VIENNA, 3 September (United Nations Information Service) - How to ensure the availability of internationally controlled substances for medical and scientific purposes while preventing illicit cultivation and production, diversion, trafficking and abuse, including during the COVID-19 pandemic is being discussed this week in Vienna at the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) 128th session. Postponed from May 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is being held in a hybrid format to enable Members to participate virtually from around the world. At elections held yesterday, the Board renewed the mandate of its President, Cornelis P. de Joncheere, and elected a new Bureau for a one-year term.

During the session, which is taking place from 31 August to 4 September 2020, the Board is reviewing the compliance of Member States with the three international drug control conventions and the functioning of the international drug control system.

The session opened with a meeting of the Board's Standing Committee on Estimates, which looked at national estimates of requirements for narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances for medical and scientific purposes and reviewed annual legitimate requirements of precursors for licit industrial use submitted by governments for those chemicals that are frequently subject to diversion to the illicit manufacture of drugs.

In plenary, the Board is working on the preparation of its annual report for 2020, which will include a thematic chapter on drug use among older persons and is considering civil society perspectives on the topic in the form of written submissions provided by the Vienna Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) Committee on Drugs. During the session, the Board will meet with the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Ghada Waly.

At the opening of the session, the Board welcomed three new Members, who had been elected by the Economic and Social Council in 2019: César T. Arce Rivas, Viviana Manrique Zuluaga and Zukiswa Zingela.

The composition of the INCB Bureau following the 2 September elections:

Cornelis P. de Joncheere - President of the Board

Luis A. Otárola Peñaranda - First Vice-President

Jagjit Pavadia - Second Vice-President and Chair of the Standing Committee on Estimates, and Member, Committee on Finance and Administration

The International Narcotics Control Board holds postponed 128th session, renews President's mandate and elects new Bureau Members

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are dying from drug overdoses at three times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians, according to Australia's Annual Overdose report.

The report, published by drug and alcohol research centre, the Pennington Institute, showed that 473 Indigenous people died of unintentional overdoses between 2014 to 2018.

In 2018, there were 17.3 unintentional overdose deaths per 100,000 Indigenous Australians.

This rate had almost doubled since 2009 and compared to 6.0 unintentional overdose deaths per 100,000 among non-Indigenous Australians in 2018.

Drug overdoses killing Indigenous people at three times the rate of other Australians

Ahead of the UNAIDS Multi-Stakeholder Consultation on 16 September, 33 civil society and community-led organisations working on drug policy and harm reduction are urging the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board (UNAIDS PCB) to uphold the rights of people who use drugs and harm reduction in the new UNAIDS Strategy.

This letter includes six key recommendations from our community and sector and we asking UNAIDS PCB to advocate for these at the upcoming Consultation.

Now, more than ever, we need their leadership to be strong, bold and unrelenting in ensuring that key populations, including people who inject drugs, are prioritised in the new UNAIDS Strategy; harm reduction services are available, scaled-up and fully funded to meet the HIV prevention and health needs of people who use drugs wherever needed; communities, including community-led services, and civil society are at the front and centre of the HIV response; and barriers to services, including criminalisation, stigma, discrimination, punitive laws and policies, are removed.

The new UNAIDS strategy will have profound implications - either by compounding or alleviating the political invisibility of people who use drugs. We need them to show a commitment to people who use drugs in your engagement in the Strategy process.

We will not end AIDS if we keep leaving people who inject drugs behind.

Call to uphold the rights of people who use drugs and harm reduction in the new UNAIDS Strategy

We are in a "war" - a war with drugs and with people. And we need to know that in this world, far or near, there are few strong in spirit and firm in word who will not betray or disappoint. The characters and the characters must be real. This is a tuning fork that you use to check the clear sound. This is our compass.

The ENPUD video `Flowers growing through the asphalt` tells about such people.

Today human rights activists from ENPUD are fighting for the lives and wellbeing of people who use drugs. That includes people who are in prisons and those who have been released. They support those who were refused help, who lost all hope and prepared to expire. It doesn’t matter who the person is. If their rights were violated it means that they requires support. Their goal is to increase access to medical services and respect for human rights for all people without exception. They protect our right to be ourselves every day.

Flowers growing through the asphalt - A video by the Eurasian Network of People who Use Drugs

 has launched the regional COVID-19 Solidarity Program in the Eastern Partnership countries with the financial support of the European Union and in partnership with People in Need and the Netherlands Helsinki Committee. This project will support community-based organizations to respond to the immediate and longer-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Eastern Partnership countries.

 will support 9 organizations with small grants in the period of October 2020 – September 2021. The maximum amount per grant is 5000 euro.

Projects address the immediate COVID-19 related health and socio-economic needs of Key Populations, and enable them to continue supporting their usual constituents.

Activities respond to a situation that threatens the health, and/or the physical or juridical safety of one or more people from the above target groups or threatens the financial and/or legal situation of an NGO/CBO.

The activity will be used as a tool for local, national and/or international advocacy for preventing similar emergencies occurring in the future.

The activities to relieve an emergency will be immediately implemented and will last no longer than 

or represent the interests and needs of the following groups:   

Applicant is a registered CBO or – if not registered – provides references from partner organisations.

Fill out the form (can be downloaded from here). An application shall be submitted in English or Russian. The deadline for submitting the form is on 

27 September 2020 at 17:00 CET (Amsterdam time)

. All proposals submitted after the deadline will not be reviewed! Decisions will be made within 3 weeks. Funds will be transferred approximately within 14 days after a positive decision.

Send this form to the following email address: 

. Once submitted, you will receive an automated notification.

Wait for the decision of the Selection Commission regarding your application. The review of the applications will be done within 3 weeks after the deadline. The decisions will be announced on 19 October 2020.

If you have questions, please refer them to the above-mentioned email address or to Valeria Fulga: valeria_fulga@AFEW.nl.

More details about the call for applications – here.

Application Form CoV-19 Solidarity Program – download.

COVID-19 solidarity program for key populations in Eastern Partnership countries

Peter Krykant aims to reduce Scotland's shameful drugs death toll but Police Scotland vow to enforce draconian Westminster laws and clamp down on his bid to help addicts.

Drugs activist Peter Krykant is risking jail after launching the UK’s first - and illegal - mobile drug consumption facility.

People who inject heroin and cocaine in Glasgow have been invited to step out of dingy, needle strewn back alleys and into his clean and safe converted mini-bus.

He admits he could face being arrested but is taking his own action over the lack of it at Government level.

The Daily Record spoke to some of the van’s first clients after they stepped on board as it parked close to Glasgow’s Barras market on a street as blighted by drug addiction as those in any city in Europe.

Glasgow, with scores of open air drug scenes close to busy shopping streets, has been pinpointed as the single most needy city in the continent for a Safer Drugs Consumption facility (SDCF).

UK's first illegal drugs consumption room launches in Glasgow

By Erika Dupuis & Kira London-Nadeau / Filter Mag

After decades of campaigning, the decriminalization of all drugs for personal use in Canada finally feels just around the corner.

On August 17, a set of guidelines issued by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada (PPSC) called on prosecutors to pursue non-criminal sanctions for simple drug possession. They noted plainly:

“Criminal sanctions, as a primary response, have limited effectiveness as (i) specific or general deterrents and (ii) as a means of addressing the public safety concerns when considering the harmful effects of criminal records and short periods of incarceration.”

Tragic increases in overdose deaths amid the pandemic, particularly in British Columbia and Ontario—together with growing calls, amid racial justice protests, to prioritize health and human rights over criminalization—can no longer be ignored.

Decriminalization is a bold idea—one seemingly too progressive for the Liberal Party of Canada, which leads a minority government that remains opposed. But we are rapidly approaching a tipping-point.

The PPSC’s announcement was praised in the media as an essential step toward decriminalization. But experts and advocates are wary of the guidelines’ limitations. Sandra Ka Hon Chu, director of research and advocacy at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, cautions about the discretion that police and prosecutors will retain. Speaking to Filter, she encouraged us to ask critical questions.

“Will police continue to surveil, harass and charge people?” she asked. “Will the requirement to continue to pursue charges for those who ‘possess in the vicinity of children’ or those with ‘statutory authority over children’ disproportionately fall on women who use drugs? Or will the requirement to continue to pursue charges against people in detention largely fall on Indigenous and Black people, who are both grossly overrepresented in our prison system and disproportionately marginalized by repressive drug laws?”

Despite these critical reservations—and the fact that the guidelines still entail civil penalties, like fines, for simple possession—the unprecedented announcement speaks loudly to an urgent question: Can full decriminalization become politically viable in Canada?

Canada is so close to decriminalizing drugs: Let’s make it happen

In June 2020, all harm reduction services with public funding stopped in Bulgaria for the second time in three (2017-2020) years. The oldest, biggest, and most experienced harm reduction organisation, Initiative for Health Foundation, shut down too. No needle and syringe programs remained open in the country. An article by Yuliya Georgieva.

The story starts in 1997 when Initiative for Health Foundation was founded, becoming the first harm reduction program in Bulgaria. During the next several years they supported and trained two more organisations. “Dose of love” in Burgas and “Panacea” in Plovdiv. They are the pioneers, the people who covered all HIV prevention for people who use drugs (PWUD) during the huge and awful heroin epidemic in the ‘90s.

The heroin epidemic started to fade away after 2003. The Ministry of Health signed a contract with the Global Fund. Three NGOs, including Initiative for Health Foundation, were appointed to be the mentors for the newly founded organisations which needed to work in the field.

The National HIV program encouraged the creation of new organisations to be the grantees of Global Fund grants. Armed with a lot of money and political support, the National HIV program became the architect of making these new NGOs friendly and silent allies. Initially, the staff of these organisations were emotionally motivated. But the Ministry broke their independence and strong motivation and made them into technocrats.

Approximately 50 organisations have received Global Fund funding through the National HIV program for more than 10 years. During this period Bulgaria became one of the most successful countries regarding HIV prevention. The reports were amazing, the epidemic in the biggest ghetto in Europe (Stolipinovo-Plovdiv) was stopped. The results seemed very, very good.

The oldest harm reduction organisation in Bulgaria shut down

INHSU is excited to launch the Connecting with Care Competition; a global award to identify innovative models of hepatitis C care in order to highlight emerging ways of working and to inspire others in the sector.

Open to entries globally, applicants are invited to submit their model of care as an opportunity to showcase to the world how their model effectively provides access to hepatitis C treatment and care for people who use drugs.

The award is part of Connecting with Care, an ongoing project led by INHSU.

Connecting with Care inspires and educates the global hepatitis C community by sharing innovative case studies from every corner of the globe, with the ultimate aim of creating an interactive online Model of Care Toolkit to provide services with the practical tools they need to enhance hepatitis C care for people who use drugs.

 Is your model of HCV care the best in the world?

The International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) is the headline conference in the region, and an important opportunity to advance the HIV response. However, people who use drugs and the harm reduction community have been consistently marginalised and under-represented at these events.

Despite the 2019 conference (in Kigali, Rwanda) having more than 8,500 delegates and an objective to “Rethink gender norms, human rights-based approaches and inclusion towards equitable and accessible HIV and AIDS services including key populations”, there was once again very little focus on harm reduction, and poor visibility for people who inject drugs. This crucial aspect of the HIV response was restricted to only two satellite events and around five poster presentations.

We are calling on ICASA to proactively address this imbalance, starting with preparations for the 2021 conference.

Proposed Objective: To raise the profile of evidence-based harm reduction programs and promote integrated rights-based and stigma free interventions and policies for Africans who use drugs.

It is estimated that there may be as many as 2 million people who inject drugs in Africa, of whom more than 11 percent are living with HIV. Yet services remain woefully unavailable, and only a few African countries have adopted this approach – most often with external funding, and through NGOs rather than state provision. According to UNAIDS, people who inject drugs account for 8 percent of all new HIV infections in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 37 percent of all new infections in the Middle East and North Africa. This is a population that cannot be overlooked if we are to end AIDS in Africa.

Furthermore, the conference in Uganda is an opportune moment for this conversation – the host country itself has begun to embrace the harm reduction approach in response to its own domestic drug use challenges.

60+ NGOs working in Africa call upon ICASA 2021 to centre the importance of harm reduction in the HIV response

HIV prevention and other programs are facing a huge setback at the Jorthang OST centre of the Jorethang Hospital and HIV testing at the ICTC of the district hospital, Namchi, South Sikkim, due to the unwarranted move of the Health Minister in transferring staffs in those two facilities, under the program of the Sikkim State AIDS Control Society (SSACS).

In order to deter such foreseen challenges and prevent the occurrence of the service access barriers, the Sikkim Drug Users’ Forum (SDUF), with a concern to ensure uninterrupted and client friendly services, earlier submitted a request letter to the Health Minister on the 6th of July 2020. The letter mentioned purely about the urgency to revoke the transfer order and re-instate the earlier staffs at their respective work settings. However, the SDUF, lamented that, the Health Minister did not initiate any remedial measure to the request of SDUF, despite the several and persistent effort put in by the later.

SDUF, through this press release reiterate, that the such unwarranted move by the authority is “uncalled” for and ongoing negligence from by the higher authority, Dr. M.K Sharma, greatly disrupts the continuity of effective HIV service deliveries. It poses a great risk to the lives of people who are currently under the purview of the service and has the potentiality to escalate the spread of HIV, in the near future. SDUF, therefore, called upon the Health Minister to sort out the mess he created, before the situation reached to the level of state Health Crises.

HIV prevention program in Sikkim is vital in containing the public health threat. Programs and several services in different shapes and size such as Harm reduction, Early HIV testing and ART Initiation, and IEC campaigns are the integral part of the whole comprehensive service delivery package as part of the National AIDS control Plan. Yet, with the arrival of Covid 19 crises, the HIV response became widely ignored. It has derailed several ongoing service deliveries, and still poses as a serious threat to further collapse the HIV response in the state.

To this, the SDUF has responded to this crisis, since the inception of the announcement of the Lockdown in the state. Accordingly, SDUF has been tirelessly delivering crucial lifesaving medicines to people suffering from HIV, TB and, Harm reduction services indulging Needles and Syringes and Buprenorphine (OST), referrals, Counseling and bridging the service gaps. These efforts were made to mitigate the HIV Program gaps and challenges with the core principle being “one emerging public health crises should not be a reason to derail another existing public health crises”.

Gross negligence on HIV prevention programme in Sikkim by Dr. M.K. Sharma

When we think about people who use drugs, there is a tendency to refer to drug rehabilitation centers as the solution, and without thinking about the importance of what the person actually needs or wants. Moreover, for women who use drugs, their experiences too often involve stigmatization, marginalization, and violence. Little is known about what happens in the many drug rehabilitation and treatment centers around Asia and whether they are helping or hurting. Conditions in drug rehabilitation centers can be overcrowded and poor, and fail to treat people with the standard of health and human rights that each of us deserve.

This year, twelve United Nations entities have issued a joint statement calling for the closure of compulsory drug detention and rehabilitation centers. Amnesty International has also reported torture, sexual violence, and deaths in their report covering prisons and places of detention, including drug rehabilitation centres, on Cambodia.

To shed light on this issue, UNAIDS and the International Drug Policy Consortium launched a podcast series ‘Reality Bytes: On Drugs in Southeast Asia’ to chat with various experts about the real experiences faced with drug treatment and rehabilitation in the region. Tune in to hear stories and voices that are too rarely heard.

In this first episode, we talk with Rosma about her experiences going through over 17 different types of drug treatment and rehabilitation programmes in Indonesia. She bravely opens up about how she started using drugs, struggles with her family, and why she believes it is important to talk about her difficult experiences. Transcript available here.

Episode 2: On understanding community needs

In this second episode, we talk with Thomas Cai about his experience working with people who use drugs in Asia to help provide treatment and other services they need to live a life of dignity. Transcript available here.

Episode 3: On providing community-based treatment and services

In this final episode, we talk with Sam Nugraha, the founder and Executive Director of Rumah Singgah PEKA, a oeer ryb rehabilitation centre in Indonesia. Transcript available here.

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