New Zealand is set to hold a binding referendum on the legislation of recreational cannabis, the government has announced. The plebiscite would be held alongside the country’s next general election, in 2020, Justice Minister Andrew Little told reporters on Tuesday morning. Pro-reform campaign group New Zealand Drug Foundation welcomed the vote, with its chief Ross Bell saying the current approach…

Damon Barrett, director of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, points out that the Integrated Strategy emphasizes policing, rather than public health, and doesn’t seem any different from the status quo approach to drugs in general. The strategy also seems to mirror President Donald Trump’s Global Call to Action on the World Drug Problem, a document co-signed…

Policymakers can reduce overdose deaths and other harms stemming from nonmedical use of opioids and other dangerous drugs by switching to a policy of “harm reduction” strategies. Harm reduction has a success record that prohibition cannot match. It involves a range of public health options. These strategies would include medication-assisted treatment, needle-exchange programs, safe injection sites, heroin-assisted treatment, deregulation of…

The people behind the ACT’s initial push to open a safe injecting room almost 20 years ago say the current proposal is well overdue. A drug strategy report released this week flagged the possibility of Canberra finally getting a supervised injecting room, almost decades after legislation was passed. […]

Ann Symonds saved lives and changed lives. She saved them by fighting, losing, then fighting again to provide safe injecting rooms for drug users at Kings Cross. She changed lives by her efforts to create homes for women escaping domestic violence or the curse of drugs, by finding legal ways to keep women out of jail and to care for…

An expansion of pill testing at events in the ACT and revisiting a safe injecting room for opioid users are two of 43 measures contained in the ACT Government’s new three-year Drug Strategy Action Plan released today. The Government says harm minimisation underpins the Action Plan 2018-2021, which outlines the priorities over the next three years to tackle the harms from alcohol,…

The 2018 Global State of Harm Reduction is the sixth edition of this report, and the most comprehensive ever thanks to a coordinated effort of over 100 harm reduction practitioners, academics, advocates and activists from around the world. […]

Dr Caldicott also hopes to avoid further tragedy. ‘We’re at the start of a summer season, a season which we know is very dangerous in the global sense,’ he said. According to Dr Caldicott, the illicit drugs he sees now are also ‘far more dangerous than any we’ve ever had’. He believes pill testing is a vital strategy in reducing…

We’re at a point now where the government refuses to even consider pill testing once again as a viable way to reduce harm like it does with other dangerous substances (alcohol and cigarettes), refuses to acknowledge it’s success overseas and locally while championing the success of safe injecting rooms that is saving lives here yet continues its hard-line approach to…

Paul Dillon said heavier policing is a common government response to public outrage over drug deaths, but it has not done much to solve the problem.  ‘Drug use has not reduced at festivals or night clubs – people just take their drugs in a different way, or choose things not easily identified by drug dogs,’ he said. […]