A joint Transnational Institute (TNI) and Burma Centrum Netherlands (BCN) initiative today releases its first Burma Policy Briefing on ethnic conflict.
Documenting the complexities and disappointments of the Obama Administration’s relations with Latin America in its first year, the report focuses on U.S. military relationships with the region.
Relevant drug policy publications are almost nonexistent in languages other than English. With the help of leading drug policy experts, the Global Drug Policy Program has selected five key documents for translation, the first of which - "Legislating for health and human rights: model law on drug use and HIV/AIDS" - is now available in English, Chinese, Fahsi, French and Russian.
Coinciding with the 2010 UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the International Harm Reduction Association, the Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch, created a series of fact sheets on the human rights implications of anti-drug policies and practices. These briefings address serious human rights abuses that result from drug control efforts, including torture and ill treatment by police, mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, and denial of essential medicines and basic health services.
The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union’s (HCLU) video advocacy team attended a press conference organized by the Russian delegation in Vienna at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), where the representatives of the world's governments discussed the burning questions of international drug control policies. HCLU asked Mr. Viktor Ivanov, the head of the Federal Drug Control Service, the largest anti-drug agency in the world, to explain why his country does not tackle the demand side problems present in Russia with evidence based interventions, such as Opiate Substitution Treatment (OST). Mr. Ivanov declared that there is no evidence that methadone treatment works and in those former Soviet countries where OST was introduced it proved to be a failure. However, he also said that there is a possibility to experiment with methadone in the regional level.
The New Zealand Drug Foundation has produced a short video from an interview with the authors of the review of New Zealand's 35-year-old Misuse of Drugs Act. The video can be visualised online via the following link: http://vimeo.com/9643269.
In this 93-page report Human Rights Watch documents detainees being beaten, raped, forced to donate blood, and subjected to painful physical punishments such as "rolling like a barrel" and being chained while standing in the sun. Human Rights Watch also reported that a large number of detainees told of receiving rotten or insect-ridden food and symptoms of diseases consistent with nutritional deficiencies.
In this issue of Crime & Globalisation, Tom Blickman tracks the history of the international anti-money laundering (AML) regime. Since its origin in 1989 there has been a growing awareness that the AML regime is not working as well as intended. After two decades of failed efforts, experts still ponder how to implement one that does work. The paper concludes that current initiatives have reached their sale-by date and that a bolder approach is required at the UN level, moving from recommendations to obligations, and fully engaging developing nations, at present left out in the current 'club'-oriented process.
Human Rights Watch issued a 93-page report, "Skin on the Cable," on January 25, 2010, with reports of widespread beatings, whippings, and electric shock to detainees, including children and individuals with mental disabilities, in seven Cambodian drug detention centers. In response, several United Nations agencies, including the joint UN program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), have spoken out about the abuses. But the two UN agencies that work most closely with the government in detention centers and on drug policy, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), have been less vocal.
This article argues that the chemical imbalance in street cannabis (skunk) makes it more harmful. If the recreational cannabis market was regulated to ensure a balanced chemical structure in cannabis it would be safer for users.
This paper contributes to recent debates surrounding the improvement of the UN drug control system’s methods of gathering and analyzing data. It critically examines the current predominance of quantitative evidence, arguing for a greater emphasis on the cultural understanding of drug use and more attention to the taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning policies.
Sweden’s drug policies have recently attained symbolic status in international policy debates. This paper examines the country’s policies, their effectiveness or otherwise and the historical and cultural context that underpins them. It considers whether these policies should or could be applied in other countries.