News
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Russia and Ukraine: Annexation Symptoms
Russia’s abrupt, public shutdown of substitution therapy in Crimea in 2014 is one of the oddest and cruellest stories of the annexation. Russia claimed it incorporated the peninsula to protect local Russian-speakers from what it called a nationalist, fascist government that had come to power after months of demonstrations in…
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The Left/Right Challenge To The Failed “War On Drugs”
The argument to criminalize “street drugs,” and severely punish their sellers and users, is largely based on the assumption that a “tough on crime” approach will reduce addiction and abuse of these dangerous substances. Criminalizing drug use consistently fails to address the health problems of addiction, and drives the drug…
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Mobile drug testing under fire: are the NSW police and policymakers targeting the young and the poor?
“The police and the Coalition government aren’t testing drivers for the drugs like benzos and cocaine that tend to be taken by middle and upper class Australia. This is despite the fact we can see they are serious contributors to road accidents. Instead the police focus is on drugs like…
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US: It’s time to kick our addiction to the war on drugs
There’s a better way. It’s called harm reduction. This approach focuses on reducing the negative effects of drug use rather than on punishing people who use drugs in an often-futile attempt to make them stop. Harm reduction options like supervised injection facilities or drug consumption rooms have successfully prevented fatal…
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From Japan to Hungary: Harm Reduction in Politically Challenging Environments
“We realised the key is to convince local people who are being manipulated [by local politicians.] We try to convince people how harm reduction is good for them, even if they don’t use drugs, [and to recognise that] people who use drugs are part of the community”. […]
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People who use drugs may use cannabis and drug cocktails as a form of harm reduction
People who use drugs have come up with innovative strategies that help them reduce harm, including using marijuana to decrease crack use and mixing heroin with methamphetamine to moderate the effects of meth or prolong the duration of heroin’s effects, according to presentations at the 25th International Harm Reduction Conference…
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Meet the Woman Testing Drugs at This Summer’s UK Festivals
The ink hasn’t quite dried on all the contracts, but the Loop will be providing drug testing at four or five commercial festivals. Add up all the guests at these events, and Fiona Measham believes some 500,000 people will have access to a potentially lifesaving service. All this is a…
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Drug plan based on stigma not love
It is abundantly clear that the aim is not to “stabilise lives and encourage people to participate in treatment”. If the Turnbull government genuinely wanted to help people into treatment it would direct what will undoubtedly be the very high costs of this program towards treatment. […]
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Drug testing could have catastrophic consequences for welfare recipients
Targeting and excluding people who use drugs is a terrible response to what is at its core a public health issue. This idea rests on the discredited view that illicit drug use is a “moral evil” as opposed to something 42 per cent of Australians have done at least once, and that getting tough…
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Supervised Drug-Injection Sites Are Spreading in Canada
Some segment of the population is going to be injecting drugs: Do you want them doing it in a safe, clinical setting, or in a park? Stigmatizing a problem and driving it into the darkness only exacerbates it — which is why cities like Montreal should be applauded for taking…