By John Collins - London Schools of Economics,

“Decades ago, the Thai royal family effectively decided that illicit drug production was a long-term policy development issue, and that they would therefore treat it as such. They would not just go in and eradicate crops unless there were alternatives for those communities to live off, and they have seen the benefits of that policy.”

Dr John Collins, founding Executive Director of LSE's International Drug Policy Unit (IDPU), is explaining why the Drugs and Development Hub (DDH) focuses on the work of its partner, the Mae Fah Luang Foundation, and why Thailand is often seen as a success story in development and drug policy. While northern areas of Thailand used to be a significant opium growing and trafficking region, he says, decades of government intervention has effectively shifted those communities and their economies away from a reliance on illicit crops.

“Now there are a lot of reasons why you can’t just replicate or transfer that experience to say Colombia” Dr Collins cautions. “Thailand is much smaller, the cultivation areas were much more constrained, they had support of the Royal family etc, but it is a good example of effective policy and there are of course lessons we can learn from that."

Creating the environment to enable such lessons to be learnt is one of the aims of the DDH, which launched in January 2020 at an event hosted by the Centre for the Study of Security and Drugs (CESED) at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Led by the IDPU, in collaboration with the Global Partnership on Drug Policies and Development and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, the Hub provides a platform to enable policymakers and practitioners across a range of disciplines to forge connections and learn from each other.

“There is currently quite a siloed approach to international drug policy,” Dr Collins says. “You have certain actors that focus specifically on drugs, or specifically on crime or development and there's not really a platform to enable cross-cutting discussions where these fields meet.”

The DDH aims to change this. “There are a lot of institutional hurdles to creating these collaborative or inter-institutional discussions” Dr Collins explains. “It’s not necessarily through a desire not to engage, but there are institutional set ups which push back against any meaningful collaboration. We’re aiming to bring people together in ways that will encourage these networks and develop the discussions that we feel are currently missing."

How can we end the War on Drugs?

The Icelandic government has proposed the decriminalisation of drugs for personal use by adults, and this week launched a consultation exercise to gauge public opinion on the matter.

The initiative, led by Minister of Health Svandís Svavarsdóttir, is intended as a harm-prevention measure. It includes the provision of additional resources to support users, with particular focus on more marginalised members of society, Vísir reports.

This new approach is based on regarding users as patients rather than criminals, and follows the minister’s successful introduction last year of a bill to provide safe spaces for drug injection.

Under current law, possession of illegal drugs is usually punished as a criminal matter. However, as the government suggests in its public consultation document, this approach has shifted in societies around the world as understanding of the issue improves.

“In the last decade, there has been a change in attitudes towards drugs worldwide, as doubts about the usefulness of the international war against drugs have grown,” states the consultation document. “The effects of these changes in attitude have also been felt in Iceland, and in recent years the decriminalisation of consumption doses has been prominent in public discourse.”

The public consultation, which can be found here, is open until January 31st.

Icelandic government proposes drug decriminalisation

By Stephen Kalin / The Wall Street Journal

Saudi Arabia said Monday it had imposed a moratorium on capital punishment for drug-related offenses that led to an 85% reduction in executions, as the conservative Muslim kingdom seeks to soften its image to attract Western tourists and foreign investment.

The state-backed Human Rights Commission said 27 executions were recorded in 2020. That is down from 184 the year before, according to rights watchdog Amnesty International, when Saudi Arabia trailed only China and Iran globally.

Saudi Arabia curbs death penalty in move to soften image

In 2019, Equis Justicia para las Mujeres A.C. (Equis hereinto) carried out an advocacy-oriented research on women and girls who use drugs and are in detention, either in prison centres or in drug treatment centres. Our purpose was to listen to and give visibility to women and girls who use drugs, in order to increase knowledge and reduce stigma. Our research collected women’s testimonies on how their drug use began, which circumstances and motivations prompted it and what response they received. We interviewed 43 women and girls in a total of three female prison centres, two public and two quasi-public treatment centres and five 

The experience of being locked up in a treatment centre happens at different stages of their lives, but is generally ignited by their families, in response to a situation they see no other solution for. Usually, people who use drugs are taken by their families and forced to enter the centre, or picked up using violence by the centre’s personnel (usually former drug users) in their house, stuck into a van and forced to stay in the centre against their will. Families pay a weekly amount for the person’s maintenance and usually are not allowed to release their relative until the treatment is considered to be over. However, the decision to determine the treatment as successful – on an abstinence-based model – is made by the drug centres’ owners themselves, who are often former drug users or religious figures, such as pastors, and clearly have an economic interest in keeping people inside.

During our visits, we witnessed and recorded through testimonies all sorts of abuse and ill-treatment: people detained are usually given rotten food, they are not allowed to wash themselves every day, have no access to education or medical attention and are often punished in humiliating ways, such as having wet, hard sand thrown at their bare back by their peers – who are compelled to do it – or being forced to wash blankets and then sleep with them while they are still wet and freezing cold. In the case of relapse – which is a normal condition in the rehabilitation process of substance dependency – they are also punished, for instance by shaving their head or sitting at the front on “the bench of relapse” during group treatment sessions.

Arbitrary detention and compulsory drug treatment in Mexico: A forsaken face of female incarceration

Unlike some of its neighbouring countries, the Brazilian government has continued to block efforts to decriminalise cannabis. In 2017, when Argentina legalized medical cannabis, the right-wing Brazilian president Michel Temer censored the publication of a study by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ) which questioned the very existence of a drug addiction epidemic; the government was accused of suppressing data that would call its war on drugs into question.

The current president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has promised to invest in the war on drugs since he began campaigning for the presidency in 2018, a vow he renewed upon election. In 2019, during his first year in office, Bolsonaro signed a decree establishing his own kind of drug policy. The new piece of legislation excludes previously adopted harm reduction approaches, relying on the enforcement of coercive abstinence. In practice, this channels taxpayers’ money into abstinence-only institutions and removes support for people who use drugs.

The Brazilian government also altered the composition of the National Drug Policy Council, excluding civil society representatives; 13 seats were removed, including those held by the Order of Attorneys of Brazil; the Federal Council of Social Work; the Federal Council of Medicine; the Federal Council of Nursing; the Federal Council of Psychology; the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science; and the National Student Union. The seats previously occupied by an anthropologist, a journalist, and an artist were also extinct.

In Brazil, Bolsonaro continues to pump blood to the war on drugs

The European Union (EU) which welcomed Sri Lanka’s record on maintaining its moratorium on executions had encouraged the country to legally abolish the death penalty.

A Joint Statement released by the EU and the Foreign Ministry yesterday said the EU also reiterated its opposition to the use of the death penalty in all circumstances.

This has been discussed during the 23rd meeting of the EU-Sri Lanka Joint Commission held yesterday.

The EU and Sri Lanka took note of the ad-hoc Counter-Terrorism Dialogue, which took place in Colombo in July 2019 and reviewed on-going cooperation provided through an EU funded project with UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Interpol.

EU encourages Sri Lanka to legally abolish death penalty

Indonesia is a tough jurisdiction for achieving drug policy reform. Massive corruption, lack of evidence in policy making, and a struggling democracy are all prevailing hurdles that won’t go away in the near future.

Every year at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Indonesia’s government pats itself on the back over-proudly about diverting people from the criminal justice process. For those who work in the field, we know for sure that such “success” aren’t manifested in practice – and if there’s any, it should be attributed as well to the work of civil society actors and it seldom has nationwide implementation.

Indonesia’s approach towards drug policy, like many countries, is still steered by a prohibitionist manner: simple drug possession could imprison someone 4-12 years, selling/buying drugs more than 5 grams is an act punishable with the death penalty, and forced inpatient rehab is viewed as “humane” punishment.

As of October 2020, Indonesia’s prison capacity is around 135,000 yet it is filled with almost 240,000 people. Stopping to arrest people who use drugs will directly help the situation since the number of people who are charged with the drug law is almost 136,000 and most of them are people who use drugs.

How COVID-19 failed (to inspire) drug policy reform in Indonesia 

Alþingi has passed a bill which will make it legal for municipalities around the country to open safe injection sites (SIS) for intravenous drug users, 

 reports. Heiða Björg Hilmisdóttir, chair of the City of Reykjavík’s Welfare Committee, has praised the bill as a step in the right direction and believes that in Reykjavík, such a facility would do the greatest good if opened downtown. According to the SIS bill, around 700 people use intravenous drugs in Iceland each year. It’s estimated that somewhere between 25 and 40 people would use the Reykjavík SIS initially.

Safe injection sites (also referred to as overdose prevention centres, supervised injection facilities, or drug consumption rooms) are facilities where individuals over the age of 18 can use intravenous drugs in a safe environment, under the supervision of healthcare professionals and without fear of arrest or legal repercussions. They are intended to provide sterile injection supplies, provide healthcare guidance, referrals to rehabilitation and social services, and monitor for overdose, thus decreasing overdose-related expense and pressures on the healthcare system, increasing the likeliness of users seeking treatment and social aid, and reducing behaviours that put users at risk of contracting HIV and Hepatitis C, such as needle sharing.

News