The professor behind Dutch addicts getting taxpayer-funded heroin has called on the Scottish Government to do the same in its fight against drugs. Researchers headed up by world-renowned addiction expert Wim van den Brink analysed Scotland’s harrowing addiction death toll. Professor van den Brink, who led a pioneering scheme in the 90s that saw free heroin administered to users in the Netherlands, said he was shocked by Scotland’s drug problem. He compared it to the opioid crisis in the US, where it is estimated 500,000 people have died from misuse since 2000. The professor of psychiatry and addiction at Amsterdam University said: “When I started looking at the data in Scotland, I was left furious."

Police in Myanmar this week announced the largest synthetic drug seizure on record in Southeast Asia. Between February and April, security forces seized more than 200 million tablets of methamphetamine, 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of crystal meth, 300 kilograms of heroin and 3,750 kilograms of liquid 3-methylfentanyl (3MF). "The amount of 3MF is truly incredible. 3MF is 10 times stronger than fentanyl, which is 100 times stronger than morphine. That makes it equivalent to a few thousand tons of morphine — or several billion doses. That has to be for global supply, not just regional," Myanmar expert Richard Horsey told DW.

A determined political movement to end the war on drugs has taken shape across Europe and North America. Harm reduction advocates say lives can be saved and resources spared, if only the state would move away from punishing drug users. Perhaps, some predict, the state could even get into the business of regulating the production and sale of once-illegal substances. Yet proponents of decriminalizing, or even legalizing, drugs have focused mostly on the world’s biggest drug importers and often overlooked the countries responsible for producing and trafficking the drugs to satisfy rich countries’ demand. States such as Mexico.

The Andrews government has approved a trial run of a safe injecting room for heroin addicts. Key upper house MP James Purcell confirmed that his vital vote would go with legislation to enable a state-sanctioned injecting room in the inner-city neighbourhood of Richmond, where dozens of lives have been lost to heroin overdoses in recent years. If established, the injecting room would be the first in Victoria, and only the second in Australia, after NSW established one in Kings Cross in 2001. It's believed the trial would run for at least two years, followed by a review.

The Organization of American States' (OAS) latest drug consumption report highlights shifting trends in drug use among youths in the Western Hemisphere. One noteworthy trend is changing cocaine consumption among high school students in South America, when compared to the United States -- the region's largest overall drug consumer. While cocaine use among US high school students has declined since peaking in 1998, consumption in South America has increased, most notably in Argentina and Uruguay, and less so in other nations like Chile and Brazil.

Norway's government proposed a bill aimed at decriminalising the possession and use of small amounts of narcotics, saying users should be offered treatment rather than face jail. "Decades of repression have taught us that punishment doesn't work. On the contrary, punishment can make things worse," Education Minister Guri Melby told a press conference. "Drug addicts need help, not punishment," she added. Under the centre-right coalition government's proposal, both possession and the use of small quantities of drugs, including heroin, cocaine and cannabis, would no longer be punishable under the criminal code, but users would still have to seek help. "They are still forbidden, but no longer punishable," Health Minister Bent Hoie said. (See also: The Norwegian decriminalization model (proposed bill))

This much we know: Americans like to do drugs. That might explain why a prescient headline in the satirical publication The Onion stands as one of the most enduring comments on American drug enforcement — “Drugs Win Drug War.” While that article was published in 1998, it was only during the past decade that its parody devolved into grim reality. In many ways, this reality has been an aching nadir, with more lives lost annually to overdoses than AIDS, gun violence and car crashes. But this past decade also brought its highs (pun intended): Recreational marijuana prohibitions started to fall in a domestic domino effect as one state after another accepted that it was pointless to criminalize the use of such a widely consumed drug.

Downtown Eastside residents at high risk of overdose now have Vancouver’s support to get untainted drugs, but the federal government has the final say whether they’ll get access to a legal supply. A motion to support an application from the Drug User Liberation Front — to run North America’s first compassion club to give members access to untainted heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine — was approved by Vancouver council last week. Drug User Liberation Front co-founders Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx submitted an application for a federal exemption to Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act on Aug. 31 and had asked for city support. While awaiting the federal decision, Liberation Front is considering whether to purchase more illicit drugs from the dark web to hand out in the DTES.

Poppy cultivation in Mexico and Colombia is part of a local economy geared almost exclusively toward the illegal market abroad: it is driven by demand for heroin, primarily in the United States. North America, including Canada, is currently experiencing a major humanitarian crisis related to this use and the opioids circulating on this market. To understand the dynamics of this market and to evaluate whether political responses to the phenomenon are appropriate and effective, we present this report on opium poppy cultivation in Mexico and Colombia, which, together with Guatemala, are the poppy-producing countries of Latin America.

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Across the world, the state of environmental stress is unprecedented. As scholarship and activism on ‘environmental justice’ points out, poorer and marginalised communities face particular exposure to environmental harms. This holds particularly true for populations in the global South. The role of illicit drugs in relation to these environmental stresses is an underexplored terrain. Yet, as this report will argue, drugs, as well as the policy responses to them, are an environmental issue.

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Drugs now kill about 70,000 Americans every year—more than car crashes or guns (both 39,000), more than AIDS did at the height of its epidemic (42,000), and more than all the American soldiers killed in the entire Vietnam war (58,000). In 2017 about 47,600 of those deaths were caused by opioid overdose – a fivefold increase since 2000. Only 32% of those opioid deaths involved prescription pills; the rest were from illegal heroin and fentanyl. But three out of four heroin users first became addicted to pills. What started as a problem of abused prescription drugs has been transformed by corporate greed, a failure of the health system and a lack of political will into a social disaster.

In the last few years, while the business and economy in the state kept sliding, the drugs trade flourished. With addicts turning peddlers and several reports of political patronage to the drugs trade, chitta became a veritable business in Punjab. The business of drugs sprawls from the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the farms of rural Punjab and drawing rooms of Ludhiana and Chandigarh, involving a vast variety of actors such as the unemployed rural youth, urban rich brats, spoilt college girls, bored housewives and even cops. Punjab's drug problem is not restricted to the typical demographic of unemployed youth. It is rampant across divides such as class, gender, age and geography. No wonder, the Punjab government recently ordered all its employees to undergo drug tests.

As a farmer eking out a living in Peru’s central jungle, Rubén Leiva grew one cash crop that seemed immune from global cycles of booms and busts. But the coronavirus pandemic has accomplished what neither other international crises nor a U.S.-backed “war” ever could: a collapse in the price of coca leaf, a natural stimulant that is the building block of cocaine. The great coca crash of 2020 — prices for the leaf in some regions of South America have fallen as much as 73 percent — illustrates the extent to which the pandemic is disrupting every aspect of global trade, including the traffic in illegal drugs. Lockdowns have sealed regional borders and sharply curbed domestic and international transit, challenging the ability of cartels to move product by land, air or sea.

Today, the contributions of drug suppliers towards harm reduction efforts remain mostly neglected by history, although some within the grassroots end of the movement still emphasise their critical role. The work of Van Dam in The Netherlands and Southwell in the United Kingdom is part of a mostly-forgotten history of drug dealers organising themselves and alongside drug-user activists to advance the health and wellbeing of people who use drugs. In 1996, as the City of Rotterdam was cracking down on the public presence of drug suppliers and consumers, or what they called “nuisances,” the City officially supported drug consumption rooms (DCR). But some drug-user activists were skeptical of these newly above-ground programs. “It is only concerned with regulating and monitoring users.”

It was in 1992 that the Platzspitz city park – right by Zürich train station and internationally nicknamed “Needle Park” – was cleared out by the police, who had previously tolerated drug use and sales there. This was eventually followed, however, by a far more enlightened policy. Switzerland found itself at a crossroads, and chose to take the path of careful consideration instead of ostracization, incarceration and destruction of fellow human beings. From the mid-1990s, we vastly expanded syringe services and methadone access, and also permitted the limited prescribing of heroin – a policy with many well-studied benefits, which spawned a number of imitators around the world. 

The epidemic of drug overdoses, often perceived as a largely white rural problem, made striking inroads among black Americans last year — particularly in urban counties where fentanyl has become widespread. Although the steep rise in 2016 drug deaths has been noted previously, these are the first numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to break down 2016 mortality along geographic and racial lines. They reveal that the drug death rate is rising most steeply among blacks. Fentanyl-laced cocaine, too, may be playing a role. A study found that cocaine-related overdose deaths were nearly as common among black men between 2012-2015 as deaths due to prescription opioids in white men over the same period.

A Vancouver man is planning to open what would be Canada’s first store that sells heroin, cocaine, meth, MDMA, and other drugs as a way to reduce the rising number of deaths stemming from the overdose crisis. Jerry Martin, 51, wants to open the brick-and-mortar shop by the end of January, when British Columbia’s new drug decriminalization policy kicks in. The pilot project, which will last three years, will mean it’s no longer illegal to possess up to 2.5 grams of opioids, crack and powder cocaine, meth, and MDMA. Selling those drugs will remain illegal. But Martin, a former cocaine user, believes providing drugs that have been tested for contaminants will save the lives of drug users. 

Nurses and volunteers watch over drug users at the Toronto's first pop-up supervised drug-use site. In the month since the site started operating in a gritty east-end park with the tacit approval of police and city officials, volunteers have stopped 27 overdoses. The activists behind the site, who call themselves the Toronto Harm Reduction Alliance, say it's a desperately needed response to the rising wave of opioid overdose deaths caused by the increasing presence of fentanyl in other street drugs. The mayor and city officials do not want it to become a permanent fixture in the park.