News
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Trump’s Policy of Executing Drug Dealers Is Straight From the Authoritarian Handbook
President Donald Trump is proposing to fight the opioid epidemic using the death penalty, a vicious and counterproductive policy that would do little to make the country safer and echoes the policies of authoritarians like Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. […]
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ACT: Health Service Commissioner’s review calls for prison needle and syringe program
There are renewed calls for a needle and syringe program (NSP) at the Alexander Maconochie Centre after a review of the prison’s opioid replacement therapy program recommended the move. […]
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Stop sniffer dog operations: an interview with Sniff Off Campaign’s Xiaoran Shi
The campaign against the warrantless use of sniffer dogs in public places by NSW police is moving North. The Sniff Off campaign, which is a collaboration between Greens MLC David Shoebridge and the NSW Young Greens, launched in Newcastle on Friday night. […]
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Duterte goes to war with UN as he threatens to throw rights team to the crocodiles
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte fuelled an extraordinary war of words with the United Nations by saying that their human rights team should be fed to crocodiles if they came to investigate his controversial war on drugs. […]
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Exclusive: Trump finalizing opioid plan that includes death penalty for dealers
The Trump administration is finalizing a long-awaited plan that it says will solve the opioid crisis, but it also calls for law enforcement measures — like the death penalty for some drug dealers — that public health advocates and congressional Republicans warn will detract from efforts to reverse the epidemic.…
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Australia’s ‘dance with dictators’: Country expected to stay mum on rights abuses with Asean leaders in town
Human Rights Watch had not just Cambodia, but also Myanmar and the Philippines in its sights – for the suspected genocide of the Rohingya population and the extrajudicial killings carried out in President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, respectively – when it urged Australia to raise their concerns about human…
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Trump Opioids Plan to Include Good Ideas — Also, Executing Drug Dealers
The Trump administration finally has an ambitious, detailed plan for combating the opioid epidemic, one that includes some evidence-based reforms that public-health experts have been recommending for years — and, also, the death penalty for low-level drug dealers. Or, at least, so Politico’s summary of the yet-to-be-finalized plan suggests. […]
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NZ: Calls for early warning system over potentially harmful drugs
A drug harm reduction advocate says an “early warning system” needs to be set up to prevent drug harm in New Zealand. Wendy Allison is director of Know Your Stuff – a group that lets people test their drugs at music festivals. She put out an alert about N-Ethylpentylone three…
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Separating newborn babies from mothers with addiction does more harm than good, says doctor
Removing newborn babies from women who are suffering from addiction helps neither mother nor child, says a doctor at the forefront of a movement to keep them together. The stress of that separation, Dr. Ron Abrahams believes, has been confused for withdrawal symptoms in the past. […]
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Longer jail sentences will do nothing to solve the synthetic cannabis epidemic
We need to extend treatment services to effectively cover substances like synthetic cannabis, while implementing an early warning system to enable urgent action when particular drugs are becoming a problem. We need to make it easier for agencies at the coal face of dealing with the consequences of addiction to…