This report is one of five documents produced by the International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD) as part of their “Drug War Peace” initiative – relaunched in January 2015. This report focuses on how the war on drugs fuels stigma and discrimination among people who use drugs. As the report states:

Prohibition Drives Harms; Harms Justify Prohibition

The harms which can be associated with drug use are used to justify prohibition and criminalisation. The argument is that drug use is harmful and must therefore be criminalised. However, the harms associated with drug use are for the most part created and driven by prohibition itself.

Criminalisation is Arbitrary and Discriminatory

Not only does prohibition create and exacerbate many of the harms associated with drug use, but the blanket criminalisation of currently illegal and controlled drugs is informed by scientific errors, bad pharmacology, bad sociology, bad economics, and misinformation.

Inaccurate and crude (mis)understandings of drugs have fed through into how people who use drugs are seen: the widely-held, generalising, and unscientific position that illicit drugs are ‘bad’ informs the understanding that people who use drugs are bad too.

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

Drug user peace initiative: Stigmatising people who use drugs

This report is one of five documents produced by the International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD) as part of their “Drug War Peace” initiative – relaunched in January 2015. This report focuses on how the war on drugs violates the very basic human right principles of people who use illicit drugs As the report states:

There are some groups for whom human rights do not appear to be even considered when formulating and applying The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. People who use illicit drugs are one such group. People who use drugs have their human rights violated systematically and endemically, and these human rights violations have grave impacts on wellbeing and health. In addition to the direct impacts of these human rights violations, they increase vulnerability to blood-borne infections such as HIV and hepatitis B and C.



“Published work documents widespread abuses of human rights, which increase vulnerability to HIV infection and negatively affect delivery of HIV programmes. These abuses include denial of harm-reduction services, discriminatory access to antiretroviral therapy, abusive law enforcement practices, and coercion in the guise of treatment for drug dependence.” (Jürgens et al., 2010: 475)

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

Drug user peace initiative: Violations of the human rights of people who use drugs

This weekend there were reports in the media about the increased number of drugs being found in prisons.

This echoes findings in DrugScope's Street Drug Survey, published last week, where we reported that many respondents were finding that synthetic cannabinoids were readily available in prisons and many people referred into services from jails came out with dangerous levels of use of the drugs.

Drugs and prison-statistics from the last year in the UK

Marijuana legalization is a controversial and multifaceted issue that is now the subject of serious debate. Since 2012, four U.S. states have passed ballot initiatives to remove prohibition and legalize a for-profit commercial marijuana industry. Voters in Washington, D.C., took the more limited step of passing an initiative to legalize home production and personal possession. In December 2013, Uruguay became the first country to experiment with legalization nationwide. In May 2014, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed a bill into law that required the Secretary of Administration to provide a report about the consequences of legalizing marijuana. This report was produced for the Secretary of Administration in response to that legislation.

The report does not make a recommendation about whether Vermont should change its marijuana laws. The goal is to inform, not sway, discussions about the future of marijuana policy in Vermont and other jurisdictions considering alternatives to traditional marijuana prohibition.

The principal message of the report is that marijuana policy should not be viewed as a binary choice between prohibition and the for-profit commercial model we see in Colorado and Washington. Legalization encompasses a wide range of possible regimes, distinguished along at least four dimensions: the kinds of organizations that are allowed to provide the drug, the regulations under which those organizations operate, the nature of the products that can be distributed, and price. These choices could have profound consequences for health and social well-being, as well as job creation and government revenue.

Considering marijuana legalisation, insights for Vermont and other jurisdictions

Cannabis social clubs (CSCs) are private, non-profit organisations in which cannabis is collectively grown and distributed to registered members. With no profit motive to increase cannabis consumption or initiate new users, the clubs offer a more cautious, public health-centred alternative to large-scale retail cannabis markets dominated by commercial enterprises. The growth of the CSC model in Spain demonstrates that cannabis legalisation does not have to mean commercialisation. As CSCs show, it is entirely possible to restrict the availability and promotion of cannabis while at the same time making the drug legally available to adult users.

Additionally, the UN drug conventions have been interpreted as permitting CSCs, on the basis that they are an extension of decriminalisation policies. Because of this, the CSC model avoids many of the political and diplomatic obstacles associated with more far-reaching systems of legal regulation.

Cannabis social clubs in Spain: Legalisation without commercialisation

Economic marginalization as a result of institutionalized discrimination, stigma, and low levels of education contribute to a severe lack of opportunities for many transgender. In the Asia-Pacifc Region, a considerable percentage of transgender women are engaged in sex work.12 Available statistics indicate the following percentages of transgender persons involved in the sex industry in the following countries: Indonesia, 81% (2011); Malaysia, 84% (2009); Cambodia, 36% (2009); India, 90% (2009- 2010).13 There is no comparable data available for China.

An increasing amount of evidence shows that transgender women14 and transgender female sex workers are among the populations most heavily afected by HIV.15 Transgender women are 49 times more likely to acquire HIV than all adults of reproductive age.16 In global terms, the rate of HIV infection among transgender women engaged in sex work is 27.3%, and the rate of infection among transgender persons overall is 14.7%.

My life is too dark to see the light:  A survey of the living conditions of transgender female sex workers in Beijing and Shanghai

The use of psychoactive substances among young people is a social phenomenon that still has little informa - tion to help us estimate the quantity and characteristics of drug users. The aim of this paper is to approach this reality by comparing indicators of drug use in three different national surveys: the National Survey of Youth conducted by the Council of the Young People, the National Survey on Drug Use in Secondary and the National Survey on Drug Use in Household made by the Institute on Alcoholism and Drug Dependece. Despite the differences in methodology of the studies, it was possible to generate estimates of the percentage of usage of several drugs, the results show that alcohol, tobacco and marijuana are the only substances that present rates of use that allow for comparison, as well as a rough estimate of the total of youth drug users nationwide. The conclusions present a reflection of the importance of further epidemiological studies on this area, and its usefulness in the development and implementation of public policies to prevent drug use and health care for young people that have a risky or problematic drug use.

Uses of psychoactive substances among young people in Costa Rica: Comparative analyse of national surveys

This Insights report examines individual-level factors that predict the use of public health services in 23 Latin American and Caribbean countries, which were surveyed via the 2014 AmericasBarometer. Across the region, there is significant variation in the percentage of citizens who access public health services. I find that women, those with a greater number of children, those living in rural areas, those who receive government assistance, and those who are poorer are more likely to use public health services. In addition, those who engage in their societies in other ways (e.g., voting) are more likely to access health services. Further, satisfaction with public health services is significantly related to public health care access: those who are more satisfied with its quality are more likely to access a public health service. These findings highlight important factors that governments might take into account when considering improvements to public health care access.

Public health services use in Latin America and the Caribbean

The International Journal of Drug Policy provides a forum for the dissemination of current research, reviews, debate, and critical analysis on drug use and drug policy in a global context. It seeks to publish material on the social, political, legal, and health contexts of psychoactive substance use, both licit and illicit. The journal is particularly concerned to explore the effects of drug policy and practice on drug-using behaviour and its health and social consequences. It is the policy of the journal to represent a wide range of material on drug-related matters from around the world.

International Journal of Drug Policy moves to twelve issues

Impact of armed conflicts and warfare on opioid substitution treatment in Ukraine: Responding to emergency needs

 A view from the frontlines in Slavyansk, Ukraine: HIV prevention, drug treatment, and help for people who use drugs in a conflict zone

Effects of transnational migration on drug use: An ethnographic study of Nepali female heroin users in Hong Kong

 Medical Marijuana programs: Implications for cannabis control policy – Observations from Canada 

International Journal of Drug Policy: Volume 26

The 35th meeting of the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board (PCB) took place 9-11 December 2014. The NGO Delegation and our civil society colleagues had anticipated that this PCB meeting would be eventful but we underestimated the extent to which this would be true. Intense negotiations with Member States started the weekend before the meeting and continued until early in the evening on December 11th. A highlight of the meeting for civil society was the Executive Director's (ED) pledge to lead by example to meet the three-fold increase in funding that is needed for civil society to effectively conduct HIV advocacy and service work.

The 2014 NGO Report on Intellectual Property Barriers to Treatment Access was expectedly, the most controversial topic at the 35th meeting. This topic brought profound disagreements into open discussion about the role that UNAIDS ought to play in helping countries overcome these barriers and the proper balance between trade and public health, and between profit and the right to development.

Other topics that motivated extensive debate and negotiation focused on the ED's request to update the UNAIDS strategy in 2015, the thematic session on social protection, the Post-2015 agenda, gaps in paediatric prevention, treatment, care and support, and addressing HIV-related stigma and discrimination. The thematic segment on halving HIV transmission among people who inject drugs brought powerful testimonies to the floor about governmental failures to protect the lives and other human rights of people who use drugs.

Feedback from the 35th meeting of the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board

On the 6th of November 2014 the FBI and Europol working with other international law enforcement agencies declared that they had succeeded in a joint operation against several hidden services on the Tor Dark Net. The investigation, dubbed ‘Operation Onymous’ saw the successful closure of 267 ‘.onion’ webpages making up 27 separate sites. Law enforcement agencies also made 17 arrests and seizures of $1 million in Bitcoin as well as assorted amounts of cash, drugs, weapons and computers.

If Tor has been compromised (the worst-case scenario for administrators of darknet markets), it does not put an end to darknet markets. OpenBazaar is a decentralized market system that incorporates Tor but operates very differently to the centralized model used by Dark Net markets such as Evolution and Agora. In this model users have total control over their own storefront and are able to buy and sell whatever they want in a peer-to-peer system in which all members are equally-footed as the system’s key components are self-regulated by nodes distributed throughout its users. This would put an end to law enforcement’s ability to shut a whole network down. Although OpenBazaar is currently in its testing phases we can assume that models like this will eventually become the dominant platform for illicit e-commerce in future.

Operation Onymous: International law enforcement agencies target the dark net in November 2014

Tor’s hidden services have allowed a new form of low-risk high-profit drug dealing to emerge and grow quickly over the last four years. Vendors of narcotics are utilising innovative marketing techniques that mirror those used by legal, ‘real-world’ and web-based businesses to promote and sell goods and services. These range from offers of free samples and discounts, to the use of banner adverts and brand management. Drug marketing is becoming increasingly sophisticated as more users and buyers flock to the Tor network and as hidden markets become more diversified and competitive.

Publications