on coca. Households earn about $1,000 per person per year from the crop, making them by far the lowest-paid link in the cocaine supply chain.

They live in “agricultural frontier” zones where evidence of Colombia’s government is scarce. Paved or maintained roads are nonexistent. The national electric grid is far off. There is no such thing as potable water or land titles. In some areas, even currency is hard to obtain, and stores offer the option of paying for groceries with coca paste.

These people need to be governed and protected by their state. An aircraft flying anonymously overhead, spraying chemicals on populated areas, is the exact opposite of that. But the program has other important disadvantages:

Because it targets poor households in ungoverned areas, chemical fumigation sends a 

, and associates that message with the United States. Your administration is steadily working to undo the Trump administration’s cruel migratory measures, which imposed suffering on a weak, impoverished population at the U.S.-Mexico border. We ask that you also avoid returning to “deterrence though cruelty” in rural Colombia.

Like any eradication without assistance, fumigation further 

weakens governance and threatens to worsen security

 in Colombia’s ungoverned territories, where illegal economies and armed groups thrive. Forced eradication, especially when uncoordinated with efforts to physically bring government services into territory, sends families from poverty to extreme poverty, with no official help in sight. This hurts the government’s legitimacy in frontier areas where it badly needs to be built up.

After perhaps a short-term drop in cultivation, fumigation is not effective at reducing the coca crop. Past experience shows 

 and other means of minimizing lost harvests, in contexts of absent government and few alternative crops.

Fumigation goes against what Colombia’s 2016 peace accord promised

. That document’s first and fourth chapters offered a blueprint for reducing illicit crops: first by engaging families in substitution programs, and then by carrying out a 15-year “comprehensive rural reform” effort to bring state presence to rural areas. Fumigation was meant to be a last resort, for circumstances when families were refusing opportunities to substitute crops and when manual eradication was viewed as too dangerous. Rushing to fumigate is a slap in the face to brave farmer association leaders who took the risky step of defying traffickers and leading their communities into the fourth chapter’s crop substitution programs.

fumigation risks large-scale social discord

 in rural Colombia. In 1996, after the program first got started, much of rural Colombia ground to a halt for weeks or months as mostly peaceful coca-grower protests broke out around the country. Today, farmers are even better organized than they were 25 years ago.

risks for human health and the environment

. The 2015 WHO document is one of many studies that give us reasonable doubts about the health impacts of spraying high concentrations of glyphosate over populated areas from aircraft. Bayer, the company that purchased glyphosate producer Monsanto, has agreed to settlements with U.S. plaintiffs potentially totaling over $11 billion—another reason for reasonable doubt. While the environmental impacts are less clear, glyphosate’s own labeling warns against spraying near standing water sources, and we are concerned about its use in proximity to rainforest ecosystems. The largest environmental impact, though, is likely to be the way many past farmers have responded after losing crops to fumigation, while remaining in a vacuum of government presence: they move somewhere else and cut down more rainforest to grow coca again.

Like all forced eradication unaccompanied by assistance, fumigation is 

 themselves. In 2013, not long before the program’s suspension, FARC guerrillas shot down two spray planes within the space of two weeks. While planes and their escort helicopters will be more armored than before, the vulnerability remains. Eradication is far safer when it is agreed with communities by a government that is physically present in its own territory.

In March 2020, Donald Trump met with Colombian President Iván Duque and told him, “You’re going to have to spray.” The country’s highest court has required Duque’s government to meet a series of health, environment, consultation, and other requirements. Colombia’s Defense Minister is now predicting that the spraying could restart in April.

This time, U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg has stated, the U.S. role in the program won’t be as extensive. Still, during the Trump administration, the State Department supported maintenance of the spray plane fleet, upgrades to bases, and training of eradication personnel, among other services. State Department reports sent to Congress in late February and early March hailed fumigation’s imminent restart as a sign of progress.

we reiterate our hope that the Biden administration will turn away from supporting Colombia’s spray program while there is still time

. The United States should not support aerial fumigation in Colombia again. Nor does it have to. We know what to do.

Farmers with land titles hardly ever grow coca. Farmers who live near paved roads hardly ever grow coca. Criminal groups are badly weakened by proximity of a functioning government that is able to resolve disputes and punish lawbreaking.

This is a longer-term project, but Colombia’s 2016 peace accord offered a good blueprint for setting it in motion: a fast-moving, consultative crop substitution program, tied to a slower-moving but comprehensive rural reform program. Though those programs exist and parts of the Duque government are carrying them out diligently, they are underfunded and well behind where they should be as accord implementation enters its fifth year.

It’s not too late to help Colombia jumpstart the model offered by Colombia’s peace accord, which the Obama-Biden administration so effectively supported. We urge you to take that path instead of that of renewed fumigation, which we know to be a dead end.

Center for International Environmental Law

Centro Estudios sobre Seguridad y Drogas, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)

Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America

Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (Colombia)

Fellowship of Reconciliation: Peace Presence

Institute for Policy Studies, Drug Policy Project

Institute on Race, Equality, and Human Rights

Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Washington Office

Presbyterian Church (USA), Office of Public Witness

United Church of Christ, Justice and Witness Ministries

25 organizations call for an end to U.S. support for aerial herbicide fumigation in Colombia

By Luis Ferré-Sadurní / The New York Times

After years of stalled attempts, New York State has legalized the use of recreational marijuana, enacting a robust program that will reinvest millions of dollars of tax revenues from cannabis in minority communities ravaged by the decades-long war on drugs.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the cannabis legislation on Wednesday, a day after the State Legislature passed the bill following hours of debate among lawmakers in Albany.

New York became the 15th state to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, positioning itself to quickly become one of the largest markets of legal cannabis in the nation and one of the few states where legalization is directly tied to economic and racial equity.

Previous attempts to legalize marijuana were stymied over disagreements on how the tax revenue from sales would be distributed. Democratic lawmakers, especially those who are nonwhite, insisted that a large portion of the money be earmarked for communities where Black and Latino people have been arrested on marijuana charges in disproportionate numbers; the governor wanted to retain more control over how the money was spent.

The lawmakers prevailed. Forty percent of the tax revenue from pot sales will be steered to those communities, and people convicted of marijuana-related offenses that are no longer criminalized will have their records automatically expunged. The law also seeks to allow people with past convictions and those involved in the illicit cannabis market to participate in the new legal market.

New York legalizes recreational marijuana, tying move to racial equity

Since the first of February this year, anyone in the US state of Oregon caught possessing or using a personal quantity of any controlled drug – including heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine – has been officially not a criminal – or, rather, not liable for criminal prosecution. Instead, they will have the choice of paying a $100 fine or completing a health assessment at an approved addiction recovery centre.

The state government reported late last year, that Oregon had suffered a 40% increase in drug overdose deaths in 2020, in line with with national trends during the Covid pandemic. This dramatic shift from a criminal justice approach for drug users to one centred around health (a move the American Public Health Association called for as far back as 2013, came not from the state's elected politicians, but from the voters themselves, who last September approved Measure 110 by a 16-point margin. The measure also stipulated that funding for the introduction of new healthcare resources, including a a 24/7 telephone addiction recovery centre, would come from Oregon's burgeoning tax revenue from its legalised cannabis market.

The funding component was, says Portland drug reform activist and public radio broadcaster Doug McVay, a political winner". But he also credits an increasingly strong reform movement: "People who use drugs have become vocal and politically active. We've become visible."

McVay says that although Oregon has long led the way on drug policy reform – its needle exchange was one of the first in the US – "conventional wisdom has always been that even talking about decriminalising drugs other than marijuana, let alone legalising and regulating them, is too radical. What Oregon has done is prove that bit of conventional wisdom wrong. Oregon has set an example for the rest of the nation, which becomes apparent when you look at the other states that are now considering broad drug decriminalisation. Politicians in those states need to be bold."

Turning away from the 'war on drugs'

In November 2015, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that four individuals from the Mexican Society for Responsible and Tolerant Personal Use (SMART) would be permitted to grow and consume their own cannabis. The court ruled that prohibiting people from growing the drug for personal consumption, personal use and private consumption was unconstitutional as it violated the human right to the free development of one's personality. The case followed several years of patient work by México Unido Contra Delincuencia (MUCD), involving the development of individual cases which could test the legal status of prohibition (so-called ‘strategic litigation’).

After the 2015 ruling, more similar cases followed. On 31 October 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the law prohibiting recreational use of cannabis in Mexico was unconstitutional for the fifth time. Under Mexican law this fifth ruling set a binding precedent across the country's court system — rather than only applying to the individual litigants. The effect of the ruling was that while the law prohibiting cannabis remained in place, it could no longer be meaningfully enforced, since anyone could cite the ruling and demand that their charges be thrown out. Crucially, the ruling also mandated that the government of Mexico move to formally legalise and regulate cannabis within the next 90 days.

The challenging and contentious process of devising a cannabis regulation Bill has led to the 90 day deadline being extended 3 times by the Court — with April 30th of 2021 now being the final deadline.

Cannabis legalisation in Mexico: An explainer

New Zealand’s drug laws are increasingly leaving us behind the rest of the world.

The new Biden-Harris Administration in the United States has made racial equality a top priority, and within that the delivery of criminal justice reform. Their Office of National Drug Control Policy has now made an unprecedented statement about its new priorities, which, at its heart, represents the end of the failed repressive approach to drugs in favour of a health-based approach.

The New Zealand Government is clearly of the view that the use and possession of drugs should not be a criminal offence, as demonstrated when it passed the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Act 2019 (MODA). That amendment reminded the police that they have the discretion not to arrest and prosecute for use and supply, and that they should consider in each case whether a health-centred approach might be more beneficial to the public interest.

This amendment isn’t working as well as everyone had hoped, and thousands of New Zealanders continue to be convicted of low-level offences each year. The solution is to overhaul our current law and reformulate it, placing health considerations at the centre of how we deal with drugs.

News