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Originally posted here The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the UN agency charged with developing strategies to reduce global poverty, has strongly criticised current international drug policy, highlighting the disastrous costs it is producing – particularly for the world’s poor. In the agency’s formal submission to the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs (PDF), launched…Continue Reading Another UN agency savages the drug war

In early January around 2,000 members of Argentina’s military-style border force – known as the gendarmeria – left the country’s second city of Rosario.  They had arrived 9 months earlier, on April 9th, carried clandestinely into the city as part of an elaborate rouse involving a fake climate change conference.  In a surprise display of force the…Continue Reading View From the Ground: Rosario, Argentina

In July, Global Drug Policy Observatory staff Professors David Bewley Taylor and Julia Buxton delivered the 10 day intensive Human Rights and Drug Policy summer school, at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary. Funded by the Open Society’s Global Drug Policy Programme, the summer school was attended by 24 participants from across the world. This included…Continue Reading GDPO Summer School Success

This post was originally published here by the International Drug Policy Consortium. As it its customary practice, the UNODC released its flagship publication on June 26th, the UN’s designated ‘International day against drug abuse and trafficking’ as well as the occasion of the ‘Support Don’t Punish’ day of action, which seeks to draw attention to the…Continue Reading 2014 The World Drug Report: The Titanic sails at dawn

It has long been known that the most cost-effective way to combat the drug trade is through treatment, prevention, and education at home.  These methods continue to be underfunded in the the main consumer countries.  Instead, the focus is on supply, a policy choice that has, among many other disastrous implications, served to push routes…Continue Reading Resistance to a ‘War on Drugs’ in West Africa

The punitive element of the War on Drugs at home has led to record rates of incarceration.  Of the world’s entire prison population, twenty five percent are now in the US.  More than half the inmates are there on drug-related charges, and of these the majority were arrested for simple possession. On this note, here…Continue Reading A Temporary Aberration?

On May 16th the Colombian government announced an agreement had been reached with the FARC guerrilla on the latest issue under discussion at the peace talks in Havana, Cuba: “A Solution to the Problem of Illicit Drugs.”  The points agreed upon, which were provided in an accompanying text, suggest some positive steps away from the…Continue Reading A Partial Solution ; The Colombian Government, the FARC, and the drugs issue at the peace talks