As the COVID-19 pandemic affects more people in an ever increasing list of countries, PRI has published a briefing note, 

Coronavirus: Healthcare and human rights of people in prison

. With the fast-evolving situation, there is legitimate concern at a further spread of the virus to places of detention. The difficulties in containing a large outbreak in detention facilities are clear. People in prison and the personnel who work with them are in close proximity and in many cases in overcrowded, cramped conditions with little fresh air. People in detention also have common demographic characteristics with generally poorer health than the rest of the population, often with underlying health conditions. Hygiene standards are often below that found in the community and sometimes security or infrastructural factors reduce opportunities to wash hands or access to hand sanitizer – the key prevention measures recommended by the World Health Organization.

While legitimate measures in times of such an emergency are needed to prevent further outbreaks of COVID-19 in prisons, authorities need to ensure human rights are respected. In such anxious times it is even more pertinent that people are not cut off from the outside world, they do not end up in solitary confinement, and most of all they have access to information and adequate healthcare provision – equal of that available in the community.

Our briefing outlines the key measures that criminal justice systems, including prisons and courts, have taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 – and the impact of these in light of the UN Nelson Mandela Rules and other key standards.

Action needs to be taken now and immediately, given the risk people in prison are exposed to, including prison staff. Such action should be guided by international standards and the values of: Do no harm, equality, transparency, humanity.

Worldwide, women who use drugs are vastly underserved within health and social services and programmes. National and international research, services, guidelines, and training programmes are either gender-neutral or male-focused. As harm reduction services are primarily tailored to men, women who use drugs often find their specific needs being unacknowledged and unaddressed, leading to non gender-responsive harm reduction services.

The On the A-Gender: Community Monitoring Tool for Gender-Responsive Harm Reduction Services for Women who use Drugs aims to be a resource for community advocates to begin documenting, evidencing, and addressing this state of play. By doing so, community advocates can begin to identify areas and locales where gender-responsive services are severely lacking or identify services and programmes that can provide examples of good practice and be scaled up. The tool acknowledges the diversity and intersectionality of women who use drugs — including sex workers, lesbian and transwomen.

This tool has been developed by the International Network of People who use Drugs (INPUD) and the International Network of Women who use Drugs (INWUD), in collaboration with the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) HIV/AIDS Section and Koalisi Satu Hati , a community advocacy group in Indonesia. It is based on the Policy Brief: Women who inject Drugs: Addressing Specific Needs (UNODC, UNWomen, WHO, INPUD, 2014) and its companion guidelines Addressing the specific needs of women who inject drugs: Practical guide for service providers on gender-responsive HIV services (UNODC, INPUD, 2016).

We hope this resource can be a useful and a practical first step towards developing advocacy strategies to introduce and scale up gender-responsive harm reduction services in various settings around the world. In this way, the right to health of women who use drugs can be respected and better promoted.

On the A-gender: Community monitoring tool for gender-responsive harm reduction services for women who use drugs

Smokable cocaines are commonly referred to as “the most harmful drug”, and considered not just a threat to public health, but also to public security in the urban centres of many large cities. As a result, its users are frequently subject to hostility and stigmatization.

The smokable cocaine market was established decades ago, and is definitely not a new phenomenon. Rather than disappear, it is undergoing a slow expansion: from constituting a rather localized and isolated habit in the Andean region in the 1970s, its reach has extended in all directions, throughout North and South-America, including the Caribbean and Central American regions. Societies in the Americas have coexisted with smokable cocaines for over four decades, but - surprisingly - there is a dearth of research on the development of the market, or much first-hand evidence of how this substance is actually commercialized and used by millions of people in the region.

This report reflects a study of the information collected by a network of researchers and street-corner workers assembled by TNI, and conducted from 2014 to 2018. Our objective was to understand how local markets for smokable cocaines in Latin America and the Caribbean are actually functioning. In the first phase, researchers in seven different urban locations from Mexico to Argentina were asked to collect data on the current volume and characteristics of the market, with the aim of creating an overall picture of the current situation. In a second phase, further information was solicited in order to define policy responses to stimulant use, focusing particularly on harm reduction measures.

The different forms of violence confronted by users of smokable cocaine need to be recognized and attended by public services. All policy interventions at the street level should aim to destigmatize and find concrete practical solutions to the immediate problems faced by users’ communities - initiatives inspired by the broad concept of “bed, bread and bath”.

In the design of a broader policy framework, users themselves need to be consulted and involved, enabling a form of implementation that can be checked and evaluated by its effects on the community itself. The experiences obtained in the past decade in a number of cities mentioned in this report make a strong case for developing public policy models that combine all the above features, and need to be given the appreciation and resources they deserve. A region-wide systematic evaluation of these experiences could contribute to more humane and effective polices regarding the different forms of smokable cocaine.

Smokable cocaine markets in Latin America and the Caribbean: A call for a sustainable response

By Penal Reform International, Linklaters LLP, International Drug Policy Consortium

Drug‑related offences are known to have a particular and disproportionate impact on women. Eighty-two per cent of all women in prison in Thailand are imprisoned for a drug offence; in the Philippines, the proportion of women in prison for a drug offence is 53% and in Peru and Costa Rica it is more than 60%.

This report considers five key questions relating to the sentences imposed on women for drug‑related offences across criminal justice systems in 18 jurisdictions. The research was undertaken by Linklaters LLP for Penal Reform International on a pro bono basis, and is co-published by Penal Reform International, Linklaters LLP, and the International Drug Policy Consortium. The study is instrumental in building a better understanding of the case law around women accused of drug‑related offences and forms a solid basis for the development of policy guidance and recommendations to legislators and sentencing authorities (which will be published in 2020).

The complex reasons and pathways of women’s confrontation with criminal justice systems for drug‑related offences are not adequately reflected in legislation or (where existing) sentencing guidelines, nor sentencing practices across the 18 jurisdictions.

While there is a variety of considerations mentioned in a number of jurisdictions’ legal instruments that can mitigate culpability or lessen a sentence for a woman prosecuted or convicted for drug‑related offences, the impact on their sentence received is less certain.

Factors typically include consideration of pregnancy, single-parent status, or other circumstances such as experience of violence or coercion, role in the crime, or status of vulnerability. Where such factors are explicitly mentioned, they are given weight of differing degrees or discretion is limited by the applicable law or sentencing guidelines (including mandatory minimum sentences), thus limiting their impact. In cases where they have been taken into account, it is difficult to quantify the effect on the sentence given.

In a number of jurisdictions covered, non-custodial sentences are the more common form of sentences for low‑level drug‑related offences for women (for example, in England and Wales, Germany and New Zealand). In contrast, in Russia, non-custodial sentences are only issued in about 4% of drug‑related offences cases.

Jurisdictions covered by the study are: Argentina, Australia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, England and Wales, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and the United States.

Sentencing of women convicted of drug-related offences

In excess of 11 million people are in prison globally, including more than 714,000 women and girls. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in four people will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. People in prison have a disproportionately high rate of poor mental health; research suggests that around one in seven prisoners has a serious mental health condition.

A high proportion of women in prison have poor mental health. There are many factors that can affect a person’s mental health. Many people have difficult life histories and prisons can be very tough places. This guide does not claim to solve these challenges. Instead, it gives ideas of practical steps that can help.

Prison staff have an important role to play in protecting and promoting health and well-being in prison and need adequate training as well as support from their managers. In planning and delivering prison healthcare services it is good practice to involve service users alongside health and social care professionals, relevant voluntary groups and prison staff.

This guide is written to help understand how life in prison can affect a person’s mental health, with a focus on women. It describes how to recognise the signs of poor mental health and how best to respond. The guide aims to break down the stigma and discrimination attached to poor mental health, especially for women in prison.

This guide has been written primarily for prison staff and others who work with women in prison or may be making decisions that affect them. It may also be helpful for women in prison, as well as for their families and friends. Many of the points in this guide are equally relevant to men in prison. However, there are particular approaches that should be taken to meet the specific needs of women.

At the national level, improvements in mental healthcare both within prison and the wider community need leadership from politicians and policy-makers. Aspects of prison life which have an impact on prisoners’ well-being fall within the responsibility of senior prison management and national prison administrations. In the Appendix a checklist based on international human rights standards is designed to help with the implementation of key aspects of prison reform and advocacy initiatives in line with international standards and norms.

This guide does not deal with the diagnosis and treatment of specific mental health conditions. This is the responsibility of specialised mental healthcare professionals. Neither does this guide replace mental health training for prison staff. All prison staff should receive basic and ongoing mental health training as part of their professional development, especially in relation to the prevention of suicide and self-harm.

Women in prison: Mental health and well-being – A guide for prison staff

By Luis Felipe Cruz Olivera, Teresa Garcia Castro, Kathryn Ledebur, and Isabel Pereira

In Latin America, the lives of women who grow plants destined for illicit markets are marked by several forms of discrimination: because they are women, because they are rural farmers, and because their livelihood depends on an activity that has been declared illegal. The so-called “war on drugs” and the marginalization of rural life have erected walls behind which the role of women as agents of social transformation is hidden and rendered invisible. Beyond the numerous challenges they face, women growers of coca and opium poppy have played a critical role in sustaining and improving rural livelihoods, caring for families, in community organization, and in social movements. From their fight to assert the rights of coca-grower movements in Bolivia to their contribution to peace building in Colombia, women growers have been crucial agents of change in their communities. Their active participation—whether in farmer organizations, assemblies, agrarian unions, or other collectives—has given them new tools and knowledge for interacting with government entities and achieving important local objectives. Women coca or poppy growers not only build knowledge and capacities in their territories; they also contribute on a daily basis to the transformation and improvement of their realities, and that of their families and villages. Given the silence and dearth of information regarding the role of women in community life in areas where crops declared illicit are grown, this report explores who these women growers are, their socioeconomic contexts, their involvement in the production of crops destined for illicit markets, their organizing experiences, and their participation in decisionmaking processes—taking into account case studies from Bolivia and Colombia. Furthermore, the report presents recommendations focused on ensuring the participation of women growers in political and public life at all levels of decision-making.

Women coca and poppy growers mobilising for social change

It is now a year since Canada moved to legally regulate cannabis for recreational use, becoming the second country after Uruguay, and the first major G7 economy, to do so (excluding the 11 US states that have now done so outside of US federal jurisdiction). While legal access to cannabis was already available for medical purposes, this marked a groundbreaking policy shift away from criminalisation of the drug and the people who use it in a country of nearly 40 million people.

The Canadian Government emphasised three key goals of regulation: the protection of public health; the protection of young people; and the reduction in criminality associated with the illegal market.1 The
reforms built on years of evidence demonstrating that the illegal status of cannabis did not prevent rising consumption and was associated with a range of other risks, from increased potency to the empowerment of criminal gangs

Historically, Canadian provinces have developed separate systems for regulating the sale of alcohol, and a similar devolved principle was applied to cannabis. As a result, a ‘patchwork’ of regulatory models has now emerged across the country. Some provinces have been more successful than others and many have experienced ‘teething’ issues during early implementation. Importantly, the Cannabis Act only allowed for herbal cannabis and oils to be sold in the first year. The sale of cannabis ‘edibles’ and concentrates are subject to separate regulations and are due to go on sale later this year in phase 2 of the implementation.2

Establishing an entirely new regulated market – aimed at displacing well-established illegal supply – was a unique challenge. While some have raised concerns that the intensity of cannabis regulation has slowed participation in the new legal market, others remain worried about creeping commercialisation. It will inevitably take time for the new system to bed in and for emerging problems to be addressed. Policy will hopefully evolve as evidence is gathered, and learning is shared across provinces. This briefing reviews the early data since legalisation and considers lessons other countries might draw from the Canadian experience.

Cannabis legalisation in Canada – One year on

The sixty fourth session of the Commission on the Status of Women marks the twenty fifth anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. In parallel, the international community committed to the implementation of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs outcome document featuring recommendations to advance the rights of women in drug policy. This submission demonstrates how current drug policies undermine key rights and commitments included in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action’s strategic objectives and offers concrete recommendations to address these damaging inconsistencies.

CELS, IDPC, WHRIN and WOLA statement to the 64th session of the Commission on the Status of Women

The Americas are at the forefront of processes and efforts to reform cannabis-related laws and policies. The regulated markets established in Uruguay and Canada will very likely be joined soon by Mexico, where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has backed a legislative proposal that, at the time of this writing, was being considered in the legislature. In the United States, ten states and the District of Columbia have adopted legal, regulated markets for recreational use. Also at the time this report was being finalized, a bill was being presented before Colombia’s Congress to reform Article 49 of the Constitution with regard to the prohibition of narcotic substances, with a view to paving the legal way for future regulation. In 2018, the Regional Commission on Marijuana of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) concluded that the prohibitionist system “is not fit for purpose” with regard to international drug control treaties, and it called for a paradigm shift.

At the same time, medical marijuana is growing by leaps and bounds. In the United States, 33 of its 50 states along with the District of Columbia permit the medical use of cannabis, while in Canada this use has been legal since 2001. In Latin America, some form of medical marijuana is allowed in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. As this publication was being finalized, Ecuador’s National Assembly was concluding a debate on a legislative proposal that would create the means of access to medical marijuana in that country. However, it is important to note that in the majority of these countries, reforms are quite limited and do not ensure access for all people who could benefit from medical marijuana.

In addition, more tolerant attitudes toward cannabis do not necessarily translate into public support for broader drug policy reform. In the majority of Latin American countries, a change in the discourse has not led to significant domestic policy reforms. At the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations (UN), Latin American countries have spearheaded efforts to promote debate about the failure of the prohibitionist paradigm and the need to explore alternative approaches. However, as tends to happen, this rhetoric has not been matched by concrete actions. In other words, drug policy reforms in the region have been minimal despite the tremendous societal costs of current policies, and governments continue to rely on repression and criminalization.

That is why, for people in countries where there are still no legal markets, the consequences of being caught with any amount of cannabis can be severe. Previous studies by the Research Consortium on Drugs and the Law (Colectivo de Estudios Drogas y Derecho, CEDD) have shown that throughout the region, people who consume cannabis face stigmatization and harassment by police, and they are often detained for growing plants or for simple possession of the substance. In several of the countries studied, people who use cannabis constitute a significant percentage of those impacted by drug laws. Many of them end up being subjected to the criminal justice system and, on occasion, they are referred to compulsory (or semi-compulsory) treatment, even when they do not show signs of a drug dependency. In several countries, “drug court” models are making headway, which repeat the logic of using the criminal justice system to refer people who use drugs to treatment programs. To sum up, harsh and disproportionate cannabis-related laws in the region cause significant harm to people, their families, their communities, and to society in general.

This disconnect between the trend toward regulating cannabis in the Americas, on the one hand, and the continuation of a punitive approach in nearly all Latin American countries, on the other, led CEDD to undertake its current research, which analyzes the way in which punitive drug laws disproportionately affect people who use, grow, and sell small amounts of cannabis.

Cannabis is also the most widely used substance declared to be illicit in Latin America. Its medical uses are beneficial, and its problematic use causes less harm than other drugs, licit or illicit. Therefore, it is the only substance for which there is an impetus for reform. The expansion of legal and regulated marijuana markets would have a significant impact on reducing the damage caused by repressive drug policies, and we hope that this research contributes to that aim.

Cannabis in Latin America: The green wave and challenges for regulation

In September 2019, Transform Drug Policy Foundation and St George’s House convened a meeting of international experts on drug policy to discuss a scenario that many people feel may be edging closer to realisation: a world in which currently illicit drugs are legally regulated. This event provided an opportunity to discuss candidly the challenges and opportunities of this potential reality.

Transform is a leading global advocate for the legal regulation of drugs. However, the participants came from a range of backgrounds and brought different views on the question of drug policy reform. Participation did not imply, or require, agreement on the principle of legal regulation and the input of participants reflected this.

There was agreement that the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ has been waged at a high price in terms of fuelling crime and violence, drug-related health harms and deaths, undermining of institutions through corruption, and the exploitation and abuse of some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. This reflects wider shifts in attitudes towards drug policy. Global consensus on the goal of achieving ‘drug free society’ through the criminalisation of production, supply and possession has decisively fractured, with a growing number of jurisdictions experimenting with both the decriminalisation of possession, and more recently, the legal regulation of cannabis supply (including Canada, Uruguay, Mexico, and 11 US states, including California). Bolivia has also regulated the production of coca.

This consultation sought to grasp that moment and imagine a scenario where the legal regulation of drugs became a more global reality, for different drugs in different regions. The intention was not to anticipate the circumstances through which regulated markets might come to pass, or to rehearse well-trodden arguments for or against prohibition, but rather to imagine what consequences such an eventuality might have for everybody involved in, or impacted by, the global drugs market. It was an opportunity to envision that possible world, and for participants to freely and candidly discuss their responses.

This report summarises the discussions held over the two days of consultation and draws out consensus conclusions which we hope will be useful to advocates, policymakers, researchers and other parties interested in navigating a way forward. It was drafted by the independent rapporteur, Peder Clark, with editorial input from Transform Drug Policy Foundation.

Taking the points of consensus together, we propose seven principles as emerging from the discussion. Rather than focusing on what drug policy should be, these set out some key values on which reform should be based.

Challenges for a world where drugs are legally regulated

The U.S. is in the throes of a deadly overdose crisis that claimed almost 70,000 lives in 2018. Of those, around 30,000 deaths involved synthetic opioids like fentanyl,a Policymakers have responded to the overdose crisis with a rhetorical emphasis on “treatment instead of incarceration,” leading journalists to comment that we are in the midst of a “gentler war on drugs.” However, despite a change in discourse, draconian policies have persisted and in many cases been expanded. This is exemplified by many lawmakers’ reaction to fentanyl and other analog drugs, both on the state and federal level.

Since 2011, 45 states have proposed legislation to increase penalties for fentanyl while 39 states and Washington DC have passed or enacted such legislation. At this moment, some members of Congress are working to codify harsher penalties by placing fentanyl analogs permanently into Schedule 1 in both the Senate and the House with proposed legislation like the Stopping Overdoses of Fentanyl Analogues Act of 2019 (SOFA) and the FIGHT Act. In his annual State of the State 2020 address this month, New York’s Governor Cuomo proposed banning fentanyl analogs and expanding access to medication assisted treatment in the very same sentence. Legislators have dusted off the drug war playbook and proposed a variety of new punitive measures including new mandatory minimum sentences, homicide charges, involuntary commitment, expanded powers for prosecutors and more. These efforts repeat the mistakes that epitomize the failed war on drugs, while undermining efforts to reform our criminal justice system and pursue a public health approach to drug use. Indeed, such proposals risk compounding the overdose crisis.

Punitive approaches to fentanyl are particularly disturbing because they run counter to recent policy shifts that have been largely bipartisan in nature. One recent policy shift is a growing promotion of public health approaches to drug use. There is mounting support for a number of policies and interventions – such as increasing access to voluntary, medication-assisted treatment and naloxoneb – as more effective responses to the current overdose crisis than the revolving door of jail or prison. Another notable policy shift is the long-overdue recognition that decades of harsh and racially-biased drug enforcement have had devastating consequences on individuals and communities, while wasting billions of taxpayer dollars. A recent analysis of federal fentanyl sentencing revealed that 75% of all individuals sentenced for fentanyl trafficking were people of color, suggesting that fentanyl enforcement already mirrors other disparate drug enforcement.

The criminal justice reform movement has made tremendous progress on reducing drug sentences at the local, state and federal levels. The trend toward tougher penalties for fentanyl presents a threat to the reform movement, undercutting initiatives to reduce mass criminalization and incarceration. To date, none of the states that enacted harsher penalties for fentanyl, nor the federal government, have demonstrated a reduction in fentanyl-involved deaths because of these new laws.

In this context, the criminal justice reform movement must do more to combat punitive proposals, putting as much energy into challenging the exceptionalism around fentanyl as other efforts to reduce sentences.

This paper aims to shine a light on the danger that harsh fentanyl penalties present to the criminal justice reform movement and efforts to end the war on drugs:

Harsh penalties for fentanyl are detrimental to public health and exacerbate the overdose crisis.

People who use and sell drugs are often unaware of the composition and potency of their drugs and have little control over the quality of product available.

Fentanyl in heroin is increasingly the “new norm” in many parts of the country.

Lawmakers may believe they are addressing an issue that may pass with time, but fentanyl is no passing trend.

There are already harsh penalties in effect for fentanyl and they disproportionately target communities of color.

Differentiating between people who use and sell drugs is not possible.

The most effective ways to address the fentanyl crisis are evidence-based public health and harm reduction approaches. We recommend that policy makers and advocates focus their efforts to promote the following:

Expand and protect 911 Good Samaritan laws,

Expand community-based naloxone access and distribution,

Improve drug checking, surveillance and data collection and make them more widely accessible,

Authorize supervised consumption sites (SCS)c on the state and local level,

Fund pilot injectable opioid treatment as an option for some people with chronic heroin use disorder.

For lawmakers to respond meaningfully to fentanyl, public health solutions are a much more viable and affordable approach without additional harsh penalties and further criminalization. The criminalization of drug use only drives people who use drugs into more dangerous situations. This makes it less likely that they will seek support; rather it makes it more likely that they will suffer a fatal overdose.

Advocates have made considerable gains in promoting criminal justice reforms to address the many collateral consequences of our failed war on drugs. While the criminal justice reform, treatment and harm reduction movements have many victories to celebrate, there is a real risk that the proliferation of harsh penalties for fentanyl will lead to an increase in the prison population, subverting the fight to end mass incarceration.

Criminal justice reform in the fentanyl era: One step forward, two steps back

Harm Reduction International (HRI), the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), the International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD), NoBox Philippines, and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty welcome the opportunity to submit information to the Human Rights Committee ahead of the adoption of the List of Issues for the review of the Philippines.

This submission will assess the impact of the Philippines’ drug policy on the enjoyment of civil and political rights, with a focus on developments since the intensification of the anti-drug campaign in July 2016; and provide suggestions for issues to be raised with the government of the Philippines. In particular, this submission will provide information on:

Arbitrary deprivation of life in the context of anti-drug operations (Article 6);

Failure to protect the life of people who use drugs (Articles 6 and 26);

Attempts at reinstating the death penalty, specifically for drug offences (Article 6);

Torture and ill-treatment in detention (Articles 7 and 10);

Compulsory drug detention and treatment (Articles 7 and 9);

Proportionality of the criminal justice response to drugs and prohibition of arbitrary arrest and detention (Articles 9 and 14);

Arbitrary interference with the right to privacy (Article 17);

Shrinking civil society space: targeting of human rights defenders and drug user activists (Articles 19 and 21).

Publications from IDPC Members