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 rights violations during the Asean meet. […]

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. […]

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 weeks before the mass hospitalisation. […]

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. […]

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 drugs to liaise with each other. […]

There will be a day when our demands for justice and our calls for compassion stretch to those whom movement politics have largely left out over the past half century. A day when we do not ask, “What did they do to themselves to end up here?” And instead ask, “How did we let this happen?” […]

When people feel valued rather than judged, regardless of whether they continue to take drugs, they begin to value themselves more. Once people feel safe and cared for, it’s much easier to make changes that otherwise frighten them. As with needle exchange and heroin prescribing, frequent safe infection facilities users are more likely to seek further help, not less. […]

This centralised decision to implement alternatives to the existing sanctions is a good omen for drug reformers. By encouraging the suspension of investigation and prosecution of drug users, and promoting the implementation of measures focusing on education, treatment and social reintegration, the European Union is alluding a decriminalisation of drug use in its member states. […]

After a half-century of being “tough on drug dealers and drug users,” drug overdose deaths nonetheless continue climbing to record levels. Heroin and fentanyl are cheaper and more available than prescription drugs on the street, and the war on drugs has filled our prisons, affecting the lives and futures of millions of the innocent as well as the guilty, as the U.S. […]

While the question of cannabis reform has become a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, the focus now needs to be on accelerating the process and ensuring legalisation is done right. Securing that is, as Dr. Wodak suggests, “an issue for our generation.” Many of us will have to deal with the social costs that stem from drug use being…