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. […]

In a fiery retort, anti-lockouts group and new political party Keep Sydney Open have argued that police’s “message” clearly isn’t working. “To the NSW Government and Police: insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and thinking the outcome will change,” they write on Facebook. […]

It’s not just the idiocy and ill will of the Trump administration in this area as in so many others but the reluctance of even progressive state and local legislators to embrace what’s already working elsewhere. It’s not just the political weakness of those who favor drug treatment over incarceration but the persistent belief among many treatment supporters, and the…

In selecting Dr Wodak to speak at the Vatican’s ‘Drugs and Addictions’ conference on December 1, Catholic Health Australia CEO Suzanne Greenwood said she was aware the Drug Law Reform Foundation president’s opinions might not be equally held by the global headquarters of the church. Dr Wodak used his platform to call for the regulation of drug markets, the scrapping of criminal…

“The Mental Health and Addiction Inquiry has joined a chorus of other voices urging the Government to treat drugs as a health and social issue. Based on these recommendations the Government can be confident its plans to take a fresh approach to drugs is the right thing to do,” said Drug Foundation executive director Ross Bell. […]

The panel, led by the former health watchdog Ron Paterson, spent roughly 10 months consulting people around the country, holding more than 400 meetings and considering about 5000 submissions. The recommendations include taking strong action on drugs by enacting a stricter regulatory approach to the sale and supply of alcohol and replacing criminal sanctions for the possession for personal use…

Different drugs are associated with different risks, and the whole idea of regulation is to manage and reduce risk, so the regulatory tools you’d deploy are going to vary. Within stimulants there’s an enormous array of products and risks, so you’d have various models to regulate price, potency, packaging, vendors and marketing, but the principles and goals are the same.…

Rappler CEO Maria Ressa is due to land in Manila this weekend, when supporters fear she could be arrested, after she and her company were formally indicted on multiple counts of tax evasion this week, charges critics say are politically motivated and designed to silence independent media in the southeast Asian country. […]