DPA's video series, Matters of Substance, breaks down important drug policy concepts in under 60 seconds. Watch and learn in just a minute.

What are these things called overdose prevention centers, or supervised consumption sites, or drug consumption rooms? What do they provide? Can they really help save lives?

You may have heard about methadone and buprenorphine, but what exactly are they and what do they do? Is medication assisted treatment really helpful for those with opioid dependency? Why can it be hard to access treatment?

There's a new drug education curriculum on the block, called Safety First...but how does it compare to D.A.R.E. and other abstinence-based programs? Why does it talk about harm reduction? And how can it help kids stay healthy?

You may have heard about drug checking...but how does it work, and why does it matter? Can it really detect additives like fentanyl, and prevent overdose deaths? Why is it often hard to access drug checking equipment?

All drug decriminalization: what exactly does it mean? What would it change about how drug offenses are handled? How could it affect drug use, overdose, and treatment rates?

Matters of substance: Video series

FEBRUARY 13 — I attended an Anti-drug campaign during high school.

“Don’t ever do drugs or your life will be ruined!” we were reminded again and again.

There was big screen in the hall. You could hear a pin drop when they first played the video. It was about a man who was flogged 24 times for committing a crime.

For many of us, it was the first time we saw a naked buttocks of a grownup man. Pieces of flesh were ripped from his body. Definitely not for the faint-hearted.

When the video ended, some of my schoolmates were traumatised. But some found it amusing, they cheered and clapped their hands.

Despite the intended effect, our school wasn’t drug free that year.

Drug prevention programme and sudden urine test in school

The National Anti-Drug Agency (AADK) often brings different types of drugs to exhibit it in school. The purpose? To show students how harmful drugs could be.

Last year, the Director General of AADK told 

 that two million students were at risk of drug use. Urine testing was done in school as an early step to stop students from using drugs.

I am not saying we should turn a blind eye to children who use drugs. But the main reasons why kids use drugs are curiosity, broken family, trauma from abuse, mental illness, stress, boredom, and peer pressure. Will sudden drug test and harsh punitive action prevent all these?

“When I was in Form 4, nine of my friends smoked “rokok daun” in the school bus. The next day, AADK did urine test in school. All of them were found positive for Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and jailed for weeks. After their release, the head master caned all of them publicly. Some boys were suspended, some expelled. Majority ended up living a problematic life. But the one that did not attend school that fateful day was able to escape and is now a doctor.”

This story reminds me of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton who had admitted drug use in their younger days. Would they have been US Presidents if they had been caught?

The Dangerous Drugs Act which criminalises drug use, was enacted in 1952 when addiction was considered as a security threat and not a medical condition. The law does not differentiate people who use drug experimentally, recreationally, self-medication or chronic use. Instead, it only provides a one size fit it all solutions. The punishment is either a fine, jail sentence or both. In any case, the criminal records will be a hurdle for pursuing higher education and deter future proper employment.

Rethinking drug policy: Why ‘Just Say No Campaign’ is failing?

By Ricky Gunawan and Will Doran / Jakarta Globe

In late January, three members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, or GCDP, traveled to Jakarta to discuss sustainable development and advancing Indonesian drug policy. The visiting commissioners consisted of the former president of Switzerland and chair of the GCDP, Ruth Dreifuss, the former prime minister and president of Timor-Leste, José Ramos-Horta, and the former premier of Western Australia, Geoff Gallop.

The trio, who met with civil servants, NGOs and government officials during their three-day visit, exchanged views on Indonesia's drug laws and policies and shared ideas on how to move forward. The visit culminated with a public forum held at Atma Jaya Catholic University, where the commissioners offered their insights, drawn from their own experiences, on implementing successful drug policy reform, including drug decriminalization.

Dreifuss discussed how she helped administer change during her tenure as both Minister of Home Affairs and President of Switzerland during the 1990s-2000s. Stressing the importance of evidence-based treatment and prevention, instead of criminalization, she highlighted how the original goals of drug policies were to eradicate the production of drugs, extinguish the consumption of drugs and defeat organized crime.

The "war on drugs," however, failed to achieve its intended objective and only resulted in the opposite: larger production of drugs, an increase in consumers of drugs, the global phenomenon of mass incarceration and organized crime holding more power than previously before. The only way to change this course, she said, is to stop treating drugs as a criminal justice issue, and begin treating it as a public health matter. Indonesia would benefit greatly from this approach.

Ramos-Horta said it is written in his country’s Constitution that there would be no death penalty, much less for drug traffickers or users. Similarly, the maximum sentence for any crime is 25 years. With relatively relaxed borders and an inclusive society, Timor- Leste never became a drug paradise like some predicted.

In stark comparison, Indonesia, like many countries in Asia, has draconian punishments for drug offenses, including the death penalty. Out of 369 death row prisoners in Indonesia, 230 are awaiting execution on drug charges. Moreover, of all the people executed during President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo's administration, all 18 have been for drug offenses.

Capital punishment for drug offenses is just one of the many regressive and antagonistic policies that currently dominates the rhetoric and perspective toward drugs in Indonesia. It is time for this to change.

The time has come for Indonesia to decriminalize drugs

On February 10, the Colombian government said it planned to eradicate 130,000 hectares of coca this year, using techniques that will possibly include the spraying of herbicides from aircraft.

There is currently a judicial ban against doing so, in place since 2015. However, with the U.S. government placing significant pressure on Colombia to reduce coca plantings, President Iván Duque’s administration is pushing to restart aerial sprayings. Before it can do so, the government has to meet various health and environmental conditions imposed by the Colombian Constitutional Court.

The Ministry of Justice has produced a draft decree, dated December 30, explaining how the government plans to meet those conditions and restart aerial herbicide fumigation.

The decree includes some important protections and procedures to avoid some of the excesses and errors that characterized aerial spray programs from 1994-2015. But even with the protections and mitigations outlined in the draft decree, aerial herbicide spraying is a counter-drug strategy that carries few benefits—none of them long-lasting—and several serious risks and harms.

When assessing the wisdom of restarting aerial spraying, it’s also paramount to consider how this policy will impact Colombia’s obligations under international human rights law. The pursuit of drug control objectives does not relieve governments of their fundamental obligations to protect and promote human rights, including people’s rights to live in dignity, to be free from hunger, and to enjoy an adequate standard of living. 

For hundreds of thousands of farmers in Colombia and in other countries, cultivation of crops declared to be illicit—coca, poppies, and cannabis—represents a fundamental economic survival strategy. Forced crop eradication campaigns undertaken in the absence of viable alternative livelihoods violate growers’ human rights.

In this context, let’s review the potential resumption of aerial spraying according to six criteria: short-term effectiveness, long-term effectiveness, cost, risk of health or environmental damage, risk of social discord, and risk to eradicators or program participants.

The costs of restarting aerial coca spraying in Colombia

In its decision 18/117 adopted on 28 September 2011, the Human Rights Council requested "the Secretary-General to continue to submit to the Human Rights Council, in consultation with Governments, specialized agencies and intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, a yearly supplement to his quinquennial report on capital punishment and the implementation of the safeguards guaranteeing protection of the rights of those facing the death penalty, paying special attention to the imposition of the death penalty on persons younger than 18 years of age at the time of the offence, on pregnant women and on person with mental or intellectual disabilities:. Furthermore, in its resolution 22/11, adopted on quinquennial report of the Secretary-General on the question of the death penalty will continue to inform" on the matter of "the human rights of children of parents sentenced to the death penalty or executed".

OHCHR call for contributions: Report on the death penalty

Rhetorically, drug policy is objective and indiscriminate. Practically, it is quite the opposite. As the recent deportations over minor drug offences make clear, the drug war produces profoundly different outcomes depending on race.

Last week, 17 people were deported to Jamaica by the Government for being “serious foreign national offenders”. The Home Office has refused to release a breakdown of the crimes they committed, but at least four of those on board were condemned to a life away from their family and friends for minor drug convictions.

Throwing together non-violent drug offences with crimes of the highest order – such as rape, murder and manslaughter – Cabinet members have repeatedly insisted that those deported were “serious, violent and persistent foreign national offenders”.

But, as the case of Tajay Thompson demonstrates, this is false. Spared at the eleventh hour by a successful legal case, Thompson was convicted of possession with intent to supply, serving half of a 15-month sentence in 2015. Groomed into a ‘county lines’ operation when he was just 17 – in which vulnerable youngsters are recruited by adult drug dealers to travel to rural parts of the country to sell drugs on their behalf – it is difficult to see how he fits the definition of a “serious, violent or persistent criminal”.

This poses two questions. Firstly, can the Government really continue to condemn ‘county lines’ while deporting its victims? Secondly, why, as Jeremy Corbyn put it, is it “one rule for young black boys from the Caribbean and another for white boys from the United states?”

Boris Johnson admitted to taking cocaine as a teenager, as did Michael Gove as a young journalist. However, the trajectory of their lives have been nothing but positive and they have faced no consequences of their admissions. Granted they have admitted to taking drugs, not selling them, but how do they think cocaine is acquired? As free marketers, they must know that supply is created by demand.

Both claim that it was a mistake, but that their “foolish” choices should be overlooked. To quote Gove: “I don’t believe that past mistakes disqualify you”. Essentially, a mistake is a mistake and it shouldn’t tarnish your life years down the road.

The Jamaica deportations reveal the racial injustice of the UK's drug laws

Every weekend people of all ages flock to the venues of the north’s vibrant and varied dance music scene, raving together in huge warehouse-style venues or small specialist nights in spaces commandeered or custom built for clubbers. Their focus is the mutual appreciation of music and the joy of movement to “a series of wholly repetitive beats”. When these venues close at around 4am or later, the party continues, with hundreds, maybe thousands of after-parties taking place. Since its emergence in the late 1980s, the UK’s dance music scene has grown into a multi-billion-pound global industry, bringing jobs and cultural kudos to our cities and towns.

What many know but rarely discuss is that this partying is fuelled by the class A drug MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy or simply MD, consumed in the form of pills, powders and crystal. When we do get to hear about this drug, it is mostly as the result of the loss of a young person’s life. MDMA-related deaths have risen over the last seven years, reaching an all-time high of 92 deaths in 2018-19 across England and Wales alone. Calls on the government to regulate the MDMA market, rather than leave it in the hands of organised criminal gangs and small-time social dealers, have long been ignored. We are also facing a new set of problems with the emergence of online drug markets.

MDMA in its pure form is relatively safe, having been administered in successful clinical trials as a therapeutic drug to help people with all manner of health conditions, from PTSD to alcohol addiction. Yet successive governments have actively blocked science-based policy change about MDMA for therapeutic use, preventing much-needed clinical research via the prohibitive costs and bureaucracy required to run clinical trials with Schedule 1 substances such as MDMA.

At the same time, government have spent decades undermining harm reduction efforts for recreational users – such as free drinking water and on-site drug checking – for the sake of appearing tough on drugs. As Professor David Nutt, esteemed neuro-psychopharmacologist and former chair of the government’s own Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) testifies, when faced with the ACMD’s recommendation to downgrade MDMA to a class B drug in the late 2000s to reflect its lesser harms, the then Home Secretary Jaqui Smith shouted down the phone and promptly sacked him.

Why don’t we just… regulate MDMA?

We invite submissions from people with lived experience of illicit drug use to reflect on how drug use has both featured as part of their personal lives and has informed their public engagement. We are particularly interested in work that explores the tensions intrinsic to negotiating the personal, professional and political in regard to drug user activism and scholarship.

Recent scholarly trends have demonstrated an increased interest in exploring pleasure (see 

special issue, Vol 49, 2017) – that is, how drugs are intensely and pleasurably embodied, experienced as both capacitating and sublime. This is a crucial move in subverting dominant, pathologizing narratives around drug use, but, it does not always capture the complexities of identifying as a “person who uses illicit drugs” while also embodying the role of drug use researcher and/or activist. With this special cluster of papers we hope to expand the conversation around how participating in two, at times competing and contradictory worlds impacts one’s output and subjectivities.

Call for expressions of interest - Upcoming issue of the IJDP: Negotiating tensions and conflicts in drug user activism and scholarship

It is time for drug professionals, including the harm reduction community, to have a say about the upcoming regulation of the European cannabis market. If not, we miss an important historical opportunity to shape the future.

I have just read the 5th European Cannabis Report from Prohibition Partners, a think tank on the legal cannabis industry. It is an interesting read indeed, and an eye-opening one. There are revolutionary changes occurring in European cannabis policies that are not always visible, even for professionals working in the field of harm reduction. That is partly because Europe, despite all its joint institutions, is still so fragmented in terms of language, culture, and politics. Sometimes it is difficult to connect the dots. And partly because drug professionals traditionally focus on injecting drug use, opiates, and stimulants, where most of the public health harms concentrate. Meanwhile, they can tend to forget that the most popular illicit drug in Europe is still cannabis – and policies regulating it are changing rapidly.

A number of countries have introduced new legal regulation schemes for medical cannabis, established new cannabis agencies, and created legal channels to supply the market in recent years. An initiative running in the UK, for example, could see up to 20,000 patients given medical cannabis over a two-year period, with the aim of building the largest body of evidence on cannabis as a medicine in the region. Ireland has launched a pilot Medical Cannabis Access Program. France granted approval for a two-year trial to help doctors to understand medical cannabis. Germany, the biggest market, imported more than 6,7 tonnes of legal cannabis last year – and this amount is likely to grow multiple times in the following years. Europe is still dependent on imported cannabis but it is likely to change in the next couple of years, with more and more cannabis grown domestically. Medical cannabis reform is not only under way in western Europe but in the eastern part of the region as well: in countries where you would not expect it, like North Macedonia or Poland.

If you think that the reform will stop at medical cannabis, you are wrong. Luxembourg has announced that it will be the first European country to make cannabis legal. Prohibition Partners accurately points out that this will likely have a domino effect: neighbouring countries will relax their own policies. Cannabis reform is gaining speed in other countries too – again, not only in the west. I was surprised to learn that a new bill was introduced to the Croatian parliament recently about regulating the cannabis market. Even though it may be years before the first European countries legalise the recreational market, it is now obvious that it is just a question of time.

Cannabis legalisation has arrived in Europe: Civil society should not be silent

By Ian Hamilton, Alex Stevens, and Niamh Eastwood / The Conversation

The latest data on UK homicide rates shows that 31% of victims and suspects were “under the influence” of alcohol and other drugs at the time of death. Drugs and alcohol continue to be a convenient scapegoat when it comes to finding blame. But there is still very little being done about other contributing factors – including poverty, cuts to youth services, domestic violence and education.

Homicide rates have been falling around the world and have remained low over the past few years. But they have been rising in England and Wales since 2015 toward levels last seen in the early 2000s. Although we can’t be sure exactly why England and Wales buck the global trend the rise in those carrying knives and other sharp instruments is likely to have played a part, but this isn’t the only factor.

The latest data from the Office for National Statistics shows there were 671 homicides for the year ending March 2019, a small decrease of 5%. But this disguises an increase in homicide incidents of 3% – even though there was a fall in the number of victims.

Fatal knife crime has been rising and has received significant government and media attention. An important aspect of recent debates on the rise in murders is the role that drugs play in these fatalities.

Understanding how a drug-related homicide is determined and defined is important in understanding, not only the data, but how this contributes to policy.

The influence of drugs on murder rates in the UK is being overstated

Only a "handful" of inmates enrolled in the prison needle exchange program in its first 10 months, because Correctional Service Canada (CSC) appears to have designed the program around security considerations rather than health, according to the Correctional Investigator of Canada's annual report.

The report from Ivan Zinger, the ombudsman for federally sentenced offenders, on the country's prison system was tabled in Parliament on Tuesday, outlining several concerns with the approach prison officials have taken in regards to the needle exchange program.

Zinger noted that the purpose of prison needle exchanges is reduce harm associated with injection drug use, namely the spread of infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, but CSC won't be successful in that goal if inmates don't participate in the program.

He urged CSC to increase participation by considering best practices for successful prison needle exchanges detailed by the United Nations, which include:

Leadership support at the highest level.

Steadfast commitment to harm reduction and public health objectives.

Clear policy direction and oversight of the program.

Participation of staff and prisoners in planning and operational process.

The prison needle exchange program (PNEP) was launched in June 2018 at Atlantic Institution in New Brunswick and Grand Valley Institution for Women in Ontario. It was gradually introduced to other CSC facilities afterwards.

Prison needle exchanges in Canada driven by security, not health concerns, federal watchdog says in critical report

By Angus Thompson / The Sunday Morning Herald

Harm reduction advocates say the state government's decision to destroy drugs ditched in amnesty bins at music festivals is a wasted opportunity to test the dangerous substances on the market.

The bins - announced late last year - have so far been used at eight NSW events deemed "high risk" by state authorities between December 31 and February 2, including major festivals such as Field Day and Laneway festival.

A response to Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame's inquest into the deaths of six young people at NSW music festivals, Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the bins would allow punters to avoid panicking when they see police and dispose of their drugs "without any questions asked".

Ms Grahame said amnesty bins would also give authorities the chance to test the discarded substances and provide information to health providers. Results can also be used to send out real-time alerts to revellers about dangerous drugs that may be present at a music festival.

But NSW Health, which is managing the rollout of the bins, has since confirmed the substances are being destroyed by a waste management company.

"The bins that are being introduced to festivals are amnesty bins only and there is currently no testing performed on the drugs deposited in the bins," a NSW Health spokesperson told 

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