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“Our cemeteries are full of kids who are dead because we didn’t have the guts to do something that’s quite simple,” he says. “It’s the war that’s the killer.” […]

Anti-prohibition activist Will Tregoning says drug testing will be in force at a Canberra event this year, bringing Australia into line with “at least 10” other countries. […]

A trial giving family members and friends of heroin users a drug to prevent overdoses has been hailed a success, and may even reduce overall heroin use, researchers say. The WA Peer Naloxone Project trained users and family members how to administer naloxone, which is used in emergency medicine to reverse the effects of opiates. […]

The number of drug-related killings in the Philippines since Rodrigo Duterte became president two months ago on a pledge to wipe out the illegal drug trade has reached about 2,000, according to data released on Tuesday. […]

Pill testing advocates will break the law and offer punters the service at either Groovin the Moo or Spilt Milk in Canberra this coming festival season. […]

Author Matt Noffs believes there is not an ‘ice’ crisis facing Australia but rather a lack of understanding about the drug and drug policies in general. […]

Fear-based campaigns are counterproductive and may even lead to increased drug use. What is needed are evidenced-based approaches to reduce harm. For a start, Australia could begin testing drugs as part of a drug-monitoring system aimed at improving public health and safety. […]

Police told CNN that Danica is not the first child victim, but that she could be the youngest. They also noted it was not a police operation. […]

If it is one of your children or family attending a festival and considering taking a pill, which would you prefer: an engagement with health professionals, or reliance on an over-the-counter or internet-ordered test kit? […]

Neil Woods used to risk his life to catch drug dealers. But as gangs responded with escalating violence and intimidation – some even poisoning users who talked to the police – he started seeing legalisation as the only solution. […]

The Philippines is in the midst of a brutal war on drugs sanctioned by the controversial President Rodrigo Duterte, which has seen almost 2,000 killings in a matter of weeks. The BBC’s Jonathan Head explores the country’s dark underbelly of dealers and assassins through the story of one woman trapped in a chilling predicament. […]

To grow medical marijuana legally, you will need to apply for a manufacturer licence and then secure a permit. […]

Allowing drug-testing is not promoting drug use, this is not saying that ‘drugs are OK’. This would be you saying, as an elected representative, that you care about the wellbeing of your constituents. […]

The ‘war on drugs’ is spiralling out of control in the Philippines as nearly 2,000 suspected drug users and dealers have been killed by police and vigilante in the last seven weeks. […]

The Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court Wednesday confirmed the death sentence for a Vietnamese-Australian for drug smuggling after a reinvestigation determined the drug amount was too big to commute the sentence. […]

The government’s scheduling of marijuana bears little relationship to actual patient care. The notion that marijuana is more dangerous or prone to abuse than alcohol (not scheduled), cocaine (Schedule II), methamphetamine (Schedule II), or prescription opioids (Schedules II, III, and IV) doesn’t reflect what we see in clinical medicine. […]

In the days leading up to the execution, serious unfair trials and miscarriages of justice experienced by those to be executed were raised by lawyers, family members and human rights groups. […]

Human rights and drug policy activists gathered outside of the Philippines’ consulate in New York City to protest President Duterte’s violent war on drugs. Duterte’s bloody crusade has led to at least 1,800 extra-judicial killings so far, as police squads and vigilante groups roam the country killing alleged drug dealers. […]

Only with the total eradication of criminal penalties for drug “offenses”—applied retroactively, and with some form of reparations for those who have been targeted—will the drug policy reform movement achieve its greatest good. […]

New Zealand law allows anyone who is prescribed a medicine overseas to bring one month’s supply into the country for their own use – including cannabis products. […]

A poll out this week found 80 percent of New Zealanders supported legalising cannabis for medicinal purposes and a majority in favour of allowing people to have a small amount for personal use. […]

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has railed against the United Nations after it called for an end to the wave of killings unleashed by his war on drugs, saying he might leave the organisation and invite China and others to form a new one. […]

“Allegations of drug-trafficking offences should be judged in a court of law, not by gunmen on the streets,” today said two UN human rights experts, while urging the Government of the Philippines to put an end to the wave of extrajudicial executions in the context of an intensified anti-drug campaign targeting drug dealers and users. […]

Until recently, I was against legalising, or even decriminalising cannabis. I’m one of the few people I know who has never used the drug and I had been influenced by the culture of fear fostered by the war on drugs. The deeper I delve into the issue, the more I am struck by how frightening the consequences of prohibition are. […]

The case is one of several expected to be the focus of potentially explosive hearings next week before the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights, which Ms. de Lima oversees. […]

Last year the HIV rate in a single Indiana county was higher than that in any country in sub-Saharan Africa. Would adopting an Australian-style harm-reduction strategy change that? […]

Spice and flakka cause psychotic symptoms, bodily damage and death, whereas cannabis has never caused an overdose and has well-recognized medicinal value. Cocaine sourced from the black market, which is laced with other unknown chemicals, can cause overdose death – but people aren’t stabbing and eating the faces of other people while on cocaine. […]

Without legal mechanisms in place, the only option for arbitration in the black market is violence. This violence takes many forms: turf wars between drug suppliers where civilians are caught in the crossfire; no-knock police raids where suspects are gunned down; drug addicts assaulting others to secure money for their addiction. […]

Those targeted by the killings, according to Phelim Kine, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, are often people who are on the margins of society, poor and easy to target. […]

Organised Crime can only be fought successfully by levelling the playing field; take the money away from them. Regulate the control of illegal drugs and take the power away from criminals. It’s the intelligent thing to do. […]

The New Zealand Drug Foundation, which commissioned the survey, said it was the first such poll to show a majority backing the loosening of rules on the personal use of marijuana. […]

NZ and Australia are to conduct the world’s largest trial to find out whether ketamine can cure depression. Previous trials have shown ketamine “produces rapid antidepressant effects within hours”, says research leader UNSW Professor Colleen Loo, but the long-term effects aren’t yet known. […]

Some local news agencies have reported considerably higher death tolls, some as high as nearly 1,000, in counts that included drug suspects killed by unidentified attackers since Duterte emerged as the president-elect following the May 9 elections. […]

The Sydney doctor in charge of Sydney’s lone supervised injecting centre has decried as “hurtful” and “offensive” suggestions by the NSW deputy premier that the centre was trying to “tout” for business among pregnant women. […]

Decriminalisation of personal drug use and possession not only saves public money, it has significant public health benefits, according to a report prepared by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at UNSW. […]

From severely overcrowded prisons to exhausted funeral parlour operators and parents turning their own children in to avoid vigilante bounty killings, people in the Philippines are scrambling to respond to the effects of President Duterte’s war on drugs, slightly more than a month after he took office. […]

Officials hope the new law will put a dent in Colombia’s drug trafficking business by creating a legal opportunity in an industry historically controlled by the black market. The authorities believe the new law will also help attract investment and give the economy a lift. […]

President Rodrigo Duterte is exploiting the rivalry of China and the US to wage a ‘war on drugs’ that is cover for a tide of extrajudicial killings. […]

In Australia we have known for decades that although treatment for drug addiction is sometimes expensive, it is always much less expensive than the costs of escalating incarceration. As Dan Satterberg, a prosecuting attorney from King County in Washington, says: “Jail is the most expensive and least effective way to deal with drug crimes.” […]

Debates about harm reduction follow the same pattern: relentless hostility, proof that it works, then more relentless hostility. This is the ‘drug problem’ problem. […]

In the two years since the first cannabis company ad was published in the New York Times, the Berlin Wall of prohibition has continued to crumble. Today, 25 states have some type of legal medical cannabis, a total that could climb after the 2016 election. Countries like Germany and Australia are taking active steps to introduce federal medical cannabis programs. […]

Elizabeth Trudeau, a State Department spokeswoman, said Monday that the United States was “concerned.” “We believe in rule of law. We believe in due process. We believe in respect for universal human rights,” she told reporters. […]

In a homily delivered later on Sunday, Catholic leader Archbishop Socrates Villegas condemned the latest killings, saying, “I am in utter disbelief. If this is just a nightmare, wake me up and assure me it is not true. This is too much to swallow. […]

About 800 people have been killed since Duterte won a landslide election in May, according to reports by the local press which has been tracking the maverick politician’s campaign pledge to kill tens of thousands of criminals. […]

People who use drugs recreationally do not want to harm themselves—quite the opposite. Without major changes to drug laws, the work of organizations like DanceSafe, The Loop and others will remain essential if unnecessary drug deaths and hospitalizations are to be reduced. It is #TimeToTest. […]

Police wrap their lifeless heads in tape and cardboard scrawled with the tag ‘pusher ako’. It’s a sign to the community that this person who lays dead on a street was a drug dealer. You should not remember their face. You should not see them as human. You should not cry. […]

“A redirection of focus and funds away from repressive policies should happen with evidence-based approaches such as harm reduction and community-based drug dependence treatment as the priority, rather than coercive or non-evidence based models,” said Rick Lines of Harm Reduction International. […]

Civil society groups from across the globe, including prominent human rights NGOs, have called on UN drug control authorities to urge an immediate stop to the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug offenders in the Philippines. Since 10th May 2016, more than 700 people have been killed by police and vigilantes in the Philippines for being suspected of using or dealing drugs, as a direct result of recently-elected President Duterte’s campaign to eradicate crime within six months. […]

People in the slums of Manila are living in fear after new Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte called on police and vigilantes to kill drug suspects. […]

For emergency doctors with an interest in illicit toxicology, the arrival of the summer months in Australia signals, like some sort of grotesque seasonal cuckoo, the beginning of the music festival season. With it, the entirely predictable and unnecessary deaths of young Australians from illicit substance ingestion. […]

More completely and more quickly than any of the “classic” drugs, the creation and existence of NPS has forced two of the thorniest issues in drug policy to the fore: whether altered states are even allowable, and whether it should possible for anyone to profit off of them. Answering these two questions will force an end, one way or another, to the drug-by-drug prohibition-based drug war we know. […]

Some 316 suspected drug dealers were killed from July 1-27, 195 of which were vigilante killings, according to police. Human rights groups estimate the body count to be at least double the official number. […]

A long-anticipated loosening of the availability of medicinal cannabis is expected to offer new treatments and choice for a range of patients. […]

President Joko Widodo has permitted these executions, each convicted of drug offences, claiming it will send a message of deterrence. The only message is regrettably of Indonesia’s inhumanity. […]

An Australian drug rehabilitation advocate is calling for for Australian and New Zealand governments to adopt a northern European approach to methamphetamine that uses legal consumption rooms. […]

All 14 people executed last year were convicted of drug trafficking, and all but two were foreign nationals. With hundreds of Indonesians on death row in other countries, many have decried the hypocrisy of a government that fights to save their own people while targeting foreigners for execution. […]

The constantly evolving use of social media and dating apps to try and score drugs shows how futile attempts to stop drug use at music festivals are. Is it time to accept it’s always going to happen and get on board with harm minimisation approaches? […]

After seeing too many young people admitted to his ER with overdoses, Dr David Caldicott has become one of Australia’s leading advocates for safer drug use. I called David up after one of his shifts, and thankfully he pulled over his moped to have a chat with me. […]

Russia has become the world’s most aggressive defender of maintaining the war on drugs, outdoing even countries such as Iran. Iran, for instance, supports things such as needle exchanges for heroin users; Russia does not. And Russia’s hard-line stance on the drug war is bad for us. […]

Human rights groups say police data showing that Mr Duterte’s crackdown has claimed the lives of 293 suspected users and pushers in police operations between July 1 and July 24 does not include those slain in extrajudicial killings by vigilantes. […]

“Any executions that are still to take place must be halted immediately. The injustice already done cannot be reversed, but there is still hope that it won’t be compounded,” said Rafendi Djamin, Amnesty International’s director for South East Asia and the Pacific. […]

Pitched on the grass at the Secret Garden Party festival in Cambridgeshire was a tent run by The Loop, a not for profit drug and alcohol service. For those few days it was the first ever de facto decriminalised space for possession of drugs in the UK. […]

As long as we persist in keeping drugs illegal, the violence, especially in our inner cities, will continue, and there will be an endless supply of new non-violent offenders as well as those who take violent action. Only legalization can change the dynamic. […]

There is no evidence to support President Widodo’s position. The death penalty does not deter crime. Carrying out executions will not rid Indonesia of drugs. It is never the solution, and it will damage Indonesia’s standing in the world. […]

Tony Trimingham said earlier this year that “families want services that assist rather than punish and criminalise people in a way that creates lifelong penalties”. Nowhere is our punitive, counter-productive approach to drug use more perfectly encapsulated than the hypocritical, expensive police operations run at music festivals like Splendour in the Grass. […]

In a statement, Amnesty International urged “the country’s authorities to halt all executions and to take immediate steps to ensure that the cases of all those under sentence of death are reviewed by an independent and impartial body”. […]

Some suspiciously hard, grey pills were made of concrete and several samples of “cocaine” and “ketamine” were in fact ground-up anti-malaria tablets. Even the real drugs varied dangerously in potency: the strongest ecstasy pills were five times as potent as the weakest. […]

If we can acknowledge that addiction is like a disease in some ways and very much unlike a disease in other ways, maybe we can stop trying to label it and pay more attention to the best means for overcoming it. […]

“For the first time we’ve been able to offer the testing service to individual users as part of a tailored advice and information package provided by a team of experienced workers. This can help people make informed choices, raising awareness of dangerous substances and reducing the chance of drug-related problems.” […]

Next month’s summit, the initiative of a group of MPs from across political divides, will consider how a harm-minimisation approach could be extended to today’s major drug challenges, including the rising availability and use of ice. […]

Advocates of minimising the dangers of drugs are frustrated that tens of thousands of young partygoers at one of the biggest events on the music festival calendar this weekend have no organised drug testing available to them. […]

The advocates of decriminalising cannabis now have an economic case to press. A Treasury official, in a document prepared for a brainstorming session, suggested the Government could save more than $500 million a year legalising the popular drug. […]

Italy hopes to jown a growing list of countries that have recently reformed marijuana laws. If Italy passes the bill currently under consideration, it would become the first European country to legalize marijuana for non-medical use. […]

It’s well and truly time we opened more Drug Consumption Rooms in our major cities and in some of our larger regional centres. New centres should also be able to handle people who inhale ice, a drug about which the community rightly remains concerned. […]

How much pain you have to suffer shouldn’t be determined by where you live, and it is unacceptable that we let stigma and misguided fears of addiction get in the way of allowing patients to realize their right to health. […]

Mr Noffs said there were only two perspectives on drug use — those who see the evidence and what the rest of the world is doing and the other group who close their eyes and hope the ice problem goes away without help. […]

Duterte’s murderous measures represent the ‘war on drugs’ taken to deeply worrying extremes. […]

The spread of blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis B and C among Australia’s prison population has prompted a call for jails to establish needle exchange programs. […]

Who opposes this mainstream medical idea? Zealots who believe in abstinence, weak and reactionary politicians and of course the worst group of the lot – those who actually think there can be a drug free world. You know, the same people who think the earth is flat. […]

More than a decade after Thailand declared a “war on drugs”, the country is admitting defeat. As the prison population soars, Justice Minister Paiboon Koomchaya told Reuters he was looking at changes to the country’s draconian drug laws. […]

The only way that we can know for sure what is circulating at festivals and whether dealers are misselling NPS to users is to conduct forensic testing on site and to match what users think they have bought with what they have actually bought. This is essential for public safety, for emergency services to respond appropriately to incidents, and for targeted harm reduction messages to users. […]

An Australian drug addiction treatment expert says New Zealand should introduce supervised meth inhalation facilities. Youth addiction sector worker Matt Noffs said New Zealand’s innovative approach to treating drug addiction has worked in the past and should continue. […]

With any psychoactive substance, the balance between help and harm depends on the person and the circumstances. […]

We need to rethink our approach to drug treatment and management in prisons to control the spread of infectious diseases – in Australia and abroad. Drug dependence is a health problem and should be treated as such. […]

“The majority of governments continue to ignore the strategic importance of prison health care to public health. Most strategies for dealing with infectious diseases in prisons focus on a zero-tolerance approach to drug users. The fact that infection rates are still climbing confirms that this approach does not work.” […]

Safe rooms represent a portal for health and social interventions. So safe rooms benefit people who use drugs and their families and their communities. They are not a solution to our drug problems; there is no solution. But they are part of the response intended to more effectively respond to illicit drugs. […]

The Human Rights Watch said it was appalled by the death penalty verdict by a Vietnam criminal court against an Australian grandmother for drug trafficking. Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, was highly critical of Vietnam’s policy to apply the death penalty for drug trafficking. […]

“The evidence speaks for itself. There are more than 130 research papers on drug consumption rooms around the world — it’s been deeply researched,” Mr Noffs said. He said it was a stepping stone to getting people into treatment and helped filter drug-related cases away from mainstream hospital emergency departments. […]

Each tragedy that swells the ranks of the Anyone’s Child campaign is preventable, and each one further evidences the fact that legalising and regulating the UK’s supply of drugs will save lives. Nobody’s child needs to provide the government with another case study. […]

If we are genuine about reducing the harm caused by drugs we need education, regulation and health-based programs underpinned by evidence. The days of empty, chest beating calls for a war on drugs are hopefully over. […]

Dr Angella Duvnjak has been appointed CEO of the Australian Injecting and Illicit Drug Users League (AIVL). […]

Tough love, interventions and 12-step programs are some of the most common methods of treating drug addiction, but journalist Maia Szalavitz says they’re often counterproductive. […]

Drugs, legal and illegal, are prevalent in Australian society. And over-consumption causes addiction, disfunction and death. But the illegal ones – those tested for by the NRL – are, according to experts, less harmful than the legal ones that sponsor rugby league. […]

It’s impossible to remove the stigma of addiction while drug use remains illegal – the two concepts are completely at odds with one another. […]

Another step toward mainstream medical acceptance of formerly “out-there” substances may involve turning them against other drugs. Across the US and UK, new clinical trials are using psychedelics in an attempt to treat addiction to everything from controlled substances to alcohol and cigarettes. […]

Thirty suspected drugs dealers were killed in the five days after he took office on June 30 and the death toll since his May 9 election win is far higher than that recorded in the previous four months.The drugs war has triggered alarm among human rights groups, lawyers and the clergy who say “summary executions” should stop. […]

Australia cannot arrest and imprison our way out of our drug problems. Yet as Australia struggles with increasing problems from ice use, we haven’t been prepared to try innovative approaches that appear to have worked overseas. […]