A recent neuroscience study from Harvard Medical School claims to have discovered brain differences between people who smoke marijuana and people who do not. Such well-intentioned and seemingly objective science is actually a new chapter in a politicized and bigoted history of drug science in the United States. Different-looking brains tell us literally nothing about who these people are, what their lives are like, why they do or do not use marijuana, or what effects marijuana has had on them.

In 2014 the UK banned khat, the stimulant stems and leaves of the tree Catha edulis. This move brought to an end the weekly importation into London’s Heathrow of about 56 tonnes of the commodity. Most had been grown on farms in Kenya’s Nyambene Hills in Meru County. An estimated £12.7 million was remitted to Kenya from the UK for this trade in 2010 alone. The loss of this income has had adverse economic effects in those parts of the growing regions that had been reliant on the UK market. While prohibitions are being introduced in other countries too, in Kenya the British ban has actually served to make the substance more respectable and secure in status. But with its last major international market of Somalia threatened, the fate of this international pariah crop is far from certain.

The Library of Congress (LOC) is documenting racist depictions of marijuana in early 20th century news coverage that helped to drive the criminalization of cannabis, highlighting sensationalized articles about the plant that the federal research body says effectively served as “anti-Mexican propaganda.” As part of the institution’s “Chronicling America” project, which digitizes media from throughout U.S. history, LOC published a timeline last week that gives examples of headlines concerning cannabis from 1897 to 1915. “From the late 19th to early 20th century, newspapers reported the early rise of marihuana (known today as marijuana),” the post states.

Banning a plant with hundreds of industrial and medical uses was never going to work out well, but 2022 saw marijuana prohibition reach peak absurdity, not to mention peak confusion for consumers and new businesses trying to make sense of it all. At first glance, cannabis reform appears to be humming along smoothly. Maryland, Missouri and Rhode Island approved legalization initiatives in 2022 as states such as New Mexico and New York raced to establish regulations for legal recreational sales. New laws in mostly blue states expunged cannabis arrests from criminal records for thousands of people. President Joe Biden made moves to pardon federal marijuana prisoners and reconsider the federal “scheduling” of marijuana...

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrado released a new plan that called for radical reform to the nation’s drug laws and negotiating with the United States to take similar steps. The plan calls for decriminalizing illegal drugs and transferring funding for combating the illicit substances to pay for treatment programs instead. It points to the failure of the decades-long international war on drugs, and calls for negotiating with the international community, and specifically the U.S., to ensure the new strategy’s success. “The ‘war on drugs’ has escalated the public health problem posed by currently banned substances to a public safety crisis,” the policy proposal, which came as part of AMLO’s National Development Plan for 2019-2024, read. Mexico’s current “prohibitionist strategy is unsustainable,” it argued.

Alarmed by a recent spike in the number of youngsters abusing marijuana, also known as cannabis or pot, Japan’s health ministry is looking to stiffen what is already one of the world’s most draconian anti-cannabis laws. The ministry convened a new panel of experts tasked with discussing possible revision to the Cannabis Control Law, under which owners and growers of the illicit plant currently face up to five and seven years of imprisonment, respectively. While moves have been afoot in some parts of the world to legalize cannabis for medical or recreational purposes, such momentum is almost non-existent in Japan, where the plant — along with other illegal drugs — has long been deeply stigmatized under the much-hyped government slogan “dame zettai” (“absolutely not”).

Measures to dispose of laughing glass cylinders have turned the flasks into a potentially deadly hazard, waste processing industry body NVRD has warned. The problem started when the use of the popular party drug laughing gas, or nitrous oxide, was banned at the start of this year without any system for disposing of the canisters, NVRD director Wendy de Wild told the AD. A deposit system, where empty cylinders could be handed in to providers, was abandoned when the ban came into effect, resulting in dozens of potentially dangerous explosions as cylinders were thrown out with the household waste.

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.

More than 1,100 children have been trafficked into the UK’s drug trade, new Home Office figures reveal. The data obtained by the drug reform charity Transform shows that 1,173 children were enslaved by drug dealers in 2019. Figures from January to December 2019 show that the majority of the 1,853 people estimated by the Home Office to have been trafficked into the illicit drugs business were children. Transform obtained the Home Office statistics through a freedom of information request and released them on Thursday to mark the UN’s World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. (See also: UK must regulate drug market to combat human trafficking)

More than 140 people died from illicit drug toxicity across B.C. during the month of June, the provincial coroners' service says, pushing the total number of fatalities this year past 1,000. The number of drug toxicity deaths in the first six months of 2022 is the highest ever recorded in that period of a calendar year, according to preliminary data released by the B.C. Coroners Service. The tally also means more than 10,000 people have now died as a result of toxic drugs in B.C. since a public health emergency was declared in April 2016. "These were men, women and youth from all walks of life. They lived in our neighbourhoods, worked in our workplaces and played on our sports teams. Some lived ordinary lives, while others faced enormous challenges," Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe wrote in a statement.

La política de drogas “Sembrando Vida Desterramos el Narcotráfico” 2023-2033 que presenta el presidente Gustavo Petro en Cauca ha recibido comentarios positivos y también críticas de distintos sectores por las inconsistencias y vacíos detectados. En comparación con los enfoques punitivos predominantes en el pasado, la política formulada reconoce explícitamente que la “guerra contra las drogas” fracasó a nivel mundial, lo que exige transformar sustancialmente las premisas que criminalizan a los pequeños productores de plantas prohibidas, a los consumidores de drogas y mantienen en un segundo plano los enfoques de secuencia debida y derechos humanos también incluidos en instrumentos de Naciones Unidas. (En contexto: Los detalles del borrador de la política de drogas de Petro, que costaría 18 billones de pesos)

The first anti-drug law in the US was a local law in San Francisco passed in 1875, outlawing the smoking of opium and directed at the Chinese. Marijuana prohibition also had racist underpinnings. This time it was the Mexicans. Just as cocaine was associated with black violence and opium with Chines white slavery, in the southwest border towns of the US marijuana was viewed -- beginning in the early 1920s -- as a cause of Mexican lawlessness. Cocaine regulations also were triggered by racial prejudice. Cocaine use was associated with blacks just as opium use was associated with the Chinese.

A “radically innovative” new analysis of global drug policies has laid bare the full impact repressive drug laws and their implementation have on millions of people worldwide, civil society groups behind its creation have said. The Global Drug Policy Index (GDPI), developed by the Harm Reduction Consortium (HRC) ranks countries on their drug policies against a series of indicators related to health, development, and human rights. It is the first tool of its kind to document, measure, and compare countries’ drug policies, and their implementation, across the world. And the results of the first index have underlined how even the best-ranked countries are falling dramatically short in aligning policies and their implementation with UN principles of human rights, health, and development.

There are good reasons to legally regulate drugs markets, rather than persist with efforts to ban all non-medical uses of psychoactive substances. Regulated cannabis and coca markets are already a reality in several countries, with more likely to follow. But ignoring or denying that such policy shifts contravene certain obligations under the UN drug control treaties is untenable and risks undermining basic principles of international law. States enacting cannabis regulation must find a way to align their reforms with their international obligations.

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Pocas políticas públicas han sido aplicadas de forma tan consistentemente uniforme en prácticamente todo el globo como la prohibición de la producción y comercialización de estupefacientes para usos no médicos. Pero también pocas han tenido un resultado tan pobre. Resulta inminente profundizar un debate, ya inexorablemente abierto, sobre alternativas de política pública en drogas a partir de una valoración crítica e inteligente de los aciertos y, sobre todo, de los errores cometidos. Pero para ello será necesario despojarnos de los viejos ropajes dogmáticos donde todo aquello que no es la prohibición absoluta implica un sacrificio de la salud de la gente.

The federal law that makes possession of marijuana a crime has its origins in legislation that was passed in an atmosphere of hysteria during the 1930s and that was firmly rooted in prejudices against Mexican immigrants and African-Americans, who were associated with marijuana use at the time. This racially freighted history lives on in current federal policy, which is so driven by myth and propaganda that it is almost impervious to reason.

The New York Chapter of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), the prohibitionist organization led by Kevin Sabet, has submitted a request “to keep its funding sources confidential,” as reported in a September 5 Times Union article. As justification, the group cited fears that its donors would be harassed. SAM’s request for donor anonymity claims “that it doesn’t receive funding from “faceless deep-pocketed corporate interests” in the “alcohol, tobacco, opioid, or the prison industries…” Yet the organization’s attempt to avoid transparency is ironic, when SAM has just announced its intention to release a report on industry donations to the marijuana legalization movement. (See also: Marijuana legalization opponent directed to identify donors)

The cannabis plant has been used for spiritual, medicinal and recreational purposes since the early days of civilization. In this report the Transnational Institute and the Global Drug Policy Observatory describe in detail the history of international control and how cannabis was included in the current UN drug control system. Cannabis was condemned by the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs as a psychoactive drug with “particularly dangerous properties” and hardly any therapeutic value.

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Résumé en français (PDF)
Download the press release (PDF)

As a colonial construct, the global drug control regime has undermined the rights of indigenous peoples (including the right to self determination, and to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs), obliging all states to abolish traditional uses of coca, cannabis and opium by means of crop eradication and drug law enforcement. This webinar, which took place on the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples 2021, will shed light on the conflict between the drug control regime and Indigenous rights, and challenge prevailing narratives that these tensions are possible to reconcile while the UN retains the goal of a society free of drugs.