There are more than half a million people who inject drugs (PWID) in the South-East Asia Region (SEAR). The majority of countries in the Region have a significant injecting drug use problem and several countries have reported much higher national HIV prevalence rates among PWID—most notably Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, and some regions of India.

New Zealand’s existing drug laws are out of date, overly complex and poorly aligned with official drug policy. In 2007, the Government decided to entrust an independent agency, the New Zealand Law Commission, to comprehensively review the country’s drug law.

This report is a summary of the research carried out by the Italian Council for the Social Sciences.

The Andrey Rylkov Foundation for Health and Social Justice is pleased to present this paper on policing drug users in Russia, which was published in the Substance Use and Misuse in May 2010. We undertook qualitative interviews with 209 injecting drug users (IDUs) (primarily heroin) in three Russian cities: Moscow, Barnaul, and Volgograd. We explored IDU's accounts of HIV and health risk. Policing practices and how these violate health and self, emerged as a primary theme.

Sentencing for drug offences in England and Wales has recently undergone a widesweeping review and public consultation. Fundamental issues of principle were brought forward for a constructive public discussion for the first time and an Advice has been issued which, if adopted, will radically change sentencing in the courts for many drug offences, and particularly in the case of drug-couriers.

In 2009, the United Nations Member States decided to make further and decisive progress, within a decade, in controlling illicit drug supply and demand. Many illicit drug markets have reached global dimensions and require control strategies on a comparable scale. In that context, there is a need to better understand these transnational markets and the manner in which they operate. This year's World Drug Report is a contribution towards that objective.

A joint Transnational Institute (TNI) and Burma Centrum Netherlands (BCN) initiative today releases its first Burma Policy Briefing on ethnic conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to give meaning and insight into some of the key drug and alcohol issues that affect children from the perspectives of the children themselves. It is not to estimate the relative magnitude of a specific drug or alcohol problem or the numbers of children affected by it. Each section of this paper is preceded by one or two key statistics and whilst the quotations that follow may highlight a need to develop more robust and detailed statistics on a key issue, the overriding objective is to give the children a voice.