Imagine going on a night out with friends, planning to share some “ecstasy” pills you bought locally. What if you first wanted to know the quality and purity of your drugs, but didn’t have the means to check? And what if you wanted to find local harm reduction organizations, information and services that could help keep your drug use safer?

The developers behind TripApp sought to provide some answers.

The free app—which launched this month and is so far available in Spain, Italy and Germany—shares real-time data from the Trans-European Drug Information Project (TEDI), an international illicit drug checking network. It also collects data from consumers who check their own drugs with reagent kits or test strips. It constantly updates its data in order to alert consumers when adulterated or high-risk drug batches are detected in their location.

“We wanted the people to be the primary beneficiaries of this data.”

“We realized that in discussions about drug use, there’s a lot of talk about monitoring and controlling people who use drugs, but when do we ever consider talking to them?” Florian Scheibein, deputy director of Help Not Harm and one of the app’s founders, told 

. “People who use drugs and their communities are often excluded from having data about the quality of their drugs, that’s normally collected by governments and academic institutions. We instead wanted the people to be the primary beneficiaries of this data.”

TripApp is the latest mobile innovation to make drug use safer

In 2019, about 12 people die every day from an opioid-related overdose. It’s Canada’s most significant public health threat since 1919, when 55,000 people died from the Spanish flu. Not only are opioid-related deaths among the top 10 causes of mortality in our country, but the number grows each year. The likelihood of death from overdose is higher than ever because illicit—otherwise known as “street”—drugs are increasingly contaminated with fentanyl and its analogues, contributing to 82 per cent of accidental opioid-related deaths in Canada.

This is a national public health emergency. But you wouldn’t know it from the discourse in our recent federal election. It barely registered in public debates or party communications, probably because the solutions to the crisis are politically unpopular. The way out is difficult to explain, and few are ready to push for it.

The topic must not be dismissed as one affecting only marginalized people. It’s estimated that a million Canadians are at risk of exposure to toxic opioid products. They are our relatives and neighbours: people use drugs in city centres but also in suburbs, small towns and remote regions; they use drugs in urban areas, but also alone at home or in the washroom cubicles of your neighbourhood fast food restaurant.

If you don’t already know someone who has lost a loved one because of an accidental opioid overdose, it’s only a matter of time until you will. If every life is of value, then it’s time to get beyond our prejudices and political biases and implement the steps that will save lives.

The solutions are not mysterious. In the last four years Canada has made progress on drug policy. We made naloxone (a drug that temporarily reverses the effects of opioids) available without prescription and in multiple formats. We passed Bill C-37 to reintroduce harm reduction and facilitate approval of supervised consumptions sites. We overturned a ban on use of prescription heroin for people with substance dependence, and enabled bulk imports.

Canada can do more by implementing international best practices. Two changes can be adapted from drug policies in Europe. Following Portugal’s lead, we should decriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs—a 10-day personal supply. Following Switzerland’s lead, we should expand access to safe supply.

Decriminalisation is not a radical solution to the opioid crisis. And it would work.

Although the drug strategy adopted by the Hungarian government in 2013 aimed to make the country drug-free by 2020, the (not so) new synthetic drugs still rule the country. After the municipal elections, there is some hope that harm reduction can return to Budapest.

Illicit drug markets have been behaving strangely in Hungary for the last ten years. The decline of Ecstasy and the boom of new synthetic drugs was happening all across Europe after 2009 – but what made this small Central European country peculiar was the almost total collapse of the heroin and amphetamine markets, replaced by new stimulants. A similar trend could only be observed in Romania (where it seems heroin is now back, unlike in Hungary). Despite (or partly due to?) all efforts of law makers to ban new substances as soon as possible, the market for designer drugs has been stabilising.

There are two types of these drugs: synthetic cannabinoid agonists, which are dubbed as “herbal” or “bio” by Hungarian users, and cathinones, dubbed as “crystal” on the street. Almost every year a new substance comes to dominate the designer market. This year the dominant stimulant was ethyl-hexedrone (replacing pentedrone) and the dominant synthetic cannabinoid agonist was 5F-MDMB-PINACA (replacing ADB-FUBINACA). God knows what comes next year but we can be almost sure the designers will throw something new into the market.

There are some signs (police seizures for example) that the designer market boom peaked around 2014, and that its rise is now somewhat slower, or even stagnating. But there is no chance that they will be gone any time soon. According to the latest epidemiological study among the adult population, the use of “herbal” is the most prevalent among illicit substances. That is if we trust the results – it is very hard to make accurate estimations of illicit drug use trends in Hungary due to the restrictive and stigmatising political environment.

The unchallenged rule of designer drugs in Hungary

DRUG COURTS, WHICH which differ from other courts in Ireland, were set up with the aim of reducing crime through drug rehabilitation.

Under this system, you are a person most likely experiencing problematic drug use, yet you are considered an offender, not a participant or patient of the drug courts.

Offender and health are not terms we consider as being complementary to one another.

The Drug Courts recruit based on a guilty plea and prescribe to a clean urine programme, which rules out many other drug users who are harder to reach, engage and support due to the chaotic nature of their drug use.

Imagine if we had a localised multi-agency and disciplinary team, consisting of nurses, drugs workers, counsellors and educators.

Well, in many areas we do, or we can have with the right resources and policy support.

A Drug Court has many of these, but a judge oversees it, and your involvement is court-ordered, and your addiction is still an offence.

It is just another system that will benefit a tiny percentage of drug users, and to succeed, you have to be a model patient, or in this case, offender.

Drug courts are not the solution to Ireland's drug problem - Senator Lynn Ruane

By West Africa Drug Policy Network, Drug Policy Network -Ghana, Harm Reduction Alliance Ghana, Students for Sensible Drug Policy- Ghana, YouthRISE International, Students for Drug Policy Reform Ghana, Hemp Association of Ghana

We have read the CSOs petition to the President and the Speaker of parliament on why Ghana should not legalize cannabis.

First and foremost, we want to emphatically state, the current narcotics bill before parliament is not seeking to legalize drugs, the bill before parliament is seeking to decriminalize drug use and place the health and well-being of its citizens at the forefront of its constitutional mandate by treating drug use as a health issue.

Ghana is a signatory to the 3 international conventions, that is the 1961, 1971 and 1988 convention and the preamble-of these conventions mandates all member states to place the health and well-being of its citizens in the implementation of these conventions. Fairly, is continuous punishment of people who use drugs a fulfillment of that commitment of Ghana? Absolutely no, it’s in clear violation of the letter and spirit of these very conventions.

The Conventions provide a very clear provision whereby drug use does not need to be criminalized. The 1961 Convention, Article 36 (b) explicitly states “when abusers of drugs have committed such offences, the Parties may provide, either as an alternative to conviction or punishment or in addition to conviction or punishment, that such individuals shall undergo measures of treatment, education, after-care, rehabilitation and social reintegration in conformity…”.

This is then repeated in the 1971 Convention (Article 22b) and the 1988 Convention (Article 3, Para 4 c and d). Please take note of a commentary on the 1988 Convention “It will be noted that, as with the 1961 and 1971 Conventions, paragraph 2 does not require drug consumption as such to be established as a punishable offence” (UN, 1988). Moreover, the term personal use has not been defined in the International drug Conventions (Marks, 2019). The International Conventions rather criminalizes possession with the intention for trafficking and not possession for personal use.

We should not forget that, imposing on this very population with criminal records for the use of cannabis or any other drugs have ripple effects, this very population gradually become the fulcrum of any country's economy so why burden them with criminal records for the rest of their lives for committing just minor non-violent drug offences?

Setting the records straight: Response to CSOs calling for criminalisation of drug use in Ghana

ROME — Growing small amounts of marijuana at home for private use is not a crime, Italy’s top court has ruled, putting an end to a yearslong legal dispute and adding Italy to the short list of countries to allow cultivation of recreational cannabis.

A 1990s law prohibits the cultivation and sale of marijuana in Italy, but conflicting court decisions, and a 2016 amendment that opened a loophole in the law, created confusion over how it should be interpreted.

The country’s highest court appears to have settled at least part of the question, writing in a one-page statement of its findings that “at home, small-scale cultivation activities are to be considered excluded from the application of the penal code.”

The judges produced the document on Dec. 19 and it was first publicized on Thursday by the news agency AGI. A full, detailed ruling remains weeks or months away, so the court’s complete reasoning has not been made public.

Among the unanswered questions is how much cannabis qualifies as “small-scale cultivation,” but the ruling stemmed from a case in which the defendant had two plants.

Growing a little marijuana at home is not a crime, Italy’s top court says

Since September, I’ve asked Vox’s readers to tell me their stories about drug addiction treatment for our Rehab Racket project. In less than four months, we’ve gotten a lot of responses — now more than 1,000.

From all of these experiences, one theme emerges: Addiction treatment in the US is expensive, hard to navigate, and far too often fails people. In the middle of an opioid epidemic that’s helped lead to more than 700,000 drug overdose deaths since 1999, America’s main defense against addiction is deeply flawed.

The stories we’ve published so far speak to these problems. Kim and Tim Blake spent more than $110,000 on treatment for their oldest son, yet much of the treatment was unhelpful and he died anyway. Michel Cote’s daughters went through $200,000 worth of treatment over a decade before they finally found something that worked for them. Nan Warren faces financial ruin after she lost her oldest son to addiction and has spent years trying to avoid the same fate for her surviving daughter.

Health insurance alone is not enough to protect patients from high costs and low quality. Maureen O’Reilly lost her son to addiction after their health insurance plan wouldn’t cover addiction care near home and he was sent to shoddy treatment facilities — some of which were later shut down — in Florida.

Here are four lessons from the project so far -

1) Poor insurance coverage leads to high addiction treatment costs

This is a big problem nationwide: Based on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, federal researchers estimated that roughly 314,000 people in the US in 2018 needed drug addiction treatment but couldn’t get it because they didn’t have health coverage and couldn’t afford the costs. About 100,000 couldn’t get it because, while they had health coverage, it didn’t cover treatment at all or it didn’t cover the full cost. (There’s some overlap between the groups because participants were able to select multiple responses.)

2) We know disturbingly little about addiction treatment in America

While reporting on addiction treatment in the US and asking experts about the evidence for addiction care, there has been one answer I’ve gotten used to hearing a lot: “I don’t know.”

It was a common response when I asked if certain addiction treatments worked. Many facilities, for example, now use equine therapy, in which patients connect with horses. But we have next to no research on whether this works. The same is true for wilderness therapy that emphasizes outdoors activities, which also has little reliable scientific evidence behind it.

3) We don’t make good use of what we do know about addiction treatment

For example, the research shows that medications for opioid addiction — methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone — are very effective: Studies show they cut the mortality rate among opioid addiction patients by half or more and keep people in treatment better than non-medication approaches.

Yet in the US, the majority of addiction treatment facilities don’t offer any medications. According to federal data, only 42 percent of the nearly 15,000 facilities tracked by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) provide any type of medication for opioid addiction. Less than 3 percent offer all three federally approved medications.

When writing about anything addiction-related, there’s an explanation I can expect for just about any problem: stigma. Indeed, it’s the thing that ties the lessons on this list together.

This has stuck with me ever since I went to Vermont in 2017 to see how the state built up its addiction treatment system. When I asked officials about the hurdles to building up the new system of care, I expected to hear a lot about money (a common problem in policymaking). But officials told me, in fact, that money wasn’t that big of a deal. Instead, the main barrier was stigma around addiction, fueled by the notions that addiction is a moral issue — not a health issue — and people with addiction don’t deserve public resources. Once that stigma was overcome, the money came easily.

1,000 people sent me their addiction treatment stories in the United States. Here’s what I learned

The proposal for a new Norwegian drug policy was tabled by the Drug Reform Committee on Thursday, December 19. The proposal marks a historic step away from punishment as a reaction for use and possession of drugs in Norway. As the title "From punishment to help" indicates, people who use drugs will now be met with offers of help and treatment. Although the use and possession of drugs will still be prohibited, it will no longer be punishable as a criminal offence.

The committee proposes a model where drug users are summoned to a meeting with a municipal counselling service. Although there is a duty to attend, failure to attend will not be punished. The report states: “The duty to attend is intended to clarify that the use of drugs is still illegal, while the meeting itself is intended to provide the basis for people to receive help and follow-up as needed. People will also be informed about potential consequences and risk factors associated with drug use.”

If people are caught with large amounts of drugs, they can be prosecuted for sale or distribution, as is the case today.

Norwegian Drug Reform Committee report: Remove penalties for use and possession

At a seminar held in Brussels today, the Civil Society Forum on Drugs urged the European Parliament to prioritize and fund drug policies based on evidence and human rights.

On 5 December 2019, the EU Civil Society Forum on Drugs (CSFD), an expert group of the European Commission, organized a seminar for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) entitled ‘The Future of European Drug Policy’.

The event comes at a time when the EU is facing significant challenges in tackling the illicit drug market. Despite the EU’s efforts to counter the drug problem, drug trafficking and production remain among the most profitable criminal activities in the region, while the health and social harms associated with drug use continue to rise, with more than 8,000 drug-related deaths reported in 2019. Drug-related issues affect millions of people within the EU, bringing with them complex health, security, social and criminal justice issues.

The expiry of the current European Drugs Strategy (2013-20) and Action Plan (2017-20) represent a key opportunity to be seized by the EU. It is a chance to review successes and failures of European drug policy and to build on the learnings and challenges from the last decade, by continuing to prioritize a drug policy approach grounded in the principles of public health and human rights.

Civil society urges European Parliament to make drug policy a priority

By Pierre Smith, Louis Favril, Dominique Delhauteur, Freya Vander Laenen and Pablo Nicaise

For more than 30 years, drug consumption rooms (DCRs) have been implemented in Western countries. DCRs are supported by a large body of evidence about public safety and public health effectiveness. However, a political consensus has never been achieved in Belgium on amending the existing law that explicitly penalises the supply of a room for facilitating drug use. Despite this adverse legal and policy framework, a DCR opened in the city of Liège in 2018. In this case report, we applied the theoretical framework proposed by Shiffman and Smith for policy agenda setting, in order to describe and assess how political and legal barriers were overcome in the process of opening the DCR.

For some years, fieldworkers and some city policymakers argued for DCR implementation in Belgium, but without gaining the support of the national authorities, mainly for ideological reasons. In order to address this debate, a feasibility study of DCR implementation in Belgian cities was commissioned. At the national level, an institutional debate took place about the political responsibility for DCRs as a public health intervention, as health care is mainly a matter of regional policy. The lack of consensus led to a situation of political deadlock. Meanwhile, the publication of the study report and the context of local elections offered an opportunity for Liège authorities to reignite the local debate on DCRs. At the local level, law enforcement, care professionals, residents, users, and the press were all involved in the implementation process. Therefore, a local consensus was formed and despite the absence of any national legal change, the DCR opened 1 month before the local elections. It has been working without major medical or legal incident since then. Incidentally, the mayor of Liège was re-elected.

Although the lack of a legal framework may engender instability and affect longer-term effectiveness, the DCR implementation in Liège was successful and was based on a local consensus and effective communication rather than on an appropriate legal framework. The experience provides lessons for other cities that are considering opening a DCR despite an adverse legal and political context.

How to overcome political and legal barriers to the implementation of a drug consumption room: An application of the policy agenda framework to the Belgian situation

A former Mexican security minister has been arrested in the US, charged with taking bribes from a drugs cartel.

Genaro García Luna is accused of allowing the Sinaloa cartel of "El Chapo" Guzman to operate in Mexico in exchange for millions of dollars.

Prosecutors say Mr García Luna gave the cartel safe passage for drug shipments and access to sensitive information.

They say that on two occasions cartel members delivered up to $5m (£3.7m) in two briefcases to him in person.

Mr García Luna, 52, served as public security chief in the administration of President Felipe Calderon between 2006 and 2012.

His arrest in Texas is a major development in Mexican politics, the BBC's Mexico correspondent Will Grant reports.

Mr García Luna was not just an important figure in Mr Calderon's administration - he was Mexico's secretary of public security, the face of the country's federal police force, our correspondent adds.

Mr Calderon, with US backing, deployed troops against the cartels for the first time. Tens of thousands died in Mexico in drug-related violence during his "war on drugs".

Genaro García Luna: US arrests Mexico ex-minister on drugs charges

THE HAGUE- The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is looking at 2020 to finalize its preliminary examination on issues concerning the war on drugs in the Philippines, according to a report released Thursday.

“During 2020, the Office will aim to finalize the preliminary examination in order to enable the Prosecutor to reach a decision on whether to seek authorization to open an investigation into the situation in the Philippines,” the report read.

According to its annual report, the Prosecutor’s Office “advanced its assessment of whether there is a reasonable basis to proceed under Article 15 (3) of the Statute”.

Article 15 (3) of the Rome Statute states that “if the Prosecutor concludes there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation, he or she shall submit to the Pre-Trial Chamber a request for authorization of an investigation, together with any supporting material collected.”

On Feb. 8, 2018, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced the opening of a preliminary examination on the alleged crimes committed in President Rodrigo Duterte's drug war. This, after her office reviewed a number of communications and reports documenting alleged crimes including extrajudicial killings.

Prior to this, on Oct. 13, 2016, the prosecutor issued a statement “expressing concern about the reports of alleged extrajudicial killings of purported drug dealers and users in the Philippines.”

The prosecutor also recalled “that those who incite or engage in crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court are potentially liable to prosecution before the Court.”

Following the announcement of the preliminary examination, the Philippine government deposited on March 17, 2018 a written notification of withdrawal to the UN Secretary-General. The withdrawal took effect a year after, on March 17, 2019.

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