Controversial plans to drug test welfare recipients are back on the agenda after the coalition party room endorsed new proposed laws. The Turnbull government had originally hoped to drug test 5000 Newstart and Youth Allowance recipients across three trial sites in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia from January   […]

Experts from the Finnish government’s leading health agency have called for the decriminalisation of all drug use, igniting a debate that has drawn in top politicians and police authorities. The call was made by two senior members of Finland’s National Institute for Health and Welfare which operates under the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. […]

On February 27th, A Current Affair launched an extraordinary attack on people who are prescribed methadone. The program deliberately used stigmatising language to describe people utilising a prescribed, evidence-based medical treatment. Methadone use was described as “deadly epidemic” that is “putting everyone at risk”, without presenting the plethora of evidence of the benefits of methadone treatment. […]

President Emmanuel Macron has taken steps to reform drug laws amid concerns that France has seen a continuous rise in drug use despite having some of the strictest narcotics laws in Europe. But is the country ready for a radical new approach? […]

Britain’s “utterly failing” drug laws must be overhauled to help curb the number of inmates in overcrowded prisons, the Green Party will say, as party activists battled through harsh weather conditions to attend its spring conference in Bournemouth. […]

More than 100 drug suspects have been killed since Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the police to rejoin his “war on drugs”, an official said Saturday (Mar 3). Duterte was elected in 2016 on a promise to eradicate drugs, and launched an unprecedented campaign in which – rights activists allege – as many as 12,000 people have been killed. […]

“Some countries have a very, very tough penalty — the ultimate penalty,” Trump said at a White House summit on the opioid crisis. “And, by the way, they have much less of a problem. If you shoot one person, you get life in prison,” he added. “These people kill 1,000, 2,000 people and nothing happens to them.” […]

Protesters gathered at the Philippine embassy in D.C. Wednesday to call for an end to the drug war and freedom for a leading Duterte critic. Since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in June 2016, police and mysterious “vigilantes” have killed more than 16,000 alleged drug users and sellers in a massive wave of extrajudicial killings condemned by human rights organizations,…

This disgraceful piece ignores official guidance, veers away from interviewing any health or medical expert and alarmingly and possibly deliberately uses the term ‘meth’ for convenience and further shock effect. The potential consequences of such a story could be patients reluctant to seek treatment and further misinformation being peddled in the community for what has been proven to be an…

Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced that there would be a preliminary examination on extrajudicial killings in the context of police anti-drug operations. This is an important step forward for the many victims, advocates and international supporters who argue that justice is not possible within the Philippines when the highest levels of government have…