Drugs like opium and cannabis have been used in cultures around the world for millennia. Drug regulation, on the otherhand, arrived when settlers and colonizers did—particularly in African and Asian countries.

“Criminalization is a colonial legacy,” Tripti Tandon, deputy director with the Lawyers Collective, told 

Lawyers Collective is one of the oldest human rights organizations in India. Tandon had just spoken on the impact of colonization on drug policy within the country during a May 26 panel hosted by Harm Reduction International, Release, Dejusticia, the International Drug Policy Consortium, the Transnational Institute, and Voices of Community Action & Leadership, Kenya. The panel, 

Decolonising Drug Policy: Dismantling Racism and Colonialism Through Drug Policy Reform

, was the first of a four-part series. Speakers from India, South Africa and Kenya shared their experiences.

“The American experiment in drug prohibition … really became one of the flagship foreign policies of the USA,” said Kojo Koram, a lecturer at the Birkbeck School of Law, during the panel. “[It] had the consequences of actually reproducing, and in some cases accelerating, the racial and geographical divisions within the world.” Koram’s research points to implementation of drug prohibition and penalization policies as a way to “civilize” Indigenous peoples.

To decolonize drugs, start with prohibition’s settler origins

Over the course of May 2021, the fear that COVID-19 would breach Cambodia’s prisons was finally realized, but despite being warned of such a possibility for more than a year, the government has so far refused to explain its response to the crisis or detail the exact number of cases found within the penal system.

This has prompted concerns among rights groups that COVID-19 is going unchecked through Cambodia’s gravely overcrowded prisons and that cases are not being reported.

DLA Piper called for a reduction in custodial punishments, notably pre-trial detention which is how an estimated 35 percent of the roughly 39,000 prisoners in Cambodia are held.

A similar study conducted across 109 countries by Harm Reduction International and the International Drug Policy Consortium published in January 2021 also found that prison release schemes eased the burden on states during the pandemic, but while they had been initially successful, they were not widely implemented.

COVID-19 outbreaks highlight urgency of prison reforms in Cambodia

The Misuse of Drugs Act (MDA) turns fifty today. In the half-century since its implementation, the act has perpetuated a false reality that renders a selected list of drugs the cause of society’s ills.

I use the term ‘drugs’ here for convenience, but that in itself is troublesome. Loaded with moralistic implications, it is a linguistic construction that feeds into the binary drawn between substances that are approved by the state, like caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco, and those that are not—cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy, and so on—which makes it part of the problem that the MDA represents.

That problem is the attempted eradication of certain psychoactive substances. Introduced in the wake of the global shift towards a prohibitive approach to substance regulation, the MDA is a mechanism of control that aims to govern the use and distribution of substances considered ‘dangerous or otherwise harmful’.

50 years of Britain’s bad drug policy

Suzanne Sharkey used to arrest drug users, then she became one. She worked as an undercover officer for Northumbria Police in the 1990s, and was "very happy" locking up users and dealers. "I joined the police because of what they stood for - reducing crime, protecting communities and locking up 'the baddies'," she said.

"But I ended up a 24/7 alcoholic and I used drugs. I was in recovery and I looked around at the people there with me, and one of the biggest barriers I saw to their recovery were drug laws. The criminalisation closed so many doors for them that they couldn't move on with their lives."

Now she is one of those calling for drug policy reform as co-executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, an activist group made up of current and former justice sector workers.

Britain's Misuse of Drugs Act turns 50 with reform calls

Melbourne City Council has voted in favour of a supervised-injecting room in the CBD after furious debate at its meeting on Tuesday night.

A motion by councillor Roshena Campbell – a senior Liberal party figure – opposing a safe-injecting room anywhere in the city was narrowly defeated, while a second vote on a council management report that recommended supporting a Victorian government service was successful.

It would be the second safe injecting room in Melbourne, joining a controversial centre in Richmond.

Australia: After furious debate, Melbourne council votes to support safe-injecting room

While the Czech parliament discusses the amendment to the Criminal Code that would effectively decriminalise drug use, the Constitutional Court has repealed part of the law concerning small amounts of cannabis and ‘magic’ mushrooms.

An important amendment to the Substance Abuse Act is being debated in the Chamber of Deputies, which is very important for the whole area of drug policy. It is a government proposal by the Ministry of Health, to which a large number of amendments of various quality and content have been tabled. However, three of these amendments, if adopted, can mark a positive breakthrough in the field of drug policy and addiction care in the Czech Republic.

These are amendments laid by Mr Tomáš Vymazal, Deputy Minister for Health Care, which would allow the creation of supervised consumption rooms for controlled use of drugs, would allow for testing of the chemical composition of drugs in, for example, dance clubs and would get rid of unnecessary criminalisation for the processing of small quantities of cannabis. On Thursday, May 13, the amendment was debated by the House Health Committee.

Civil society supports government proposal to reform drug laws in the Czech Republic

It’s a Rio de Janeiro classic. Officers of the civil, military or army police make an incursion into a 

. They arrive in armored vehicles, carrying assault rifles. Soon they issue a statement justifying their actions as necessary to stamp out illegal drug suppliers who “dominate” the area. They say that in order to tackle organized crime, you sometimes need to produce corpses and orphans in the process. It’s a drug war, and there are always casualties in war.

One day before the May 6 Jacarezinho Massacre, President Jair Bolsonaro met with Rio de Janeiro’s governor, Cláudio Castro, at the Palácio das Laranjeiras. I wonder if they talked about the operation that would become the deadliest in the long history of police violence in the Wonderful City.

In June 2020, the Brazilian Supreme Court had prohibited police raids in Rio’s favelas—due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By the next month, under the reduction in police incursions, the number of people fatally shot in favelas dropped 70 percent. Then police forces started ignoring the ruling.

The Jacarezinho Massacre exposed the current government’s necropolitics. Heavily-armed police officers entered a poor community and murdered at least 28 men in 10 different areas of the neighborhood. The vice president of the republic then dismissed the dead as “all thugs.” Bolsonaro called the victims “drug traffickers who steal, kill and destroy families,” and congratulated the police officers for a successful operation. Conservative media rushed to disclose the victims’ aliases and criminal records so that the public could shrug off the incident. The police surely had both the license and the duty to put these criminals down.

The Jacarezinho massacre and lethal drug policy enforcement in Brazil

1. Underlines the importance of a positive outcome at the UN High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS to be held from 8 to 10 June 2021; requests that the Council contribute to the adoption of a set of forward-looking and ambitious commitments in the political declaration;

2. Reaffirms that everyone is entitled to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health, as well as equality conducive to living life in dignity;

3. Commends the EU’s role in the multi-sectoral global AIDS response and calls on the Commission to address AIDS as a global public health crisis and accelerate all efforts to meet the 2025 targets, including through scaling-up investments in UNAIDS and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria;

4. Insists on the essential provision of sufficient means for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in order to enable it to make decisive contributions to the fight against HIV/AIDS;

Accelerating progress and tackling inequalities towards ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030

If you’re in Japan, keep this mantra in mind: never do drugs in this country. Ever.

The United States, Australia, and other countries are hardly perfect with their drug laws. Celebrities, however, have long appeared to play by different rules. This is not true in Japan, where if the rich and famous are caught with illegal substances, it’s not a speedbump on their careers, but a stop sign.

Japanese society is built on very high expectations. The expectation is that if some has broken the law, a company should not profit from that person’s work. The taint of crime, especially drug-related, is seen to reflect on the larger group. Making money off an alleged criminal is certainly not a good look in image-conscious Japan.

Why Japan Is so strict about drugs

The Rastafarian Society of Kenya has filed a petition to decriminalise the use of cannabis or bhang for 'spiritual' purposes.

They argue that followers and believers of the Rastafari faith use cannabis by smoking, drinking, bathing or burning incense for spiritual, medical, culinary and ceremonial purposes as a sacrament to manifest their faith.

In their petition, they also argue that Rastafarians are apolitical and therefore have no political power. They say they are subject to prejudices such as intimidation and searches on their homes because of their use of cannabis.

Kenya Rastafari group seeks to legalise 'spiritual' cannabis use

2020 marked the tenth anniversary of the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules). There are over 740,000 women and girls in prison worldwide, and although they are a minority compared to the number of men in prison (2 to 9% of national prison populations), their number increases every year, more often at a higher rate.

Drug policies in Latin America have resulted in increasingly harsh penal responses to drug-related offences and have disproportionately affected women. These policies provide very little space to explore non-custodial alternatives and reduce the number of women in prisons, bearing in mind that women are often single mothers who are the primary carers for their children and families.

Unfortunately, Peru is no exception to this trend. In the current context of the so-called War on Drugs there is an increasing need to prioritise the use of non-custodial measures for women who become involved with the criminal justice system. Indeed, women detained for drug-related offences in Peru – almost six out of ten – are all too often in a situation of increased vulnerability or socioeconomic precariousness. Still, they usually are minor actors in the drug trade, especially cocaine trafficking in Peru (and Latin America at large), who bear the full brunt of the law. In addition, like many countries, Peru’s burdened prison system was built to accommodate a male population and takes little account of the specific needs of women – from harsh security measures to scarce work and education programmes, family and conjugal visits and differentiated health-care services.

Women deprived of liberty and excessive use of pre-trial detention in Peru

In 2001, Portugal decriminalised the personal possession of all drugs as part of a wider re-orientation of policy towards a health-led approach. Possessing drugs for personal use is instead treated as an administrative offence, meaning it is no longer punishable by imprisonment and does not result in a criminal record and associated stigma. Drugs are, however, still confiscated and possession may result in administrative penalties such as fines or community service.

Whether such a penalty is applied is decided by district-level panels made up of legal, health and social work professionals, known as ‘Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction’. Where an individual is referred to a Commission for the first time and their drug use is assessed as non-problematic (low risk), the law requires their case to be ‘suspended’, meaning no further action is taken. Fines can be issued for subsequent referrals. Where some problematic trends are identified (moderate risk), brief interventions are proposed — including counselling — but these are non-mandatory. In ‘high risk’ cases, where more serious problematic behaviours and dependence are identified, individuals may receive non-mandatory referrals to specialised treatment services.

In the vast majority of instances, problematic drug use is not identified, and cases are simply ‘suspended’. Individuals referred to the Commissions overwhelmingly view their purpose as helping to reduce use and educate on drug risks. They are non-judgemental in nature, and a primary focus is safeguarding the right to health of those referred.

Importantly, the decriminalisation of personal possession is only one part of broader health-centred drug policy reforms that involve an increased focus on harm reduction and treatment provision. By ‘accepting the reality of drug use rather than eternally hoping that it will disappear as a result of repressive legislation’, Portuguese reform allows drugs to be treated as a health, rather than criminal justice, issue. The benefits of these reforms, therefore, arise from both decriminalisation itself and the establishment of a wider health-based response to drug problems.

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