Mark Haden

FW: IDPC December 2010 Alert

2010-12-20T08:38:00.001-08:00

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

IDPC December 2010 Alert

Welcome to the IDPC December 2010 Alert. The International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) is a global network of NGOs and professional networks that work together to promote objective and open debate on drug policy. This Alert contains news, updates on the latest publications and upcoming events relevant to international drug policy.

Top stories

IDPC/Malaysian AIDS Council Seminar - Options for the management of drug using offenders
‘Access to HIV services is a right for drug users', states UNODC Executive Director
A War on Drugs: A War on People - Facebook Campaign!
Former Polish President and other prominent figures call for drug liberalisation in Poland
First IDPC drug policy Seminar in the Middle East and North Africa

News

IDPC/MAC Seminar - Options for the management of drug using offenders
This seminar, co-organised by IDPC and the Malaysian AIDS Council (MAC), provided the opportunity to share experiences from different countries and encourage new thinking at a time where the Malaysian government has already successfully implemented harm reduction measures and is in the process of scaling these up. Read more.

Asian launch of the Lancet Special Series on HIV in People Who Use Drugs
This Series draws attention to the issues around the growing HIV epidemic in people who use drugs, including tackling the myths surrounding HIV and people who use drugs, and subjects as diverse as women and drugs to the effect of amphetamines, alcohol, and human rights on the epidemic. Read more.

Former Polish President and other prominent figures call for drug liberalisation in Poland
Signatories of the open letter urge the government to advance proceedings on amendments to the drug policy bill that has now reached the parliament. Read more.

IDPC participates to training course on the prevention of discrimination in Switzerland
In December 2010, IDPC participated to a training course organised by the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. The training aimed to raise awareness of human rights and the right to health among Swiss professionals specialised in health, addictions and vulnerable populations. Read more.

‘Access to HIV services is a right for drug users', states UNODC Executive Director
At the occasion of World AIDS Day on 1st December 2010, the UNODC Executive Director raised awareness of the need to target drug users in the fight to combat the HIV epidemic. Read more.

'NGOs a vital link in fight against drugs', says UNODC Executive Director
During the appointment of the new chairperson of the Vienna NGO Committee on Drugs, Mr. Fedotov, the UNODC Executive Director, declared: 'To tackle drugs, we need to keep constant contact with on the ground knowledge and expertise. Our main partner NGOs provide that context and support our work from the local to the global level'. Read more.

A War on Drugs: A War on People - Facebook Campaign!
IDPC, along with a number of organisations, marked Human Rights Day 2010 by launching “A War on Drugs: A War on People” Facebook campaign. Each month the page will highlight a different type of human rights abuse carried out under the drug prohibition regime. Please help us by spreading the word and joining the movement!

UK's former Drugs and Defence Minister calls for drug legalisation
Bob Ainsworth MP, former Home Office drugs minister and Secretary of State for Defence, called for the legalisation and regulation of drugs during a Parliamentary debate he was leading in Westminster Hall, London, on 16th December 2010. Read more.

Youth RISE recruits volunteers for its 'International Working Group'
Youth RISE, the global youth-led network for reducing the risks and harms associated with substance use – is seeking volunteers from around the world to join their ‘International Working Group’ (IWG) in 2010. The deadline for applications is 27th December 2010. Read more.

Publications

Executive summary of IDPC Drug Policy Guide now available in 6 languages!
The Executive Summary of the IDPC Drug Policy Guide is now available in English, Czech, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish. The full version of the Guide can be downloaded on our website in English, Russian and Spanish.

Systems overload: Drug laws and prisons in Latin America - TNI/WOLA Report
This comparative study, conducted by the Transnational Institute (TNI) and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) on the impact of drug policies on the prison systems of eight Latin American countries reveals that drug laws have contributed to the prison crises these countries are experiencing. Read more.

IDPC Report on South East Europe Drug Policy Network Meeting, Ohrid, Macedonia
Throughout 2010, IDPC has developed a South East Europe drug policy Network. This session was attended by 27 participants, both from NGOs and national governments and focused on two topics: harm reduction, and the Roma population. This report summarises the main discussions that took place during the seminar. Read the report.

UNAIDS report on the global AIDS epidemic 2010 now available online!
Based on the latest data from 182 countries, this global reference book provides comprehensive analysis on the AIDS epidemic and response. Read the report.

Independent reference group to the UN calls for evidence-based approach to address HIV among IDUs
In this Consensus Statement, the Reference Group to the United Nations on HIV and Injecting Drug Use identifies key regional issues of concern and outlines recommendations for action. Read the report.

South East Asia opium survey 2010: LAO PDR, Myanmar - UNODC Report
Combining the UNODC Lao PDR and Myanmar Opium Surveys, as well as information on poppy cultivation in Thailand from that country's Office of the Narcotics Control Board, the Survey points to rising levels of opium poppy cultivation across all three countries. Read the report.

Breaking the silence - In search for Colombia's disappearances
In this report, the Latin America Working Group Education Fund and the US Office on Colombia highlight that the military aid that the U.S. government provided—and continues to provide—to Colombia strengthened an army that was responsible for thousands of forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions and has collaborated with, or at least turned a blind eye to, paramilitary violence that escalated as U.S. aid flowed. Read the report.

Drugs – Alternatives to the ‘war’
Thanks to his experience in the field, Col. Jorge da Silva is certain that repressive policies to control drug use is not only inefficient, but it is also the cause of the serious public security problems in countries like Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Read the paper.

The limits of equivalence: Ethical dilemmas in providing care in drug detention centres
For organisations offering health education, food, or even life-saving medical care inside drug detention centres, what are the limits of providing ethical care, without risking legitimising the system or building its capacity to detain more people? This report explores how organisations might weigh the risks and benefits of their engagement. Read the report.

Opioid substitution therapy in Central Asia: Towards diverse and effective treatment - EHRN Report
New research provided by the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network (EHRN) shows that in countries of the Central Asia, shows that in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan only 5% of the estimated IDU population has got access to the OST. The report concludes that drug policies are the key constrain to the access to medical care for drug users. Similar conclusions have been reached in a mission report entitled 'State-of-the-art of opiate substitution treatment and necessary supportive structures for scaling-up'. The EHRN report is available in English and Russian.

Events

First IDPC drug policy Seminar in the Middle East and North Africa
3 - 4 Jan 2011, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
The seminar, co-organised by IDPC and the National Rehabilitation Centre in Abu Dhabi will aim to examine the current state of drug policies in the region, identify key areas for discussion and improvement, and agree on a method of working together to developing networking and advocacy activities. Read more.

Democracy, cities and drugs conference - New challenges, new solutions
23 - 25 Feb 2011, Vienna, Austria
The partners of the Democracy, Cities & Drugs II project will hold the conference 'New challenges, New solutions' in Vienna on 23-25 February 2011. The deadline for submitting abstracts is on 20 December 2010. For more information, visit the conference website.

10th Stapleford International Addiction Conference
25 - 28 Feb 2011, Athens, Greece
This is the only conference focusing on treatment with pharmacological and behavioural antagonists. The participants are invited to submit abstracts for oral or poster presentations on topics related to treatment. For more information, visit the conference website.

Seminar on social intervention tools for online outreach
17 - 19 Mar 2011, Padova, Italy
Correlation's main goal is to train participants in the use and implementation of the Social Intervention Tool within their own organisation. The training will focus on different aspects of the use of online strategies, including practical use of the SIT, online communication methods and conversation techniques, and guidelines for successful implementation. Read more.

22nd International Harm Reduction Conference: ‘Building capacity, redressing neglect’
3 - 7 Apr 2011, Beirut, Lebanon
The 2011 conference will have a strong focus on building the skills and capacity of civil society organisations in harm reduction implementation and advocacy, and will highlight the particular needs of women who use drugs and other marginalised populations within the overall harm reduction response. For more information, visit the conference website.

32nd Annual International Human Rights Training Programme
5 - 24 Jun 2011, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, Canada
The 32nd International Human Rights Training Programme, organised by Equitas, will aim to strengthen the capacity of human rights organisations to undertake educational efforts aimed at building a global culture of human rights. Read more.

6th IAS Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention
17 - 20 Jul 2011, Rome, Italy
Registration and abstract submissions to the 6th IAS Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention (IAS 2011) are now open. Delegates are encouraged to register by 24 February 2010. For more information, visit the conference website.

You are receiving this alert either because you signed up at www.idpc.net or because someone has to forwarded it to you. If you have received this alert as a forward and would rather not receive it, please reply to the sender's email address as we can only unsubscribe you if you signed up at www.idpc.net.

Unsubscribe mark.haden@vch.ca from this list | Forward to a friend | Update your profile
Our mailing address is:

International Drug Policy Consortium

124-128 City Road

London, London EC1V 2NJ

Add us to your address book

B.C. addictions study recommends free alcohol for homeless alcoholics #harmreduction #alcohol

2010-12-17T08:22:00.001-08:00

B.C. addictions study recommends free alcohol for homeless alcoholics
By Terri Theodore
Winnipeg Free Press
December 16, 2010

The price of getting high, stoned and drunk in BC (link to PDF, 2 pages)
Centre for Addictions Research of BC
News Release
December 16, 2010

The price of getting high, stoned and drunk in BC: A comparison of minimum prices for alcohol and other psychoactive substances (link to PDF, 8 pages)

More U.S. teens smoking pot: report #drugpolicy #cannabis

2010-12-17T08:21:00.001-08:00

More U.S. teens smoking pot: report
CBC News
December 14, 2010

FW: Ed Miliband rebukes Bob Ainsworth over 'legalise drugs' call #drugpolicy

2010-12-17T08:12:00.001-08:00

The Guardian (UK)
Thursday 16 December 2010

Ed Miliband rebukes Bob Ainsworth over 'legalise drugs' call

Former defence secretary described war on drugs as 'nothing short of a disaster' and called on government to look at other options

Hélène Mulholland and agencies

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said today that the legalisation of drugs would send out "the wrong message" to young people as he distanced himself from a Labour backbencher's calls for a "grown-up debate" on the issue.

Bob Ainsworth, the MP for Coventry North East, who previously served as a drugs minister in the Home Office and as defence secretary, has claimed that the war on drugs has been "nothing short of a disaster" and that it was time to study other options, including decriminalising possession of drugs and legally regulating their production and supply.

His comments were met with dismay by the party leadership, while fellow backbencher John Mann claimed that Ainsworth "doesn't know what he's talking about".

A spokeswoman for Miliband made clear that Ainsworth's comments did not have the blessing of the leadership or the wider party. She said: "These are not the views of Ed Miliband, the Labour party or the wider British public."

A party source described the legalisation proposal as "extremely irresponsible", adding: "I don't know what he was thinking."

Miliband underlined the fact that Ainsworth's views were at odds with his own as he campaigned in Oldham ahead of next month's byelection.

The Labour leader told Sky News: "I am all in favour of fresh thinking on drugs. I don't agree with him on decriminalisation of drugs - I worry about the effects on young people, the message that we would be sending out.

"I have great respect for Bob as a person. On this one I don't agree with him but he is absolutely entitled to his view and he has the freedom to say things as he sees fit."

Mann, who carried out an inquiry into hard drug use in his Bassetlaw constituency while Ainsworth was drugs minister, said: "He didn't know what he was talking about when I met him with my constituents during my heroin inquiry and he doesn't know what he's talking about now."

Ainsworth, who claimed that his departure from the frontbenches now allowed him to express his "long-held view" on drugs policy, is due to lay out his case later today at a debate in Westminster Hall.

He said his ministerial stint in the Home Office made him see that prohibition failed to reduce the harm that drugs cause in the UK, while his time as defence secretary with specific responsibilities in Afghanistan, "showed to me that the war on drugs creates the very conditions that perpetuate the illegal trade, while undermining international development and security".

He called on those on all sides of the debate to support "an independent, evidence-based review, exploring all policy options, including further resourcing the war on drugs, decriminalising the possession of drugs, and legally regulating their production and supply".

His call for a review was backed by former Conservative party deputy leader Peter Lilley, who said that it was time "for all politicians to stop using the issue as a political football".

"I have long advocated breaking the link between soft and hard drugs - by legalising cannabis while continuing to prohibit hard drugs," said Lilley. "But I support Bob Ainsworth's sensible call for a proper, evidence-based review, comparing the pros and cons of the current prohibitionist approach with all the alternatives, including wider decriminalisation and legal regulation."

Ainsworth cited the legalisation of alcohol in the United States after
13 years of prohibition to argue that after 50 years of global drug prohibition it was time for a "genuine and grown-up debate" about alternatives to prohibition, which he said had "failed to protect us".

"Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harms to individuals, communities and entire countries, with the poor the hardest hit," he said.

"We spend billions of pounds without preventing the wide availability of drugs. It is time to replace our failed war on drugs with a strict system of legal regulation, to make the world a safer, healthier place, especially for our children. We must take the trade away from organised criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists."

The backbencher criticised the government's new drugs strategy, which aims to shift the focus from reducing the harm caused by drugs to recovery as the most effective route out of dependency. "It is described by the home secretary as fundamentally different to what has gone before; it is not," he said.

"To the extent that it is different, it is potentially harmful because it retreats from the principle of harm reduction, which has been one of the main reasons for the reduction in acquisitive crime in recent years."

Ainsworth suggested one way to review the policy would be to conduct an impact assessment of the Misuse of Drugs Act in line with a home affairs select committee recommendation made in 2002 for the government (then
Labour) to explore alternatives to prohibition, including legal regulation.

The report by the committee, of which David Cameron was a member at the time, did not support legalisation and regulation in its conclusion at the time, but added that drugs policy should "not be set in stone".

However, one of its recommendations did urge the government to initiate a discussion within the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of alternative ways - including the possibility of legalisation and regulation - to tackle the global drugs dilemma.

James Brokenshire, the crime prevention minister, said: "Drugs are harmful and ruin lives - legalisation is not the answer.
Decriminalisation is a simplistic solution that fails to recognise the complexity of the problem and ignores the serious harm drug taking poses to the individual.

"Legalisation fails to address the reasons people misuse drugs in the first place or the misery, cost and lost opportunities that dependence causes individuals, their families and the wider community."

Caroline Chatwin, a drugs policy expert at the University of Kent, said that while it was important for people such as Ainsworth to publicise their support for changes to British drug policy, "it remains regrettable that this public support is unable to be offered by those in a current frontline position".

She added: "Ainsworth states that he is only able to express these views now that he no longer occupies a front line position and Cameron seems to have abandoned his own relatively liberal standpoint on this issue now that he is prime minister. While this suppression of the opinion of those in power continues to be the case, Britain will not be able to participate in an open and honest debate on this subject and will not be able to effect a much needed evidence-based policy."

--
Drugs & Democracy Info <drugs@tni.org>
Transnational Institute (TNI)
De Wittenstraat 25 | 1052 AK Amsterdam (The Netherlands) Tel +31-20-6626608 | Fax +31-20-6757176 http://www.tni.org/drugs http://www.druglawreform.info/ http://www.ungassondrugs.org/
Twitter: @DrugLawReform
_______________________________________________
Dd-world mailing list
https://lists.tni.org/mailman/listinfo/dd-world

MDMA: Empathogen or love potion? #MDMA

2010-12-16T08:22:00.000-08:00

MDMA: Empathogen or love potion?
E! Science News
December 15, 2010

see attached study

CANADA: Senator James Cowan blasts Rob Nicholson on misleading media statements about Bill S-10 #drugpolicy

2010-12-15T12:44:00.001-08:00

CANADA: Senator James Cowan blasts Rob Nicholson on misleading media statements about Bill S-10

http://www.firstperspective.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1085:senator-cowans-letter-to-justice-minister-nicholson&catid=25:releases&Itemid=50

Senator Cowan's letter to Justice Minister Nicholson

December 9, 2010
The Hon. Rob Nicholson, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Justice
Room 105 EB
The House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Dear Minister Nicholson,
I regret that I must write to you yet again to correct statements you have made accusing Liberal Senators of "stalling" your crime bills.
In your press conference of December 8, you accused the Opposition of "stalling" on "very important bills", and, when asked for particulars, you pointed to Bill S-10, the Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. You said:
"That bill has been before Parliament for almost two years. The Senate has had it for about a year and a half."
This is incorrect and misleading.
As you know, Bill S-10 has not been before Parliament for two years.
Your government chose to prorogue Parliament last December in order to avoid difficult questions about the treatment of Afghan detainees on your watch. Parliament only returned on March 3, 2010. You then waited to reintroduce the bill for another two months, on May 5, 2010. That is seven months that the Bill has been before the Senate - contrasted to five months that your Government delayed its progress.
Seven months is an eminently reasonable period of time for the Senate to study this bill. The bill has been controversial. Yet again, you have opted to put forward illusory solutions to serious issues.
Instead of devising thoughtful policies that could work to address drug abuse, this bill - like so many in your law-and-order agenda - amends the Criminal Code to apply mandatory minimum prison sentences.
The problem is, mandatory minimum sentences do not work to deter crime. And this is a conclusion you yourself reached.
In 1988, you served as Vice-Chair of a Parliamentary Committee that recommended that mandatory minimum sentences not be used, except in the limited case of repeat violent sexual offenders. You said they are not effective and carry prohibitive costs. Your report also noted that they cause "distortions" in the justice process.
It is not "tough on crime" to impose ineffective solutions, especially those that you have noted could cause problems for the justice system.
Frankly, it is irresponsible governing.
The costs of your crime agenda have been estimated to be in the billions of dollars - and this at a time when your government has already run up the largest deficit in Canadian history. Meanwhile, your government, which came to power promising a new era of openness and transparency, has refused to disclose the anticipated costs to Canadian taxpayers of this agenda. Most recently, you alleged "Cabinet confidences" prevent the disclosure.
I fail to understand how the costs of your policy program could be a Cabinet confidence, any more than any details of any policy reached by a government. One suspects that in fact, your government is hiding behind this spurious claim, because you are either unwilling to admit to Canadians how many billions this misguided prison spree will cost - or that you embarked on this folly of a crime policy for political and ideological reasons, and actually do not know yourself how much it will cost Canadians.
You attach titles to your bills such as "The Truth in Sentencing Act"
- yet you are not being truthful with Canadians about your crime agenda. You are not being truthful about their ineffectiveness to deter crime - and you are refusing to be truthful about the costs that Canadians will have to pay for these ineffective steps.
As I wrote to you last February, justice above all depends upon truth.
As our country's Minister of Justice and the Attorney General of Canada, your first allegiance must always be to the truth, far beyond any political or partisan gamesmanship. Our system of justice depends upon it. Needless to say, I am once again disappointed that you do not concur with this very basic proposition.
It is a simple fact that the Liberal opposition - and in particular, Liberal senators - have not "stalled" your crime agenda. Once again, the facts speak for themselves:
Your government has introduced 17 crime-related bills in the House of Commons in this session. Of these:
One passed both Houses and received Royal Assent; 4 sit at first reading in the House of Commons, all since late October or early November, without your Government having brought them forward for debate or further action; 8 are being studied in committees in the House of Commons;
*
*
One is at report stage in the House of Commons;
*
2 passed the House of Commons in the past few days, and received 1st reading in the Senate on December 7;
*
One came to the Senate on November 18, passed 2nd reading in the Senate, was referred for study to committee, and reported back to the Senate on December 8. It is now at 3rd reading. (It spent more than five months in the House of Commons.) It is clear that Liberal senators have not "stalled" any of these bills. The overwhelming majority - 13 of the 17 bills - remain in the House of Commons.
Your government also chose to initiate five of your crime-related bills in the Senate:4 of these 5 bills passed the Senate; one received Royal Assent.
* The 5th bill, Bill S-10, is currently being debated at 3rd reading.
* Fully 13 of these 22 bills had been previously introduced by this Government, some several times. They died on the Order Paper when Prime Minister Harper prorogued Parliament for his own personal reasons. In other words, their progress was delayed because of the actions of your government.
It reflects poorly on a government when its members must seek to cast blame on others for their own failings. When it is the Minister of Justice - the individual responsible for upholding our laws and regulations, and ensuring that Canada is a just country - then our justice system is eroded.
Minister Nicholson, you cannot expect Canadians to take responsibility for their actions, when you, the head of our justice system, do not.
Accordingly, I am confident that you will wish to quickly correct the record, and acknowledge that the Liberal opposition in the Senate has not in fact "stalled" your Government's anti-crime agenda.
I look forward - once again - to your clarification of these issues for Canadians.
Yours very truly,
James S. Cowan
Cc: The Right Honourable Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Cc: The Honourable Marjory LeBreton, Leader of the Government in the
Senate

February 4, 2010
The Hon. Rob Nicholson, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Justice
Room 105 EB
The House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Dear Minister Nicholson,
I am writing concerning several statements made by you on Friday, January 29 when defending Prime Minister Harper's appointment of an additional five Conservative Senators. In the past 12 months, Prime Minister Harper has made an unprecedented 32 appointments to the Senate - the most Senate appointments made by any Canadian Prime Minister in a 12-month period since Confederation.
I was puzzled to read press reports in which you defended the latest Senate appointments as necessary to allow your Government "to move forward on [y]our tackling-crime agenda." You accused the Liberal opposition of having "obstructed that agenda in the Senate." According to a transcript of your press conference, you said:
"The Ignatieff Liberals have abused their majority in the Senate by obstructing law and order bills that are urgently needed and strongly supported by Canadians."
I can only assume that you have been misinformed as to the progress of anti-crime legislation. In fact, as I am sure your Cabinet colleague, Senator Marjory LeBreton, would tell you, the overwhelming majority of your Government's anti-crime bills had not even reached the Senate when Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose to prorogue Parliament.
Indeed, an honest examination of the record compels one to acknowledge that the greatest delays to implementation of your justice agenda have resulted from your own Government's actions - sitting on bills and not bringing them forward for debate, delaying bringing legislation into force, and ultimately, of course, proroguing Parliament. That action alone caused some 18 of your justice-related bills to die on the Order Paper.
As a Canadian Press report described, "Indeed, [Prime Minister] Harper himself has done far more to delay his own crime legislation, by proroguing Parliament and other stalling tactics, than Liberal senators have ever done."
Your Government introduced 19 justice-related bills in the House of Commons. Of these, 14 were still in the House of Commons at prorogation. Of the five justice bills that passed the House of Commons and came to the Senate:
two passed the Senate without amendment;
*
*
one (the so-called Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime bill) was tabled by your Government in November in the Senate but not brought forward for further action after that;
*
one was passed with four amendments and returned to the House of Commons which did not deal with it before Parliament was prorogued; and
*
one was being studied in committee when Parliament was prorogued and all committee work shut down.
*
There were a further two justice bills that your Government chose to initiate in the Senate. One was passed by the Senate after 14 days, sent to the House of Commons, passed and given Royal Assent. The other was tabled in the Senate on April 1, but has not been brought forward by your Government for any further action since then.
*
*
In terms of the status of the 14 law-and-order bills in the House of Commons, that had not yet reached the Senate when Parliament was
prorogued:
Four of these bills have been sitting in the House of Commons at first reading, three in that state since October, and one since November - your Government chose not to bring any of these bills forward for second reading debate.
Another bill, Bill C-19, was tabled in the House of Commons by your Government in March, 2009, brought forward for two days of second reading debate in June, and not brought forward for any further action since then.
* Similarly, Bill C-35 was tabled in June, brought forward for one day of second reading debate in October, and no further action taken since then.
* Seven justice-related bills were being studied in Committee in the House of Commons as of prorogation. That work, of course, was required to stop immediately upon prorogation.
* One bill - Bill C-34, the Protecting Victims from Sex Offenders bill - got as far as to be reported back from the House of Commons Committee on December 7, before dying on the Order Paper with the Government's prorogation of Parliament.
* I fail to understand how this factual record could lead you to say, as you did in your press conference that, "the record also shows that the Liberals are soft on crime" or that the Liberals in the Senate "obstructed" law and order bills. In fact, as I am sure you will now recognize, it is your Government that has failed to move forward a number of your own anti-crime bills. And, of course, by choosing to prorogue Parliament, Prime Minister Harper chose to let 18 of his Government's 21 "tough-on-crime" bills die on the Order Paper.
Comparing the numbers, Canadians would have to conclude that it is the Harper Conservatives who have chosen to obstruct law and order bills - while shamelessly trying to smear the Liberals and the Senate with the blame.
It is difficult to take a law-and-order agenda seriously when it is argued with so little respect for facts. Justice above all depends upon truth. As our country's Minister of Justice and the Attorney General of Canada, your first allegiance must always be to the truth, far beyond any political or partisan gamesmanship. Our system of justice depends upon it. How can Canadians have any confidence in their justice system, if the person responsible for that system - the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada - is prepared to play fast and loose with the truth?
In your press conference, you pointed to three bills as evidence of Liberal Senators' supposed "obstruction" of your Government's agenda:
Bills C-15, C-25 and C-26.
Bill C-15 was passed by the Senate with four amendments. These amendments represented our advice to the House of Commons, reflecting what we heard and concluded after listening to testimony from Canadians about the bill. That is our job as members of the second legislative House of Canada's Parliament. We fully expected to hear back from the House of Commons with that House's considered response to our advice. Unfortunately, that was not to be: instead, Prime Minister Harper chose to prorogue Parliament. The Senate's work - done in the best tradition of Canadian parliamentary democracy - was lost.
While we may disagree as to whether the Senate's amendments improved the bill (as I would say) or weakened it (as you would say) what cannot be truthfully said is that the Senate either delayed or obstructed the passage of the bill.
What "killed" the bill in the end, was not the Senate but the Prime Minister in shutting down Parliament before the House of Commons had a chance to consider the amendments proposed by the Senate.
I was particularly surprised that you referred to Bill C-25 during your press conference. That bill, which dealt with limiting credit for time spent in pre-sentencing custody, passed the Senate without any amendments on October 21, 2009, yet as of this writing, according to the Library of Parliament and the Privy Council Office, the bill has still not been brought into force by your Government - more than three months later. One is left to wonder whether you simply forgot to bring it into force? Or was the bill more about the appearance of being "tough on crime" than actually taking action? Certainly we now know that bill was not as urgent a priority for the Harper Government as was initially represented.
Finally, Bill C-26 was being studied by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee when Parliament prorogued. As of prorogation, that bill had been in the Senate for 38 days. By comparison, the bill spent 42 days in the House of Commons. Committee study of proposed legislation is what many observers say is among the best work of the Senate. I am sure you want Canada's criminal legislation to be the best and most effective it can be, and would agree that the proposed changes to the Criminal Code regarding auto theft require careful study consistent with our parliamentary system.
Unfortunately, that work had to cease because of prorogation.
As Minister of Justice, and as a personal proponent of a strong law- and-order agenda, you have a duty, which I am sure you recognize, to uphold the truth and not mislead Canadians. Accordingly, I am confident that you will wish to quickly correct the record, and agree that the Liberal opposition in the Senate has not in fact "obstructed"
your Government's anti-crime agenda. To the contrary, the greatest delays to the implementation of your agenda have been due to your own Government's actions in failing to bring bills forward for debate, dragging your feet in bringing legislation into force, and most significantly, proroguing Parliament.
I look forward to your clarification of these issues for Canadians.
Yours very truly,
James S. Cowan
Cc: The Right Honourable Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Cc: The Honourable Marjory LeBreton, Leader of the Government in the
Senate

SSDP featured in The Nation magazine #ssdp #drugpolicy

2010-12-10T14:55:00.001-08:00

Hi Mark,

Have you heard about the special drug policy focused issue of The Nation magazine?

Because of our expertise in empowering young people to change harmful drug war policies, I was invited to write a feature piece in The Nation magazine's December 27, 2010 issue about how students are motivated to work for marijuana ballot measures, here's an excerpt:

"Watching these young activists voraciously consuming information about how to win an election, just days after a historic loss, was more than invigorating. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Change is coming sooner than anyone believes. And this is what it's going to look like." Read the full article here.

The cover of this special issue of The Nation couldn't drive home the point any better. If you appreciate the work that we are doing, please consider making your end-of-year donation to SSDP's work today.

Sincerely,

Aaron Houston
Executive Director, Students for Sensible Drug Policy
www.SchoolsNotPrisons.com

P.S. Check out our store for our "DARE to resist the war on drugs" t-shirts, stickers, and other merchandise.

Having trouble seeing this e-mail? View it online here.

Connect with SSDP

You received this email because you are one of more than 50,000 people who support Students for Sensible Drug Policy and subscribe to our e-list. Please help us grow our grassroots movement to end the failed War on Drugs by inviting family and friends to join. http://www.ssdp.org/invite

Unsubscribe

Not interested in this email?
Click here to unsubscribe

US: Obama's Drug War #drugpolicy

2010-12-10T12:45:00.001-08:00

Newshawk: Richard Lake
Pubdate: Mon, 27 Dec 2010
Source: Nation, The (US)
Copyright: 2010 The Nation
Contact: http://www.thenation.com/letters-editor
Website: http://www.thenation.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/285
Author: Michelle Alexander

OBAMA'S DRUG WAR

Among the very few people celebrating our country's fiscal crisis are criminal justice reformers.

Bill Piper, national affairs director for the Drug Policy Alliance, gushed recently, "Budgetary issues is where I'm most optimistic. Given the fiscal climate, there could be real cuts in the federal budget.

Next year is probably an unprecedented opportunity to defund the federal drug war." His enthusiasm reflects a confluence of somewhat surprising events.

For the first time in decades, politicians across the political spectrum, including some who were once "get tough" true believers, are wondering aloud whether the drug war has become too expensive.

The conservative Heritage Foundation issued a report on the eve of the midterm elections calling for a whopping $343 billion in federal budget cuts, including elimination of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and the Justice Assistance Grant program (formerly known as the Byrne grant program), which has long provided the financial fuel that powers regional drug task forces and the drug war machine.

At the state level, where the economic crisis has been felt most acutely, at least eighteen legislatures have reduced or eliminated harsh mandatory minimum sentences, and more than two dozen have restored early-release programs and offered treatment instead of incarceration for some drug offenders.

Could this be the beginning of the end of the drug war, a war that has reportedly cost more than $1 trillion in the past few decades, with little to show for it beyond millions who have been branded criminals and felons, ushered behind bars and then released into a permanent second-class status?

More than 30 million people have been arrested since 1982, when President Reagan turned Nixon's rhetorical "war against drugs" into a literal war against poor people of color. During the past few decades, African-American men, in particular, have been arrested at stunning rates, primarily for nonviolent, relatively minor drug offenses-despite data indicating that people of all races use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates.

In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders admitted to prison have been African-American, and when released they find themselves ushered into a parallel universe where they are stripped of many of the rights supposedly won during the civil rights movement.

People labeled felons are often denied the right to vote and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits-relegated to a second-class status for life simply because they were once caught with drugs.

Could the economic crisis finally put an end to this madness?

Is the drug war machinery that produced a vast new racial undercaste finally winding down?

* * *

At first blush, Piper's optimism seems well-founded. Bipartisan zeal for budget cutting has coincided with the Obama administration's expressed support for kinder, gentler drug policy.

Obama's drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, told the Wall Street Journal last year that he would no longer refer to our nation's drug policy as a "war on drugs" because "we're not at war with people in this country." Drug abuse ought to be viewed as a public health problem, he says, with more resources devoted to ensuring that fewer people suffer from addiction. That's music to the ears of many criminal justice reformers, who have fought heroically for such reform in far less sympathetic political climates.

Kerlikowske insists that the shift is not purely rhetorical, and in a certain respect he's right.

More money is being channeled into drug treatment. But here's the rub: as the overall drug control budget continues to grow, the ratio between treatment and prevention (36 percent) and interdiction and enforcement (64 percent) remains the same as that found in the Bush administration budget in fiscal year 2009. Expenditures for "lock 'em up" approaches continue to climb.

Many well-intentioned advocates argue that the best way to push the Obama administration to move beyond kinder, gentler rhetoric to meaningful policy reform is by presenting drug law reform as a budget issue. Given the belt-tightening mood in Congress and the reluctance of the administration to show leadership on issues of race, the thinking goes, now is not the time to link drug law reform to a broader movement for racial justice.

Ending our nation's racial divisions and anxieties is pie in the sky, a utopian dream.

Better to stick with cost-benefit analyses of drug treatment versus incarceration, and show the public that it's cheaper to send a kid to college than to prison.

The problem with that strategy is that it won't work, even during a time of economic crisis.

This moment of opportunity, which Piper rightly celebrates, will inevitably fail to produce large-scale change in the absence of a large-scale movement-one that seeks to dismantle not only the system of mass incarceration and the drug war apparatus but also the habits of mind that allow us to view poor people of color trapped in ghettos as "others," unworthy of our collective care and concern.

* * *

Why the pessimism?

Two reasons.

The first, and most obvious, is that the current economic crisis cuts both ways. The same fiscal concerns that have inspired a growing number of states to reconsider harsh and expensive mandatory minimum sentences have also inspired the Obama administration to increase funding for failed law enforcement initiatives, like the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and the Byrne grant program-two programs the Bush Administration had begun to phase out.

According to Slate, Vice President Joe Biden once boasted that the COPS program, which put tens of thousands of officers on the streets, was responsible for the dramatic fifteen-year drop in violent crime that began in the early 1990s. But empirical studies proved that claim false.

For example, a peer-reviewed study in the journal Criminology found that the COPS program, despite the hype and the cost-more than $8 billion-"had little to or no effect on crime." The Byrne grant program, originally devised by the Reagan administration to encourage state and local law enforcement agencies to join the drug war, has poured millions of dollars into drug task forces around the country that are notorious for racial profiling, including highway drug interdiction programs and neighborhood "stop and frisk" programs. These programs have successfully ushered millions of poor folks of color into a permanent undercaste-largely for engaging in the same types of minor drug crimes that go ignored in middle-class white communities and on college campuses.

Despite the ineffectiveness of many of these federal programs, the temptation to revive them has proven irresistible. Putting more police officers on payroll and preventing layoffs seems politically savvy when unemployment figures remain high and key states are up for grabs. Indeed, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced last year that Byrne grant funds (now known as JAG funds) would be used to save jobs in Columbus, Ohio, the story made the front page of the Columbus Dispatch. As Holder explained in his press release: "In January, 25 Columbus police recruits learned that they would be let go rather than sworn-in; but because of Recovery Act JAG funds these police officers will keep their jobs protecting their community." Similar considerations inspired Democrats to include $2 billion in increased funding for the Byrne grant program in the 2009 stimulus package, nearly a twelvefold increase in financing.

The channeling of stimulus dollars to law enforcement may help some keep their jobs, but as New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently observed, it's a "callous political calculus.... The fact that they are ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men and, by extension, the communities they belong to barely seems to register."

For those who might imagine that the 2009 stimulus package was an aberration, Obama's proposed drug control budget for 2011 reveals that hard economic times are not translating into any scaling back of the drug war. John Carnevale, former director of planning and budget at the ONDCP, testified before a Congressional subcommittee charged with reviewing the 2011 drug control budget in April that "with the arrival of the Obama administration came the hope that a new budget would emerge that would redress the failures of the past"; but instead the new budget looks much like the old one. To make matters worse, Carnevale explained, the 2011 budget does not represent a comprehensive accounting of federal drug control expenditures. Many spending categories that have been counted as "prevention" or "treatment" are actually funding law enforcement or non-drug-related programs-calling into question the claim that treatment funding is on the rise. In Carnevale's words, "The last time this nation saw such a large emphasis on supply reduction was the Reagan administration."

Whether one believes, as Carnevale apparently does, that Obama's drug war is actually worse than his predecessors', one thing is clear: Obama is in no hurry to scale it back to any significant degree, much less end it. The drug war is now too deeply rooted in our nation's political and economic structure to be cast aside.

The war rhetoric may have ended and the song may have changed, but the system hums along.

* * *

This brings us to the second, and more important, reason fiscal concerns won't end mass incarceration: the race card will be played by those who seek to preserve the system.

In the absence of a major social movement that proactively deals with race in a constructive way, old racial divisions will trump new concerns about cost.

If you doubt that's the case, consider what is at stake.

If we were to return to the rates of incarceration our nation had in the 1970s-a time, by the way, when many civil rights advocates thought incarceration rates were egregiously high-we would need to release four out of five people currently behind bars. More than a million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs. Most new prison construction has occurred in predominantly white, rural communities already teetering on the edge of economic collapse. Those prisons across America would have to close.

Private prison companies and all the corporate interests that profit from caging human beings would be forced to watch their earnings vanish.

Clearly, any attempt to downsize our nation's prisons dramatically would be met with fierce resistance by those faced with losing jobs, investments and other benefits.

The emotion and high anxiety would almost certainly express itself in the form of a racially charged debate about values, morals and personal responsibility rather than a debate about the prison economy.

Few people would openly argue that we should lock up millions of poor people just so other people can have jobs or get a good return on their private investments. Instead, familiar arguments would likely resurface about the need to be "tough" on "them"-a group of people defined in the media and political discourse not so subtly as black and brown.

The public debate would inevitably turn to race, even if politicians were not explicitly talking about it. Willie Horton type ads would likely resurface, as would media coverage of the "pathologies" of the "urban poor." As history has shown, the prevalence of powerful (unchallenged) racial stereotypes about the undeserving "others," together with widespread apprehension regarding major structural changes, would create an environment in which implicit racial appeals could be employed, yet again, with great success.

Even if significant reforms can be won in the midst of an economic crisis without addressing our nation's racial divisions and anxieties, such gains will likely prove temporary.

If a new, more just and compassionate public consensus about poor people of color is not forged, we as a nation will not hesitate to sweep them up en masse for minor drug crimes as soon as we can afford once again to do so. Similarly, if and when crime rates rise, nothing will deter politicians from making black and brown criminals once again their favorite whipping boys. The criminalization and demonization of black men is one habit that America seems unlikely to break without addressing head-on the racial dynamics that have given rise to our latest caste system.

Although colorblind cost-benefit approaches often seem pragmatic in the short run, in the long run they are counterproductive. They leave intact the racial attitudes, stereotypes and anxieties that gave rise to the system in the first place.

The problem lies in the nature of the system itself, not the cost. And the only way to dismantle the system is by building a broad coalition of Americans unwilling to accept it at any price.

Martin Luther King Jr. could have argued that separate water fountains were too expensive, a waste of money.

He would have been right about that. But cost was beside the point.

It should be beside the point today.
===
All private messages posted to this list are considered confidential -
not to be forwarded or redistributed without prior permission of the
original author.

US: Budding Prospects: Youth Activists Push Marijuana Reform #drugpolicy

2010-12-10T12:43:00.001-08:00

Newshawk: Richard Lake
Pubdate: Mon, 27 Dec 2010
Source: Nation, The (US)
Cover: http://www.mapinc.org/images/cover1227.jpg
Copyright: 2010 The Nation
Contact: http://www.thenation.com/letters-editor
Website: http://www.thenation.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/285
Author: Aaron Houston

BUDDING PROSPECTS: YOUTH ACTIVISTS PUSH MARIJUANA REFORM

On November 7 a group of student activists gathered in a room on the University of Colorado campus to discuss strategies for how to run a marijuana legalization campaign in the 2012 elections.

Five days earlier, voters in California had defeated Proposition 19 by a margin of seven points.

Although the vote represented the largest percentage a US legalization measure has ever garnered (46.5 percent), many in the drug policy reform community were discouraged. Young activists who had spent the past several months encouraging students on California campuses to register, and who worked furiously in the final days to get out the vote, were exhausted.

There were a lot of sullen expressions in downtown Oakland on election night.

But for the students in Boulder, and in some ways for the legalization movement more broadly, the fight is just beginning.

After all the media attention heaped on the Prop 19 campaign, it should come as no surprise that the vanguard of the legalization drive in Colorado is made up of college-age activists.

Motivating young voters was a central focus of the grassroots effort for Prop 19, and to a large extent it worked.

In a postelection follow-up, the Public Policy Institute of California found that 62 percent of voters under 34 supported the initiative. The campaign I helped to organize through Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) printed more than 100,000 door hangers with bar codes that, when scanned by cellphones, directed students to their polling place.

And we didn't stop with California. We worked with our partners in the Just Say Now campaign to organize phone banks staffed by students from all over the country, who made thousands of calls for the low cost of several pizzas per night.

The training, preceded by the so-called Mile High Marijuana Summit in Denver, was convened in this collaborative spirit, and the participants aimed to be equally sophisticated in their approach. They discussed concepts such as tempo, decentralization, adapting to unforeseen challenges and exploiting success.

Students were encouraged to "plan backward," envisioning objectives such as registering 2,000 students to vote and then stepping through a timeline of how that could be achieved.

At one point the conversation turned to the possibility of direct action, as students debated infiltrating the two parties' platform committees to push for their endorsements.

Watching these young activists voraciously consuming information about how to win an election, just days after a historic loss, was more than invigorating. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Change is coming sooner than anyone believes.

And this is what it's going to look like.

* * *

In today's money-soaked politics, any campaign that seeks broad legislative reform needs a healthy war chest.

Funding for state marijuana initiatives has been building steadily in recent years, with Prop 19 raising the most by far. Sponsored by Oaksterdam University founder Richard Lee, who brought some $1.5 million to the campaign, the initiative got a major boost from several large donors in the weeks leading up to election day. On October 7 the SSDP campaign received a $75,000 donation from David Bronner, co-owner of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, and another $25,000 from longtime DC marijuana activists Adam Eidinger and Alan Amsterdam. But that was only the tip of the late-money iceberg.

That same week Napster creator Sean Parker donated $100,000 to Yes on 19, and his fellow Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz added another $70,000 to support the measure.

In mid-October philanthropist Peter Lewis poured in $200,000. Billionaire financier George Soros followed in late October with $1 million.

That funding enabled the campaign to deploy sophisticated tactics and to mount a high-profile ad blitz-thirty-second spots on Comedy Central, a wraparound ad on page one of the Los Angeles Times. It also brought legitimacy in the court of public opinion.

In the early 2000s, when I began my professional involvement with the marijuana reform movement, talking in the media about legalizing marijuana was generally off-limits. So we picked the fights we could win. Even though medical marijuana enjoyed 80 percent support at the time, I often struggled to be taken seriously.

When your coffers are full, you don't have that kind of problem.

A side benefit of running a marijuana campaign with mainstream credibility is that it brings the issue into the light.

Being a marijuana lobbyist is kind of like being a priest.

People will tell you things about their marijuana use they would never tell anyone else. It fosters the sense that a great many more people use it than admit it. As more people talk honestly about their recreational use of marijuana, the barriers to honest discussion will erode.

It is misleading to claim, however, as some opponents do, that the cannabis movement is entirely sustained by "well-funded legalizers." Large donors are responding to, not creating, the energy that fuels the cannabis campaign.

The money is just catching up with the momentous political opportunity. What we need now is better preparation, with multiyear plans focused on training activists in targeted states-the sorts of tactics employed by top Democratic and Republican strategists. That requires an investment in the future.

* * *

Colorado's political culture is strongly liberty-oriented, and the state consistently ranks near the top of the list for per-capita marijuana use. This stature was not lost on legislators, who this year made it the first state to regulate the wholesale production and retail distribution of medical marijuana.

The state legalized medical marijuana in 2000, but its cannabis culture didn't blossom until last year, when the Justice Department issued guidelines for federal prosecutors in states with medical marijuana laws. In an October 19, 2009, memo Attorney General Eric Holder announced that federal resources would not be spent on "individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana."

This decision did not come out of thin air; it was the result of a long struggle by cannabis campaigners to persuade leaders to align policy with evolving public standards on the issue.

California voters leaped into the fray fourteen years ago with Proposition 215, the first state ballot initiative in the country to allow medical marijuana. Over the years an increasing number of states added their own laws providing for use with a physician's recommendation, giving those states' residents a chance to see firsthand that legal marijuana will not cause the sky to fall. (Today fifteen states and the District of Columbia allow marijuana for medical use.)

By 2007 a mainstream political consensus around medical marijuana laws had formed, at least among leading Democrats. During the primaries, every Democratic presidential candidate supported an end to federal raids on medical marijuana patients, further propelling the issue into the realm of serious policy discussion. Starting in the presidential interregnum in late 2008, Obama's staff conducted three rounds of voting on the official transition team website, asking users to submit ideas and vote on them. In all three rounds-during which millions of Americans participated-questions related to taxing and regulating marijuana were the top-voted questions.

Even before Obama's inauguration, his staff could see opportunity in the marijuana constituency. In February 2009, during the president's first weeks in office, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro affirmed that Obama intended to make good on his campaign promise to restrict federal raids.

In earlier times, we could have reasonably expected a serious backlash.

This time around, none came-but then again, neither did the guidelines. On April 2, 2009, I testified before the House subcommittee that handles Justice Department appropriations, urging Congress to ask the department to issue the promised policy.

And in June, I worked with Congressman Maurice Hinchey and other Congressional leaders to get the full House Appropriations Committee to do the same.

Once the threat of enforcing the Controlled Substances Act was removed, storefront dispensaries in Colorado proliferated. According to the Denver Post, the state has collected more than $2.2 million in sales tax from dispensaries this year. And now that medical marijuana is practically a given in the state, legalization is up for discussion. This is where the activists at the Colorado campaign training come in. They aim to push that discussion to the center of debate in 2012, and recent trends suggest that they'll have a good shot at success.

According to a 2009 America Votes poll, 45 percent of "surge voters" in Colorado will be more interested in voting if marijuana legalization is on the ballot.

Also, marijuana initiatives have tended to do better in presidential election years: five of the six most recent winning statewide voter initiatives relaxing marijuana penalties were passed in such years.

* * *

Most Americans would be surprised to learn that the government came close to significantly revising federal marijuana statutes in 1978. At the time the Carter administration expressed support for decriminalizing the possession and transfer of small amounts of marijuana, as did Senator Ted Kennedy, then chair of the Judiciary Committee. Kennedy even successfully pushed for the inclusion of a marijuana decriminalization provision in the 1978 crime bill.

Decriminalization laws seemed the wisest route back then, but the current debate should focus on legalization. Although decriminalization laws keep possessors of marijuana from being arrested, thus freeing police time and resources, they do nothing to control or diminish the power of criminal organizations that move and sell marijuana.

Legalization could be a fatal blow to drug cartels, since by some estimates 70 percent of their profits come from marijuana sales alone.

For the first time in history, the legalization movement is poised to make state-based marijuana regulation a mainstream position.

Because libertarian-leaning GOP voters, including Tea Partyers, generally support allowing states to decide their own marijuana policies, the 2012 presidential primary will be unlike any in recent memory. Assuming that the majority of GOP presidential contenders adopt socially conservative positions early in the race (i.e., against marijuana regulation), a plurality of voters with libertarian tendencies will be up for grabs and could swing some states' primary elections. Even Sarah Palin has called marijuana a "minimal problem."

The most telling difference between now and thirty years ago, when the marijuana reform movement last stood at the brink of major success, is that tens of millions of Americans live in states that allow the use of marijuana, and they don't seem to mind it. The sky has not fallen, and the silenced majority is speaking out.
===
All private messages posted to this list are considered confidential -
not to be forwarded or redistributed without prior permission of the
original author.

Decriminalizing Poverty #drugpolicy

2010-12-10T12:40:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Mon, 27 Dec 2010
Source: Nation, The (US)
Author: Bruce Western

DECRIMINALIZING POVERTY

America's drug policy aims to reduce illicit drug use by arresting and incarcerating dealers and, to a lesser extent, users. Whatever its merits (and there are some), the policy is deeply flawed because it is unjust. It applies only to the disadvantaged. As such, it reflects massive deficits in the areas of treatment, education and employment.

Drugs are intensively criminalized among the poor but largely unregulated among the rich. The pot, coke and ecstasy that enliven college dorms, soothe the middle-class time bind and ignite the octane of capitalism on Wall Street are unimpeded by the street sweep, the prison cell and the parole-mandated urine tests that are routine in poor neighborhoods.

The drug war is nitro to the ghetto's glycerin. In neighborhoods of mass unemployment, family breakdown and untreated addiction, punitive drug policy (and its sibling, the war on crime) has outlawed large tracts of everyday life. By 2008 one in nine black men younger than 35 was in prison or jail. Among black male dropouts in their mid-30s, an astonishing 60 percent have served time in state or federal prison.

The reach of the penal system extends beyond the prison population to families and communities. There are now 2.7 million children with a parent in prison or jail. There are 1.2 million African-American children with incarcerated parents (one in nine), and more than half of those parents were convicted of a drug or other nonviolent offense.

In the absence of any serious effort to improve economic opportunity, particularly among young men with little schooling, drug control has become our surrogate social policy. For all the billions spent on draconian criminalization, addiction remains a scourge of the disadvantaged in inner cities and small towns, drugs are still plentiful and the drug trade remains a ready but risky source of casual employment for low-education men and women with no legitimate prospects. Though drugs are at the center of an array of serious social problems in low-income communities, things are made worse by a dysfunctional policy in which arrest, imprisonment and a criminal record have become a normal part of life.

The most important lesson policy-makers can take from this historic failure of social engineering is that the drug problem depends only a little on the narcotics themselves, and overwhelmingly on the social and economic context in which they are traded and taken.

Addiction exacts a toll not because the latest drug is more addictive or more potent than its predecessors but because there is too little treatment, few family or community supports, and acute economic insecurity in low-income households. The drug trade-with all its volatility and violence-is not a mainstay of economic life because of the ghetto-fabulous drug culture and its promise of conspicuous wealth. It succeeds because there is no work for men and women who dropped out of school, who have never held a legitimate job and who read at an eighth-grade level. America doesn't have a drug problem. It has a poverty problem.

Change, however, is in the air. The states are broke and are trying to cut their correctional populations. Parole and probation reforms are successfully reducing reimprisonment for drug and other violations. Libertarians on the right and left are finding common ground on decriminalization. Hard times, it seems, are forcing reform on a profligate policy.

But policy reform-as salutary as it often is, and like the drug war before it-risks mistaking symptom for cause. If we only decriminalize, eliminate mandatory minimums and divert to community supervision rather than reincarcerate, then untreated addiction will remain ruinous, and illegal opportunities will continue to offer more than going straight.

Our best research shows that criminal justice reform must be buttressed by drug treatment, education and employment. These measures complement one another. A less punitive drug control regime acknowledges relapse as a likely stage on the road to recovery. Keeping people out of prison can carry a steep social cost unless they're meaningfully occupied. In this context, school and work are as important for the stability and routine they provide as for the opportunities they expand.

The drug war made an enemy of the poor. A successful ceasefire must do more than lift the burden of criminal punishment. It must begin to restore order and predictability to economic and family life, reducing vulnerability not just to drugs but to the myriad insecurities that characterize American poverty.
===
All private messages posted to this list are considered confidential -
not to be forwarded or redistributed without prior permission of the
original author.

UK poll on drug regulation #poll #drugpolicy

2010-12-07T08:22:00.001-08:00

Monday, 6 December 2010

UK - New poll shows 70% support for legal regulation of cannabis

The following press release was issued today by the campaigning group Liberal Democrats for Drug Policy Reform. The blog will explore its fascinating findings in more detail at a later stage. For more information on drug policy and public opinion see Transform's (soon to updated) 2004 briefing Attitudes to Drug Policy and Drug Laws: A review of the international evidence.
Note: Transform has provided a quote, but has not been involved in the poll, and has no affiliation with the LDDPR

Three other drugs: Magic Mushrooms, Amphetamines, and Mephedrone show a majority in favour of legalisation and regulation, whilst 3 in 10 people would prefer the state regulate rather than prohibit heroin supply. These poll results demonstrate that the public is ready for a mature, open discussion of alternative approaches to drug policy and that there is no need for politicians to fear a backlash should they express doubts about the wisdom of our current approach.

Rather than just ask whether each drug should be “legalised”, the poll gave brief descriptions of three regulatory options and asked the public to pick which they thought most tolerable for each of a series of drugs. The options were:

Light regulation (drugs sold like tobacco and alcohol are now) Strict government control and regulation (an example of how government could heavily regulate a legal market in an attempt to minimise harm) and Prohibition (the current status of illegal drugs).support for legalisation regulation combnes support for the first two options

Headline results include:
70% support for cannabis legalisation/regulation, with 1 in 3 of those polled feeling that it should be sold in a similar way to alcohol and tobacco. More people supporting legalisation/regulation than prohibition for 3 other drugs: Magic Mushrooms (52% to 34%), Amphetamines (49% to 40%), and the recently banned “legal high” Mephedrone (41% to 39%). 39% support for the legal regulation of ecstasy sales, 36% support for regulation of cocaine, and 30% of respondents supported the legal regulation of heroin. For alcohol and tobacco over 1 in 4 respondents supported strict government control and regulation and 8% expressed a desire for tobacco to be prohibited.
Poll result summary graph

From: Google Alerts [mailto:googlealerts-noreply@google.com]
Sent: 06 December, 2010 8:46 AM
To: Haden, Mark [VC]
Subject: Google Alert - "regulation of heroin"

Blogs

1 new result for "regulation of heroin"

Legal highs information: New poll shows 70% support for legal ...
By Loz
39% support for the legal regulation of ecstasy sales, 36% support for regulation of cocaine, and 30% of respondents supported the legal regulation of heroin. For alcohol and tobacco over 1 in 4 respondents supported strict government ...
Legal highs information - http://legalbudinfo.blogspot.com/

This once a day Google Alert is brought to you by Google.

Remove this alert.
Create another alert.
Manage your alerts.

David Nutt: 'The government cannot think logically about drugs'

2010-12-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

Subject: UK: David Nutt: 'The government cannot think logically about drugs'

The Guardian (UK)
Monday, 6 December 2010

David Nutt: 'The government cannot think logically about drugs'

The former government adviser on drugs explains why his latest research named alcohol as the most dangerous drug

Decca Aitkenhead

If someone were to invent a perfectly safe ecstasy pill, what would be done about it? It's the sort of scenario clubbers like to speculate about, usually at around 6am, a little the worse for wear after a big night out. It's less common to hear it from a neuropsychopharmacologist and former government scientist - but it is, Professor David Nutt says earnestly, "the key question". So what does he think the government would do?

"They would ban it. They would find some pretext to ban it. I think they would, because beneath all their posturing about health lies a moral position where they don't think young people should have fun, other than being drunk."

This is just the sort of opinion that got Nutt sacked. It is a little over a year since he was fired from his post as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), for publicly stating that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than LSD, ecstasy and cannabis. "He cannot," declared Alan Johnson, then home secretary, "be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy." Nutt in turn wondered why the government wanted a scientific adviser, if it wasn't interested in hearing scientific facts.

Five other members of the ACMD resigned in protest in the days following Nutt's dismissal. A philanthropic hedgefund manager then unexpectedly "came to our rescue", offering to fund an alternative foundation, which duly launched last January as the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs. Its mission statement is to "investigate and review the scientific evidence relating to drugs, free from political concerns", and Nutt has called repeatedly for an evidence-based approach to policy, rather than one based on prejudice or, worse still, political self-interest masquerading as public morality.

You do not need to hold a particular position on drug use to think that this would be a good idea. Like many people, I'd always thought Nutt sounded like an unusually objective voice of reason in a notoriously emotive and muddle-headed debate, and had imagined him to be rather in the mould of Richard Dawkins - rational to the point of austere, with a scientist's faintly otherworldly detachment.

In fact, he's more like the sort of fellow you'd find in the snug of a West Country pub. He's a big jolly man, relaxed and appealingly quick to laugh, and much more fun than I'd expected. He is also very good at exposing the confusion of much political thinking on drugs, as well as the baseless alarmism of media commentators "like Peter Hitchens, who don't want facts to get in the way of prejudice". But I have to say that I didn't find him quite as clear-sighted or rigorously dispassionate as I'd thought he would be.

Last month Nutt's new foundation published its first major report in the Lancet, which ranked 20 different drugs according to 16 different harms they do, both to users and to wider society. Alcohol came top, higher than heroin, crack and crystal meth, while ecstasy and LSD were ranked among the least damaging. It was, undeniably, the most comprehensive study of their respective risks ever conducted - and as someone who has enjoyed certain recreational drugs far more than I've ever liked alcohol, it would suit me very well to welcome its findings. But its shortcomings seemed pretty glaringly obvious, even to someone as unscientifically minded as me.

The rankings did not allow for the drugs' current legal status - and therefore availability - and so as Nutt himself has acknowledged:
"Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used."
But by that token, I suggest, one could say that drinking tea is more dangerous than climbing Mount Everest. Just because lots of people have been scalded by a popular drink, this tells us little about the risks of a minority sport such as mountaineering. If we're trying to establish the objective danger of a specific substance, in order to formulate policy, surely we can only calculate its harm in the context of its prevalence? Nutt looks a bit miffed.

"Well, you've got to start somewhere. We're pretty chuffed with what we did, to be honest. And doing it is not easy, cos you've got 16 variables and 20 drugs. It's a huge undertaking."

He points out that factoring in the impact of each drug's current legal status and availability would be almost impossible, as "there are so many unknowns there" - which is probably true. But then he seems to contradict himself, saying firstly that if their legal status were to change, "their relative harms could change a lot," then saying later:
"The ranking wouldn't change enormously, I don't think, if many or even all of them were legal."

When the report was published, he told the Guardian, "The Misuse of Drugs act is past its sell-by date and needs to be redone. We need to rethink how we deal with drugs in the light of these new findings." Yet now he seems more vague, conceding that the study is more useful in helping government to "direct its attention in terms of harm reduction"
under the drug laws that currently exist, than in helping it to decide what those laws should be. On the basis of harm to the individual user alone, the study ranked alcohol fourth, after heroin, crack and crystal meth. But Nutt admits that he still can't fully answer the question people really want to know, namely: "If you took a standard dose of alcohol, cocaine, heroin or ecstasy, which would be more harmful?" This is because there is no agreed standard unit dose, and even if there were, this wouldn't allow for repeat use, which would vary according to each substance's addictiveness.

"So what we've done is, in essence, told people our best estimate, on those 16 parameters, using the best science we have available now," he says. And given all the unknowables, that sounds about right. But phrases such as "best estimate" don't offer the certainty that the report appeared to promise.

It strikes me that the study contained another flaw, but I bring it up half-jokingly, not really expecting him to take it seriously. In addition to calculating the various harms a drug can do, why didn't they also factor in its benefits?

"Oh, absolutely," he agrees cheerfully. "That's another dimension.
Whether we'll work on it I don't know, but someone should. It's very controversial, of course, because if you tell some people there's a benefit to taking drugs they'll say it's impossible. But that's absurd.
There are not only benefits to the individual, but also social benefits."

As no one would take drugs if they had nothing going for them, this is clearly no more than a statement of the obvious. But to identify and compare the benefits would be politically catastrophic for Nutt, wouldn't it?

"Oh," he chuckles softly, shooting a wolfishly mischievous glance. "That wouldn't stop us."

Nutt is wonderfully fearless when it comes to taking on political convention. "I think most of the public would agree with our analysis that some of the legal drugs are more harmful than the illegal drugs."
But it's difficult to pin him down, because he keeps focusing the argument on cannabis, citing surveys that found a majority opposed to its recent reclassification from class C to B. But public opinion on, say, ecstasy - however scientifically unfounded - remains more hostile.
Does he think there's a legitimate place in the debate for members of the public who are vehemently anti-drugs, but have no scientific qualifications at all?

"Oh, there's no problem in people having moral debates about drugs," he says, to my surprise. "The moral dimension is the key dimension. But people don't want to talk about the moral dimension. People want to talk about the scientific dimension, because the moral dimension scares them."

I thought he was going to say the very opposite - that drugs are a scientific matter, and to discuss them in any other terms is meaningless.

"No, the moral dimension is at the heart of it, because the science is clear. We've done the science. The paper in the Lancet tells us the relative harm of drugs. What the last government has done, systematically, is pretend that there's a science that we need to be concerned about, with drugs like cannabis and ecstasy, which is the justification for doing what they did - making cannabis class B and keeping ecstasy class A. And that's immoral. Because the science does not direct policy making in that direction.

"But why are we still arguing about the science? Because people don't want to argue about the real issue. When the government decided to keep ecstasy as class A they said it's because we don't know what it might do in the long term. But when we say to the government, 'But we do know that alcohol kills you now, and is killing millions of people in the long term, why aren't you doing anything about that?' they ignore the question. And that's what I find offensive."

And then he is off into a rant about alcohol - "I've seen alcohol wreak much more damage than ecstasy in my children's generation, much more.
Clearly alcohol changes people's behaviour more than any other drug, it causes unwanted pregnancies and so on. And government policy actually encourages alcohol damage, there's no question about it." Why would the government do that? Because, he says, drinking is the only acceptable form of fun to them. "I think for Labour it reflects a traditional view, that beer and fags is what people do."

I basically agree with everything Nutt says, but I still can't help feeling slightly disappointed. His arguments tend to jump about all over the place, sounding at times almost as jumbled and impulsive as, say, my own, when I was hoping for something rather more coherent. It's hard to escape the impression that, for all his scientific training, his experience at the hands of the government has left him more emotionally bruised and less detached or impartial than he might wish to be.

He was, he happily admits, probably naive when he accepted the chair of the ACMD. "I genuinely thought reason would eventually prevail." Within
12 months of his appointment he published a paper that found horse riding to be more dangerous than taking ecstasy - and probably, he suspects, triggered his dismissal nine months later.

"It's funny how the horse riding line really bugged them," he reflects, still looking bemused. "I thought that paper would allow people to engage in a rational debate, and politicians could then legitimately say, actually it's less harmful than we thought so it's rational to move it down a class. But what it did was the opposite, it just riled them, because they cannot think logically about drugs."

He describes a truly surreal exchange with the then home secretary, Jacqui Smith, who told him: "You cannot compare the harms of an illegal activity with a legal one." But don't we need to compare the harms, he asked her, in order to see if something should be illegal? "And there was this long pause. And she said, 'You can't compare the harms of an illegal activity with a legal one.' And this is the problem. Many politicians seem to think that once something is illegal, job done. She didn't understand the paradox of what she was saying. So I think the home office were angry with me, and from that point on there were people out to get me."

He feels more powerful now, though, than he ever did when he was advising the government. "If sacking me was an attempt to shut me up,"
he laughs, "all they did was amplify the debate." But one consequence he hadn't anticipated was his new status as a folk hero - a sort of rock-star scientist - for admirers who have mistaken him for an evangelist for narcotic hedonism. Nothing, he laughs, could be further from the truth. "I'm not a liberaliser in any sense. I wouldn't allow unregulated access to any drug."

So if Nutt were God, and could devise all our drug laws without any regard for political pragmatism or historical precedent, what would they look like? He has an appealing willingness to think out loud, and ponders the question carefully for a while.

"Hmmm. Well, none of them would be available in the way alcohol is today, absolutely not." He thinks some more. "I think the space between alcohol and caffeine - which includes tobacco, speed, cannabis and ecstasy - I would allow regulated access to all of them, such as the Dutch coffee shop model. I would allow regulated access controlled by the site of availability and sensible pricing to prevent excessive use.
But drugs more harmful than alcohol - which would be cocaine, crystal meth, strong opiates and heroin - I would not want available in any way." He wouldn't criminalise drug users, but would offer medical treatment and civil sanctions to deter use.

It's hardly the narcotic free-for-all some of his fans have mistakenly imagined. Nutt himself has tried "a bit of cannabis, and speed once or twice", but the only drug he consumes now is alcohol, making him neither, as he keeps pointing out, a prohibitionist nor a hedonist. But I'm not quite convinced that even he would create drug laws based purely on science alone - I notice that when he mentions that the ACMD upgraded crystal meth from class B to class A: "because we were worried that if police were cracking down on crack dens, then [the dealers and addicts who used them] might turn to crystal meth instead." Which sounds to me like an eminently pragmatic - but not purely scientific - rationale.

It is probably a fantasy to think that drugs policy could ever be based on nothing but pharmacology. But I would still be more inclined to take advice from Nutt than most of the politicians involved in the debate.
His relationship with Labour is clearly over, so I ask if he has had any contact yet with the coalition.

"No, but I think we might be into an interesting phase now. We know that the Lib Dems have always been more sensible about drugs, and we know we've got a lot of Tories that have taken drugs. And it will be quite interesting to have a public debate.

"I'm still hopeful that we might change things now. Hopefully before I die we'll have rational drug laws."

--
Drugs & Democracy Info <drugs@tni.org>
Transnational Institute (TNI)
De Wittenstraat 25 | 1052 AK Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Tel +31-20-6626608 | Fax +31-20-6757176
http://www.tni.org/drugs
http://www.druglawreform.info/
http://www.ungassondrugs.org/
Twitter: @DrugLawReform
_______________________________________________
Dd-world mailing list
https://lists.tni.org/mailman/listinfo/dd-world

GeorgiaStraight: Drug use should be decriminalized to curb HIV epidemic, Julio Montaner says #drugpolicy #HIV

2010-12-01T15:38:00.000-08:00

Drug use should be decriminalized to curb HIV epidemic, Julio Montaner says

http://www.straight.com/article-361987/vancouver/drug-use-should-be-decriminalized-curb-hiv-says-montaner

M-J Milloy

Julio Montaner, the director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

Comment

By Yolande Cole, November 30, 2010

An internationally recognized physician based in Vancouver says drug use should be decriminalized in order to help curb an “out of control” HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada.

Dr. Julio Montaner, the director of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, said closing supervised injection sites and pursuing legal action against them is “short-sighted, foolish and irresponsible on the part of the federal government.”

“If we continue to criminalize, persecute and prosecute people who are either infected [with HIV] or at risk, these discriminatory practices will drive individuals underground and make it more difficult for us to access them,” he told the Straight by phone Monday (November 30).

Montaner, the former president of the International AIDS Society, has recently been selected for a number of prestigious recognitions for his work, including the Order of British Columbia, the Albert Einstein World Award of Science and the Prix Galien Canada Research Award.

On the eve of World AIDS Day, the Argentinian-born doctor is quick to point out the positive news - that the amount of new HIV infections in B.C. have decreased “significantly” and that over the last three years, there has been a 50 per cent decrease of new HIV diagnoses among injection drug users, a step forward he calls unprecedented.

He credits this progress to the impact of expanded coverage under the highly-active antiretroviral therapy treatment model, or HAART.

Montaner developed the concept of expanded HAART as “treatment as prevention”. The model advocates for the immediate treatment of clinically eligible people with HIV in order to reduce transmission of the virus and to reduce AIDS mortality rates.

Montaner said HIV-infected drug users, one of the most difficult groups to access, should be embraced through public health initiatives like safe injection sites.

“We have shown that by having a low-threshold environment where we embrace those that have drug addiction problems, we can work with them to improve the morbidity and mortality outcomes, at the same time that we increase… drug cessation,” said Montaner.

Despite the progress in reducing the number of new infections, he said the challenge is expanding access to HIV/AIDS testing and treatment, especially for the communities that have been the hardest to reach.

The provincially-funded pilot initiative, Seek and Treat for Optimal Prevention of HIV/AIDS, or Stop HIV/AIDS, seeks to do just that.

The project is designed to improve access to HIV testing, treatment and support services to individuals that face barriers to care, such as those facing mental health issues, addictions and homelessness. The pilot is operating for an initial four years in the Downtown Eastside and Prince George.

“We’re currently working with our partners in the health authorities to implement a wider seek and treat program, which hopefully will encourage people to test for HIV more readily, and as a result, engage in proper care at the earliest possible time,” said Montaner.

Another challenge to improving HIV treatment, according to the physician, is expanding the work that’s being done in B.C. to other parts of the country, where the number of HIV infections continues to grow.

“In Canada, we have not been able to bring down the national rate of growth of the epidemic – and more importantly, there are clear signs of an epidemic that is out of control,” said Montaner.

Of particular concern, he noted, are Canada’s aboriginal communities, where the number of people infected with HIV/AIDS is disproportionate to the rest of the population.

According to research on the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS web site, aboriginal people represent 3.8 per cent of the Canadian population, yet in 2006 they comprised 25 per cent of new HIV infections.

Emma Palmantier, the chair of the Northern Aboriginal HIV/AIDS Taskforce, said there are currently just two physicians in northern B.C. who are able to treat patients with HIV/AIDS, one in Prince George and one in Smithers. For the residents of remote northern communities, many of them only accessible by plane or ferry, this means travelling to Vancouver for treatment.

“There’s a lot of challenges and barriers that have been identified by our communities,” she said. “There is a lack of quality care service and treatment for our people, and it’s really difficult for them to get any treatment in their communities.”

Palmantier said she would like to see HIV education initiatives expanded in northern B.C.

“I’m really concerned about the youth,” she said, noting that young people make up the majority of the population in many northern communities. “There’s a need for education and awareness.”

The task force is currently drafting a preliminary report and recommendations that will be sent to local health directors and community leaders.

“Together, hand-in-hand with First Nations leadership, we should be able to find what are the elements that have to fall into place so that there is [an] increased rate of testing and increased rate of prevention and treatment in First Nations communities,” said Montaner.

Montaner is also urging for other federal initiatives to curb HIV prevalence, including a national testing day, and the need for “over-arching standards” for HIV treatment, care and prevention.

“To save money by not promoting HIV testing or by not having aggressive roll-out of antiretroviral therapy is foolish and short-sighted and counter-productive,” said Montaner.

Staff from Canadian health minister Leona Aglukkaq’s office declined the Straight’s request for an interview.

You can follow Yolande Cole on Twitter at twitter.com/yolandecole.

Safe injection sites will open with or without permission #drugpolicy #supervisedinjection

2010-12-01T11:11:00.000-08:00

Safe injection sites will open with or without permission
Minister wants to wait for Supreme Court ruling
By Marianne White
December 1, 2010

FW: IDPC November 2010 Alert

2010-11-30T08:18:00.001-08:00

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

IDPC November 2010 Alert

Welcome to the IDPC November 2010 Alert. The International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) is a global network of NGOs and professional networks that work together to promote objective and open debate on drug policy. This Alert contains news, updates on the latest publications and upcoming events relevant to international drug policy.

Top stories

IDPC Monthly Alert now available in English, French and Spanish!
Joint UNODC/INCB statement on the international drug control system, human health and human rights
Measuring up A guide for learners: HIV-related advocacy evaluation training for civil society organisations
EMCDDA launches 2010 report
First IDPC drug policy seminar in the Middle East and North Africa region!

News

IDPC welcomes three new members
IDPC is very pleased to welcome Association Prevent (Serbia), the Trimbos Institute (The Netherlands) and Association Terra Croatia (Croatia) as Network Members of IDPC.

IDPC Monthly Alert now available in French
The IDPC Monthly Alert is now available in English, French and Spanish. Subscribe now!

Joint UNODC/INCB statement on the international drug control system, human health and human rights
This statement comes as a response to the thematic report released by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Anand Grover. This report highlighted key issues of concern on the current drug control strategy, and called for a fundamental shift in drug policy. Read the statement.

Drug policy fails HIV patients: Red Cross
The launch of the International Federation of the Red Cross' 24-page report - essentially to promote a new strategy for nations to stop the spread of the virus among injecting drug users - comes in the week before World AIDS Day on 1st December. Read more.

Increasing levels of criminal prosecution of drug users threaten a burst of the HIV epidemic in Ukraine
The Ukrainian Ministry of Health has recently adopted a law that increases the level of criminalisation of users 20-fold. In anticipation of World AIDS Day, several organisations have drawn attention to the harmful, sweeping effects of this punitive law on the HIV epidemic and call on the Ukrainian government to rescind it immediately. Read more.

Russia: landmark study exposes lack of access to ARVs
In November, SIMONA+, a network of community correspondents, released a groundbreaking survey on the availability of antiretroviral drugs in 19 Russian cities. Read more.

Call for submission for the Drugs and Harm Reduction Film Festival
The Film Festival screens documentaries, advocacy films, training videos and fictional work relevant to reducing drug and alcohol related harms. The deadline for film abstract submissions is 17th December 2010. Read more.

HCLU video The Prague Declaration: 7 principles for urban policies
This short video prepared by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union promotes the Prague Declaration. Click here to sign the Declaration. Watch the video.

TNI study on harms associated with Kratom use in South East Asia
Throughout November, the Transnational Institute (TNI) has conducted a community-based study on the cultivation, trade and use of Kratom in South East Asia. The study found little evidence of harms related to Kratom use in the region. Read more.

Global Commission on HIV and the Law seeks submissions from the Asia-Pacific region
This is a call for submission from the Global Commission on HIV and the Law for the first Regional Dialogue for the Asia-Pacific region, which will take place on 25 and 26 February in Thailand. Read more.

UN Secretary General hands out methadone to patients in Cambodia
The UN Secretary General, Ban-Ki-Moon, visited Cambodia's first methadone maintenance therapy clinic in the end of October in Central Phnom Penh as part of a two-day visit to the Kingdom. Read more.

Alternative sentencing in Albania Interactive workshop in Durres
As part of the project 'Network of community services for alternative sentence' supported by the European Commission, an informative workshop was held in November with wide participation from law enforcement officers and representation from the criminal justice system in Durres, Albania. Read the report.

IAS/NIDA fellowship programme encouraging HIV and drug use research
The International AIDS Society (IAS), with the support of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), offers a research fellowship programme focusing on HIV and drug use, with the goal of contributing to advances in the scientific understanding of the issue. Read more.

Publications

Drug policy and development: How action against illicit drugs impacts on the Millennium Development Goals IDPC briefing paper now available in English and Spanish
This IDPC briefing paper highlights some of the impacts of current repressive and/or narrow drug control policies on the Millennium Development Goals. The paper is now available in English and Spanish.

Drug control and its consequences in Rio de Janeiro IDPC briefing paper now available in English and Spanish
This IDPC briefing paper presents the challenges of responding to the illicit drug market and associated violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The paper is now available in English and Spanish.

Alternative development or business as usual? China's opium substitution policy in Burma and Laos TNI Drug Policy Briefing No.33
The Chinese Government's opium substitution programmes in northern Burma and Laos have brought some developments, but have concomitantly had serious negative consequences for China's two neighbours. Read the paper.

Measuring up A guide for learners: HIV-related advocacy evaluation training for civil society organisations
The need for advocacy to address the challenges of HIV is widely acknowledged and accepted. This resource, published by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, brings together useful concepts and models identified from new literature on advocacy evaluation. Read the guide.

EMCDDA launches 2010 report
The European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction's annual report provides a wealth of information and analysis on consumption, production and distribution trends in Europe. Read the report.

Advancing the sexual and reproductive health and human rights of injecting drug users living with HIV
This policy briefing, published by the Global Network of People Living with HIV (GNP+) in collaboration with the International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD), highlights the key needs and rights of the injecting drug user community with regards to sexual and reproductive health. Read the paper.

From the mountaintops: What the world can learn from drug policy change in Switzerland
This report published by the Open Society Foundations looks at how evidence-based services such as heroin treatment, injection rooms, and needle exchange can lower HIV infection rates, improve health outcomes, and lower crime rates, based on the example of Switzerland. Read the report.

Media reporting on illicit drugs in Australia: trends and impacts on youth
This report examines the role of the news media, a medium that has a potentially important role in influencing the prevalence, patterns and harms associated with illicit drug consumption in Australia. Read the report.

Events

The impact of parental substance misuse on children's educational attainment
2 Dec 2010, Glasgow, Scotland
This conference, organised by the University of Glasgow, will be of interest to anyone working with children and young people who are affected by drug and alcohol dependence. Read more.

University of Lausanne Prevention of discrimination with vulnerable and addicted populations
9 - 10 Dec 2010, Lausanne, Switzerland
This course (in French) organised by the University of Lausanne will the conditions for the development of good professional practice to prevent discriminations and promote the right to health of vulnerable and addicted populations. Read more (in French).

First IDPC drug policy Seminar in the Middle East and North Africa
3 - 4 Jan 2011, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
IDPC is very pleased to announce that we, in collaboration with the National Rehabilitation Centre (NRC), will be hosting our first seminar on drug policy in the Middle East/North Africa region next January. The seminar will aim to examine the current state of drug policies in the region, identify key areas for discussion and improvement, and agree on a method of working together to develop networking and advocacy activities. Read more.

10th Stapleford International Addiction Conference
25 - 28 Feb 2011, Athens, Greece
This is the only conference focusing on treatment with pharmacological and behavioural antagonists. The participants are invited to submit abstracts for oral or poster presentations on topics related to treatment. Read more.

Seminar on social intervention tools for online outreach
17 - 19 Mar 2011, Padova, Italy
Correlation's main goal is to train participants in the use and implementation of the Social Intervention Tool within their own organisation. The training will focus on different aspects of the use of online strategies, including practical use of the SIT, online communication methods and conversation techniques, and guidelines for successful implementation. Read more.

22nd International Harm Reduction Conference: 'Building capacity, redressing neglect'
3 - 7 Apr 2011, Beirut, Lebanon
The 2011 conference will have a strong focus on building the skills and capacity of civil society organisations in harm reduction implementation and advocacy, and will highlight the particular needs of women who use drugs and other marginalised populations within the overall harm reduction response. For more information, visit the conference website.

32nd Annual International Human Rights Training Programme
5 - 24 Jun 2011, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Québec, Canada
The 32nd International Human Rights Training Programme, organised by Equitas, will aim to strengthen the capacity of human rights organisations to undertake educational efforts aimed at building a global culture of human rights. Read more.

International Drug Policy Consortium

124-128 City Road

London, London EC1V 2NJ

Add us to your address book

IHRA November E-Update

2010-11-30T08:17:00.001-08:00

From: IHRA Info [mailto:info@ihra.net]
Sent: 30 November, 2010 5:31 AM
To: Haden, Mark [VC]
Subject: IHRA November E-Update

	IHRA E-Updates
November 2010 Edition
1. Thematic Briefings on Human Rights and Drug Policy/K?????? ???????????? ?????? ?? ???????? ???? ???????? ? ????????????? In many countries around the world, drug control efforts result in serious human rights abuses: torture and ill treatment by police, mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, denial of essential medicines and basic health services. Drug control policies, and accompanying enforcement practices, often entrench and exacerbate systematic discrimination against people who use drugs, and impede access to controlled essential medicines for those who need them for therapeutic purposes. These briefing papers are intended to provide a basic overview of some of the core human rights issues related to drug control efforts and to show how they interconnect, and to spark a discussion of how international human rights law can be engaged to address a range of human rights concerns raised by drug enforcement laws, policies, and practices. Read More	In this Issue: Thematic Briefings on Human Rights and Drug Policy/K?????? ???????????? ?????? ?? ???????? ???? ???????? ? ????????????? In many countries around the world, drug control effort 'A harm reduction approach to drug use is still relevant', says Professor Gerry Stimson ‘Out of Harm’s Way’ a new report released by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) UN health rapporteur: Drug war ignores rights, decriminalize narcotics use ACMD: Foil, as an intervention, to reduce the harms of injecting heroin IHRA releases new briefing on the death penalty for drug offences Inter Press Service: Execution for Drug Offences Challenged Call for Candidates for Roster of Practitioners in HIV and Human Rights Joint statement delivered at African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights 48th Ordinary Session Global Commission on HIV and the Law - Call for Submissions for ASIA-PACIFIC Regional Dialogue Quick Links: IHRA website IHRA Blog IHRA 2011 Conference website IHRA on Facebook
2. A harm reduction approach to drug use is still relevant', says Professor Gerry Stimson In a lecture given at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on 17th November 2010 IHRA's former Executive Director, Gerry Stimson, defended harm reduction from political revisionism. ‘Harm reduction aims to reduce the risks of drugs, and to mitigate impacts on the individual and the wider society. It is basic good public health and social policy. So, why doesn't everyone support it? Conservative party ideologues have rewritten the history of harm reduction. They blame it on Labour. But harm reduction has a long history’. Read More
3. Out of Harm’s Way’ a new report released by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) To mark World AIDS Day 2010, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) have released a report highlighting the failures of governments and donors to effectively tackle HIV and injecting drug use, and the urgency with which a human-rights based, effective response is needed. A central message of the report is the importance of prioritising harm reduction over the criminalisation of drug use – because “it works and is a human-rights based approach”. 'Out of Harm’s Way’ outlines the severity of the epidemic and the human rights violations routinely faced by people who inject drugs around the world. Amongst the report’s several recommendations are the decriminalisation of drug users, as well as access to due legal process and health services for those who use drugs both within, and outside prisons and other closed settings. Read More
4. UN health rapporteur: Drug war ignores rights, decriminalize narcotics use Anand Grover, a well-known lawyer from India, also said the war on drugs has ignored drug users' human rights. Grover is the U.N. Human Rights Council's special rapporteur on physical and mental health. He told the General Assembly committee dealing with rights issues that people who use drugs may not get the health care they need for fear of being arrested, or may be denied health care if they seek help. Read More
5. ACMD: Foil, as an intervention, to reduce the harms of injection heroin The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has produced a report on the exemption of foil from Section 9A of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, as a harm reduction intervention. As the report states, “Evidence has been provided to the ACMD that some drug intervention agencies supply specialist foil to drug users to encourage smoking as a safer alternative to the practice of injecting.” Citing the extensive benefits of foil in reducing the risk of blood borne viruses, overdose and other harms – with few if any identified drawbacks – the ACMD report states “that the balance of benefit favours exempting foil from Section 9A of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.” Read More
6. IHRA releases new briefing on the death penalty for drug offences IHRA has released a new briefing written in partnership with Human Rights Watch and Penal Reform International entitled 'The Death Penalty for Drug Offences and International Support for Drug Enforcement'. The purpose of this briefing is to highlight the dangers associated with funding drug control activities in countries with capital drug laws as detailed in IHRA’s report Complicity or Abolition? The Death Penalty and International Support for Drug Enforcement. Read More
7. Inter Press Service: Execution for Drug Offences Challenged Two Georgian women are facing the death sentence in Malaysia in a case that human rights campaigners say has highlighted worries over the continued imposition of capital punishment for drugs offences. Babutsa Gorgadze, 26, and Darejan Kokhtashvili, 37, were arrested last month in Malaysia after they were found with more than 10 kilos of methamphetamine. Under strict Malaysian laws the pair, both mothers, are now facing mandatory death penalties if convicted and efforts are under way by Georgian authorities to stop the pair being sentenced to death if convicted. Read More
8. Call for Candidates for Roster of Practitioners in HIV and Human Rights The XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna, whose theme was “Rights Here, Rights Now,” provided a unique opportunity to bring together many people from around the world who share an interest in and commitment to a human rights-based response to HIV/AIDS. As a follow-up to AIDS 2010 and as part of a larger effort to support greater collaboration among key people working on HIV, human rights and law, UNAIDS and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network have partnered in order to develop an international roster of practitioners with experience in HIV and human rights. Read More
9. Joint statement delivered at African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights 48th Ordinary Session The International Harm Reduction Association signed a joint statement with a group of NGOs, raising objections to the Gambian National Assembly’s introduction of the death penalty for drug offences. The statement was delivered at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights 48th Ordinary Session in Banjul. IHRA co-signed the statement with Penal Reform International (PRI), Foundation for International Human Rights (FHRI), International Federation of Action by Christians for the Abolition of Torture (FIACAT) and World organization against Torture (OMCT). Read More
10. Global Commission on HIV and the Law - Call for Submissions for ASIA-PACIFIC Regional Dialogue On behalf of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, this is a Call for Submissions for the Commission’s Asia-Pacific Regional Dialogue. The first Regional Dialogue for the Asia-Pacific will take place on 24-25 February 2011 in Bangkok, Thailand. In addition to giving voice to regional and country perspectives on issues of HIV and the law, the dialogue aims to contribute to regional efforts for creating enabling legal environments which support effective HIV responses. Read More
International Harm Reduction Association - Unit 701 - The Chandlery 50 Westminster Bridge Road - London - SE1 7QY - United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 207 953 7412 Fax: +44 (0) 207 953 7404 Email: info@ihra.net Web: www.ihra.net Charity number – 1117375 \| Company number – 3223265 © 2010 International Harm Reduction Association

This message was sent from IHRA Info to mark.haden@vch.ca. It was sent from: Joanna Szostakowska, 130 Rye House 113 High Street , Ruislip, Middlesex HA4 8JN, United Kingdom. You can modify/update your subscription via the link below.

Email Marketing by

Manage your subscription

An extensive collection of references

2010-11-29T15:29:00.001-08:00

Hi all,

I have been collecting references on drug policy issues for years now and believe that I can now send them via email (using yousendit). If you say "yes please" to this email I will attempt to send these to you - it will take some time (10 minutes) for you to receive this and you will have to unzip after downloading.

Cheers,

Mark

Poll - asking the right question -UK #drugpolicy

2010-11-29T09:13:00.001-08:00

UK - New poll shows 70% support for legal regulation of cannabis ...
UK - New poll shows 70% support for legal regulation of cannabis Drug Policy Reform & Narco Politics.
www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=923758

Half of Canadians Support the Legalization of Marijuana #drugpolicy #legalization #poll

2010-11-29T08:21:00.001-08:00

Half of Canadians Support the Legalization of Marijuana
Angus Reid Global Monitor
November 29, 2010
Half of Canadians Support the Legalization of Marijuana (link to PDF, 8 pages)

IV drug policy fails HIV patients: Red Cross #drugpolicy #redcross

2010-11-29T08:14:00.001-08:00

CBC News (Canada)
Sunday, November 28, 2010

IV drug policy fails HIV patients: Red Cross

The Associated Press

The spread of HIV and AIDS among millions of people could be slowed if addicts who inject drugs were treated as medical patients rather than as criminals, the International Federation of the Red Cross said Friday.

More than 80 per cent of the world's governments "are inclined to artificial realities, impervious to the evidence that treating people who inject drugs as criminals is a failed policy that contributes to the spread of HIV," the Red Cross said.

An estimated 16 million people worldwide inject drugs, mainly because it delivers the fastest, most intense high, in what has become a growing trend on every continent, according to the Red Cross.

The launch of the International Federation of the Red Cross' 24-page report - essentially to promote a new strategy for nations to stop the spread of the virus among injecting drug users - comes in the week before World AIDS Day on Dec. 1.

The federation, which represents national Red Cross chapters in almost every country of the world, suggests ways to lessen the risk that addicts will contract the virus from tainted blood transmitted through shared needles.

It also points out that many of the addicts are selling sex to pay for their habits, which "massively increases the likelihood of spreading HIV into an unsuspecting public."

More than three million people who inject drugs now have HIV - almost one-10th of all the 33.3 million people worldwide who are infected with HIV.

'Mega-epidemics' highlighted

In the United States, about 56,000 people, many of them injecting drug users, become infected each year, a rate that has held steady for about a decade. But many of those who are infected don't know it and spread the virus unwittingly, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For years, the U.S.-based organization recommended routine testing, mainly for intravenous drug users and other people at high risk. If new infections are discovered early enough, HIV patients can be treated with drugs potent enough to postpone the slide into full-blown AIDS.

Meanwhile, the Red Cross report says China, Malaysia, Russia, Ukraine and Vietnam have "mega-epidemics" of injecting drug use. In some countries, such as Russia, Georgia and Iran, drug-injecting users account for more than 60 per cent of HIV infections.

The Red Cross calls the increasing rate of HIV infection among drug users who use needles "a public health emergency" and recommends more governments provide health services such as substitute drug therapy and clean needle and syringe exchanges.

It says studies consistently show that needle exchanges can lower transmission rates by as much as 42 per cent.

"The IFRC is focusing on injecting drug users because a growing body of evidence shows that failing to reach them with hard reduction programs not only jeopardizes their own health, but also the safety of the public at large," said Tadateru Konoe, the group's president.

The Geneva-based United Nations' AIDS agency said earlier this week that the global AIDS epidemic among the general population has slowed, with a 20 per cent decrease in new HIV infections over the past decade.

But that agency's report also noted there are still 7,000 new infections each day - a rate that means two people are becoming infected with the virus for every one who is starting treatment.

FW: [FIRST] Prostitution: Should it be decriminalized in Canada? #sextrade

2010-11-25T09:06:00.001-08:00

vote in this poll.... use this link

http://www.cbc.ca/news/pointofview/2010/11/prostitution-should-it-be-decriminalized-in-canada.html

Prostitution: Should it be decriminalized in Canada?

November 22, 2010 1:03 PM | Comments31 Recommend12

By POV

The federal government is warning that Canada could find itself in an "unprecedented" social experiment if key prostitution laws are lifted in Ontario this weekend.

An Ontario Superior Court judge struck down three prostitution laws in September, with the changes set to come into effect on Saturday.

The judge said laws against keeping a common bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution and living on the avails of the sex trade put sex workers in danger.

The federal and Ontario governments are before an Appeal Court on Monday, asking for the ruling to be stayed until a proper appeal can be heard.

Michael Morris, a lawyer for the federal government, says if a stay isn't granted, Saturday would bring about a "social experiment unprecedented in this country."

He says it will "profoundly and irreversibly" alter the status quo, hamper the court's appeal process and undermine Parliament and its right to create legislation in the public interest.

-With files from The Canadian Press

Should prostitution be decriminalized in Canada? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments below.

Thank you for voting!

Yes 67.21% (982 votes)

No 30.12% (440 votes)

I'm not sure 2.67% (39 votes)

Total Votes: 1,461

Should prostitution be decriminalized in Canada?survey software

(This survey is not scientific. It is based on readers' responses.)

What Can We Learn From The Portuguese Decriminalization of Illicit Drugs? #portugal #drugpolicy

2010-11-25T08:33:00.000-08:00

British Journal of Criminology
November issue 2010

What Can We Learn From The Portuguese Decriminalization of Illicit Drugs?

Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes* and Alex Stevens

The issue of decriminalizing illicit drugs is hotly debated, but is rarely subject to evidence-based analysis. This paper examines the case of Portugal, a nation that decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs on 1 July 2001. Drawing upon independent evaluations and interviews conducted with 13 key stakeholders in 2007 and 2009, it critically analyses the criminal justice and health impacts against trends from neighbouring Spain and Italy. It concludes that contrary to predictions, the Portuguese decriminalization did not lead to major increases in drug use. Indeed, evidence indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms and criminal justice overcrowding.
The article discusses these developments in the context of drug law debates and criminological discussions on late modern governance.

To download full PDF text study:
http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/6/999.full.pdf+html

--
Drugs & Democracy Info <drugs@tni.org>
Transnational Institute (TNI)
De Wittenstraat 25 1052 AK
P.O.Box 14656 1001 LD
Amsterdam - The Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 662 6608 / Fax: +31 20 675 7176 http://www.tni.org/drugs _______________________________________________
Dd-world mailing list
https://lists.tni.org/mailman/listinfo/dd-world

Portugal's Drug Experience: New Study Confirms Decriminalization Was a Success #drugpolicy

2010-11-24T10:45:00.000-08:00

Portugal's Drug Experience: New Study Confirms Decriminalization Was a Success
By Maia Szalavitz
TIME
November 23, 2010

Harm Reduction Canada 2011

2010-11-24T08:32:00.001-08:00

From: Canadian Harm Reduction [mailto:noharm@canadianharmreduction.com]
Sent: 23 November, 2010 7:56 PM
To: Haden, Mark [VC]
Subject: Harm Reduction Canada 2011

The following announcement is sent to you by the Canadian Harm Reduction Network
http://www.canadianharmreduction.com
Please visit our website, check it out and support us by becoming a member.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Please forward to colleagues & friends . . .

Registration is now open

for

Harm Reduction Canada 2011

Ottawa, Canada

February 23-25, 2011

For full information, click on website

Note: early bird discount ends December 31^st.

Conference Highlights:

§ Film Festival - Canada's first National Harm Reduction Film Festival with dynamic panels and events curated by the inthemindseye film festival

§ Learn about and sign the Vienna Declaration

§ Learn about and support the Canadian Drug Policy Consortium

Dedicated Presentation Streams:

Overdose Prevention

Progress around shelters & low-barrier housing

Understanding & Addressing Public Opinion

Confirmed presentations:

§ Harm Reduction Coast to Coast with Christie Wall, Parkdale Community Health Centre, Toronto ON

§ "Do-it-Yourself Policy Development"  Taking Control: Building Capacity for Civil Society Engagement in Modernizing Canada's Legislative, Regulatory & Policy Frameworks that Impact Responses to Illegal Drugs in Canada with Donald MacPherson, former Drug Policy Coordinator, Vancouver BC

§ Social Justice, Dignity & Collectivity: An Ethic of Self-Organizing Shelter Community with Aaron Munro, Vikki Reynolds & Sean Spear, Raincity Housing and Support Society, Vancouver BC

§ Adventurous Change in Shelter & Housing presentation and forum, with Cathy Middleton, YWCA Kitchener/Waterloo, ON

§ Overdose Prevention Stream with film, presentations & some 'how to' from around Canada including:

o Overdose Prevention: Steps in the Right Direction with Holly Kramer, Toronto Harm Reduction Task Force, ON

o Overdose Prevention and Intervention: Train the Trainer with Lindsay Klassen, Wellington-Guelph Drug Strategy Committee, ON

§ Best Practices for Safer Crack Kit Programs interactive session moderated by Patricia Bacon from Blood Ties Four Directions Centre, in Whitehorse YT, & Walter Cavalieri from the Canadian Harm Reduction Network, Toronto ON

§ Competencies for the Substance Abuse Workforce with Roy Olfert, Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, Ottawa ON

§ Gladue Reports - an exciting development carrying harm reduction into the justice system for First Nations folk with Little Brown Bear, Certified Gladue Writer, Midland ON

§ Working With Substance Users - Common Myths That Kill exploration with Dr. Peter Ferentzy, Author and Researcher, Toronto, ON

§ Building National Understanding & Support with Christie Wall, Parkdale Community Health Centre, Toronto ON

Also ...

§ 'Harm Reduction 2.0' - Are the words 'harm reduction' still needed? facilitated discussion/forum.

§ The Four Pillars Do Not Work - the need for a new model presentation & facilitated discussion

§ "All Harm Reduction Work Is Trauma Work Are you trauma-informed? facilitated by Tom Regehr of CAST Canada

Public Opinion Stream Day 3

- Understanding how public opinion forms, how it effects policy, funding & program delivery

- Concrete examples of conquering NIMBYism around the country

- The role of the media

- The role of the harm reduction community

- How to have a great relationship with your local media

New information is added weekly- check the website

Click here to register Do it now! Space is limited.

NOTE: Early Bird discount ends December 31^st

gt@cast-canada.ca 705-749-6145

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To unsubscribe from the Canadian Harm Reduction Network's mailing list, please reply to this message, with the subject of your mail reading "Unsubscribe" (without the quotes).

Lancet study on drug harms #drugpolicy

2010-11-23T08:13:00.001-08:00

see attached study on the harms from drugs... note that the relative benefits of drugs were not evaluated.