Victoria has become the first state in Australia to legalise the use of medicinal cannabis.The legislation enables the manufacture, supply and access to medicinal cannabis products in the state. […]

If drugs alone are treated as “the problem”, then we are lost. No one disagrees that drugs can be addictive and can negatively impact health and well-being. But drugs on their own are not the right starting point. The better way to think about this is how we, as governments and societies, choose to deal with drugs. […]

“Harm reduction is here to stay. Canada’s drug regulation approach is going to grow around the world, as countries start to explore different options.” The government’s support of harm reduction and the legalization of cannabis was made clear last month at the latest Session of the Commission of Narcotic Drugs in Vienna. […]

Crucially, all policy recommendations have to be based on the most robust evidence; this was no place for dogma, unfounded theories or wishful thinking. What the report makes painstakingly clear is that to legalise responsibly, you need to regulate, then reevaluate to see where you’re going wrong and readjust. […]

The drug war is now the subject of a raucous debate within the U.S., they might sound strangely familiar. The reasons why U.S. citizens are rejecting the war on drugs are, it turns out, also the reasons why it is being rejected all over the world, from the Caribbean to Europe to South America. […]

The U.S. has buried its head in the sand for the last couple of decades and ignored health-based strategies to deal with addiction and drug use. Instead we have waged a war on our citizens, filled our prisons with people who have drug problems and watched as hundreds of thousands of people have died from preventable overdose and HIV. […]

The president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, Dr Alex Wodak, has questioned Australia’s attendance at a meeting of UN member countries to debate global drugs policy later this month, describing the conference as “the last big international forum before global drug prohibition collapses”. […]

A high-powered group of reformers ushered in the month of UNGASS—the first special UN drugs summit since 1998—at the Open Society Foundations in New York this morning. They expressed hopes and disappointments about the progress and lack of it surrounding the event.Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, noted the much-improved context of this summit versus the last…

Never in modern history has there existed greater public support for ending our nation’s nearly century-long experiment with pot prohibition and replacing it with a taxed and regulated adult marketplace. […]

A policy of prohibition has put the drugs trade in the hands of criminals and led to suffering for millions. Now there are hopes a special United Nations session will see reform […]