Category Archives: War On Drugs

These letters published in the Dec. 122021 print edition of the Las Cruces Sun-News. A portion of Carrie Hamblen's column also appeared as a letter to the editor in the print edition.

President Biden and Congress have many pressing issues before them, but this administration like those which have preceded it since 1970 continue to perpetuate the absurd and heinous policy of classifying cannabis as a Schedule I drug.

One of the main reasons for classifying it at the top of the narcotics schedule is the federal governments contention that marijuana has NO medical benefits and is among drugs (LSD, Ecstasy, peyote and heroin) with the greatest potential for abuse. Among drugs considered a lower risk (Schedule II) are the recent headline-grabbing and deadly narcotics: methamphetamine and fentanyl! This makes a mockery of the federal governments drug classification system.

The FDA and DEA run roughshod over the pot issue, perpetuating federal laws that conflict with state laws and hinder legitimate research into the medical benefits of cannabis. Thirty-six states, including New Mexico, have legalized medical marijuana, touting the drugs many healing benefits in treating epilepsy, autism and other ailments. New Mexico, too, is among 15 states that have legalized the sale and consumption of cannabis, and in many cases, enacted legislation to expunge criminal records for pot crimes that have disproportionately impacted people of color for decades.

What is driving this continued, antiquated abuse of federal power that lacks any credibility whatsoever? How many people have you heard of or read about who died from a marijuana overdose? Zero. How about those dying from Schedule II drug fentanyl or engaged in a ruinous meth-using lifestyle? Tens of thousands!

It's time for this administration to end this shameless, sham classification of cannabis. Last December, the House passed bipartisan legislation to do just that but the Senate never did. Biden says he supports decriminalization, but not federally legalizing pot. The War on Drugs is over. We lost. Just say No to this laughable system.

Rob McCorkle, Las Cruces

I was surprised that NM Rep. Greg Nibert had the nerve to write the op-ed column published in the Dec. 5 Sun-News. Rep. Nibert had a great deal to say about loyalty to a single person, governor Lujan Grisham, as opposed to constitutional principles. My mother used to call this the pot calling the kettle black.

Rep. Nibert descends to truly stygian depths with his tirade against the governor. He somehow seems to have ignored the irony of his argument. I quote from his column: …there are even greater dangers to our fragile self-governance when one of the branches of government places greater importance on party loyalty than upholding the constitution they were sworn to uphold.

I would remind him and his Republican followers of the events of Jan.6 this year when, in blind obedience to the lies of an individual, Donald Trump, a mob attempted to undermine a duly held election in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution. My mother, in her wisdom, also said people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. I suggest Rep. Nibert might consider this advice in the future.

Steve McLary, Las Cruces

Recent op/ed articles published in this newspaper by elected GOP members express delight in legal challenges to Gov. Lujan Grisham utilizing federal funds in New Mexico to mitigate COVID-19 illnesses and deaths, vindicating their views with a dubious nexus that emergency public health measures are tantamount to abuse of the state constitution.

However, every single GOP opinion fails to address the appalling fact that more than 325,000 New Mexicans have contracted COVID-19 with more than 5,400 fellow citizen deaths; an inconvenient truth.

Failing to address those metrics including predictable public health disease spread based on scientific data enables and facilitates the reckless GOP message that New Mexicans don't need to wear masks to mitigate COVID-19 disease spread, vaccines aren't necessary or that we don't need public health guidance from the governor's administration.

In essence, the GOP encourages and fights for COVID-19 disease spread and premature deaths, fails to address baseline facts or the efficacy of the GOP public health plan if they had their way and the governor did nothing to protect citizens from getting sick and dying from the pandemic virus.

The GOP enjoys a shallow, Pyrrhic legal victory without questions or scrutiny from the media or press about how many more or less New Mexicans would get sick and/or die if GOP leaders were in charge of COVID-19 public health plans or responses.

I'm old enough to remember when investigative journalists would ask tough questions related to GOP public health narratives, if such opinions exist, rather than simply follow the results of a legal challenge.

Michael Smith, Las Cruces

Thanks for your ongoing COVID coverage, including "Poll: Pandemic stress has weighed on Gen Z" 12/7/21.

It's simple. Given the global pandemic who wins? Do the drug companies continue to win (read: billions more in profits) or the world (read: millions of lives saved, economies and schools opened up, billions of dollars saved)?

The Biden Administration simply needs to make Moderna and Pfizer share the vaccine recipe and production know-how with the world. Use moral authority or the Defense Production Act or whatever. Otherwise COVID continues to mutate and people needlessly suffer and die.

Who wins? The profiteers or the people?

Rich Renner, Las Cruces

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Letters to the editor: On cannabis as Schedule I drug - Las Cruces Sun-News

The Wonderland psychedelic business conference, held recently in Miami, Florida, drew large crowds and big-name keynote speakers such as former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson with the promise of a booming new sector. It is being suggested that the next big development in mental healthcare will come in the form of psychedelic drugs: substances such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms), ayahuasca (a plant-based mixture from South America), and DMT (a naturally occurring hallucinogenic).

While these substances have been illegal and primarily associated with countercultures such as the hippies of the 1960s and ravers of the 1990s, changes in laws and scientific breakthroughs in psychedelic treatments for depression and anxiety have created a new industry projected to be worth 8bn by 2027.

Much as happened with the cannabis industry a decade ago, a culture clash is now developing between social justice activists who fought for the legalisation of psychedelics and wealthy white men, often new to the drugs, who have the resources to dominate an emerging industry.

Two years ago in the US, the city of Denver voted to decriminalise psilocybin mushrooms. It was quickly followed by Oakland and Santa Cruz in California, the state of Oregon, and then Seattle, which added ayahuasca, ibogaine and non-peyote-derived mescaline to the list. Some of these campaigns enjoyed financial support from large companies such as the organic soap producer Dr Bronners.

Celebrities including actors Megan Fox, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith and talk show host Chelsea Handler have testified to the psychologically transformative powers of a psychedelic trip. As the buzz around these drugs heralds a new industry, will those profiting maintain the countercultural ideals of the people who popularised the drugs?

This isnt the 1960s all over again, the former chief executive of MindMed, JR Rahn, told Forbes as his company was attempting to get approval from the FDA, the US regulator, for its specific types of LSD to treat anxiety. I want nothing to do with those kinds of folks who want to decriminalise psychedelics.

Much of the effort to legalise such substances is centred on offsetting the damage that the war on drugs has caused in impoverished communities often by promising people of colour an economic path into this new, lucrative industry. However, for many of the early investors in psychedelics who are able carry the legalisation baton to the finishing line, the strategy is often to craft a limited version of the industry that places them exclusively in charge.

The idea that psychedelics should only be used to heal something that is broken within you rather than as a way to communally understand our world is the narrow definition that will get FDA approval, says Jason Ortiz, co-founder of the Minority Cannabis Business Association, and executive director of Students For Sensible Drug Policy. That communal bonding will be lost if were only pressing it into pills.

Ortiz fears that if psychedelics fall exclusively into the hands of big pharma, plants often deemed sacred by Native Americans and the surely lucrative industry awaiting them will follow the same path as the legal marijuana industry. Legalisation here has seen the rich get richer, while minorities and psychedelic pioneers were left out in the cold.

Theres an institutionalisation of psychedelic drugs happening that will make them less accessible to the common person, Ortiz says. A lot of these corporations come from big pharma and have established networks within the FDA. Movements for justice threaten that monopoly by saying that folks should be able to cultivate, sell and consume these substances on their own.

Ortiz is pursuing decriminalisation for all psychedelics, allowing individuals to make their own choices about whether and how to take them. He views the pharmaceuticals industry as a threat to that.

However, the chief executive of Enveric Biosciences in Florida, Joseph Tucker, says that to do it the pharma way will simply provide users with more confidence, a better experience and fewer side effects. He points to the synthesis of willow bark into aspirin in the 19th century turning a traditional cure into a more effective, less toxic medicine.

Enveric is creating psychedelic-derived molecules and synthetic cannabinoids for the treatment of mental health disorders, and is currently pursuing FDA approval for its products.

With psilocybin, there can be cardiotoxic effects if its taken every day, and theres also serotonin syndrome [caused by excessive levels of the neurotransmitter in the body], Tucker says. But the biggest issues are with the trip itself. Bad trips rely on three major variables: dose, [mind]set and setting. So people try to really control the mindset and setting, and that constrains how youre able to utilise those therapeutics. In many clinical trials, 90% of patients are screened out for having the wrong mindset, and so it wont work for them.

Tucker points to ketamine an anaesthetic that is often erroneously characterised as a psychedelic because of its history as a club drug as an example of a drug with psychedelic effects that has been shown to be effective in mental health treatments, independent of therapy.

Ketamines approval for off-label use, and its proven efficacy in treating depression and anxiety, has led to a number of clinics popping up across the US where those suffering can legally access it in a medically supervised environment.

Elsewhere, the head of Los Angeles-based Irwin Naturals, Klee Irwin, says: What Ive done for 27 years is collect the best of whats around and put it together into something accessible for all people. So Ill take what indigenous people have discovered through some herbal concoction, and Ill take it and put it into a bottle that you can get at Walmart.

As a publicly traded company and health supplement supplier for big US names such as Costco, Walgreens, CVS and Walmart, Irwin Naturals certainly has the track record to commercialise and legitimise psychedelics. In 2018, Irwin had to convince his more conservative investors that cannabis-derived CBD products were a smart, and not too risky, endeavour: he was proved right when the company became one of the largest CBD wholesalers in the nation.

Before the Wonderland conference, Irwin made headlines by announcing that his company would be entering the markets for psychedelics and THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis.

I wouldnt have been able to do this two years ago: it wouldve been too scary, Irwin says. But right now theres this perfect quiet before the storm an opportunity for us to slip in [to the psychedelics industry] as the first truly household-name brand, which can be viewed publicly as a validation of plant medicine. Soon it will be far less demonised and therell be a whole bunch of people dogpiling in just to make money.

Irwin distinguishes himself from those motivated exclusively by profit by his intention to keep prices low and thereby make the products accessible to all income groups. In this way, he feels the necessary social justice goals can be achieved via big business.

When we started selling CBD, we collapsed the pricing floor by selling it at half the price per milligram of the lowest-priced producer, he says. Since we are the largest, we can bully our competitors to chase us to the floor in terms of pricing, and we are about to do the same thing with marijuana.

Irwin sees the mental health crisis in America as an emergency that warrants an FDA fast-track for psychedelic drug approval as was achieved with Covid vaccines. And he believes companies with the power to drive the prices down should do so as a public good. There are around 600 ketamine clinics in the US, and theyre all mom-and-pop-owned, like video stores before Blockbuster, Irwin says. What we want to do is acquire some of them, and open up some new ones.

For psychedelics such as psilocybin and ayahuasca, which are not approved in America, Irwin is opening retreats in nearby countries such as Costa Rica and Jamaica, preparing his company for what he sees as inevitable drug-law shifts in the US.

Ortiz of the Minority Cannabis Business Association says that, on the whole, large investments in the psychedelic industry are not inherently a bad thing so long as people of all levels of privilege have access to the substances, and the chance to enter the industry. That will help dissolve the stigma around these substances, and there will be countless people who have their mental health issues addressed, and thats a good thing for society in general. That being said, its important that its not solely owned by anyone.

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This isnt the 60s again: psychedelics business takes off amid culture clash - The Guardian

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"One by one, we're losing our colleagues. Coming into work finding out someone that you know has passed away. Its the worst thing in the world. How much more crying can we do?" Sarah Blyth

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Harm reduction workers on the front lines of Vancouvers opioid crisis have mourned the deaths of four co-workers in the last two months, and now they are calling for an immediate increase in the safe supply of prescription drugs to prevent a tidal wave of toxic drug deaths thats already killed more than 1,700 British Columbians this year.

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One by one, were losing our colleagues, said Sarah Blyth, director of Vancouvers Overdose Prevention Society, which employs 100 peer workers to run three safe injection sites in the Downtown Eastside.

Coming into work finding out someone that you know has passed away. Its the worst thing in the world. How much more crying can we do?

One of their co-workers, Joy Phelps, saved hundreds of lives before hers came to a tragic end last month.

Despite freezing rain or snow, the 44-year-old would canvas the alleys of the Downtown Eastside with Narcan in hand. Like a true hero, she would bring those overdosing back to life with a quick pump of the drug into their nose.

Joy had been with us from the very beginning, as one of our first peer workers since we opened the site in 2016, said Blyth. She had dreams of one day being a nurse, but struggled on and off with drugs.

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Phelps was found dead in her home from a toxic drug overdose on Nov. 3. The OPS community gathered for her memorial last month.

General manager Trey Helten said the Overdose Prevention Society said Phelps was one of four staff members in the past two months they had lost.

All of a sudden youre with this person one day laughing and telling jokes and the next day theyre gone, said the 39-year-old. Its not if the rest who struggle with drug use will die but when.'

Helten, who spent his 20s living on the Downtown Eastside battling opioid use disorder, said for people who are not ready to seek treatment or those who relapse, a regulated supply is key.

For me, it took a lot of tries to recover, said Helten, who is now five years sober.

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Chief coroner Lisa Lapointe announced Thursday that 201 people are suspected to have died of a toxic drug overdose in October alone the highest recorded number of deaths for a single month. This will be the worst year on record, as the province has already recorded 1,782 suspected illicit drug toxicity deaths between January and October.

Blyth and Helten said only a rapid increase in the safe supply of prescription drugs can slow the current death rate.

Only a small number of programs are providing a safe supply, theres not even making a dent in the deaths that were seeing, said Blyth. They need a doctor or someone to give them access to something they know.

In November, the province asked for an exemption from the federal government to decriminalize illicit drugs.

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Lapointe said while its an essential step to end the decades-long war on drugs, even if approved right away, it wont end the profit-driven, unregulated drug market, which continues to put people in harms way.

The only way is to provide access to safe (drug) supply, Lapointe said. We dont have time to wait months and years to continue to look for evidence that safe supply will work. We know from studies it does work.

Alternatives to illicit drugs, such as MySafe, which operates three vending machines that dispense prescription hydromorphone tablets, a substitute for heroin, to 70 high-risk opioid users, one option.

MySafes sole prescriber, Dr. Mark Tyndall, the former director of the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, said expanding the programs scale has proven tricky due to a lack of willing prescribers.

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There was initially another doctor prescribing for MySafe along with me, but they pulled out once they were audited by the B.C. College Physicians and Surgeons, Tyndall said. So far, the college hasnt gone after me yet.

With a majority of doctors and pharmacists reluctant to prescribe opioids, Vancouver Coastal Health chief medical officer Dr. Patricia Daly agreed that a non-medicalized model of safe supply urgently needs to be implemented.

We know there are tens of thousands of people at overdose risk and despite provincial investments the B.C. Ministry of Health and Addictions said it has given that things are getting worse, Daly said last week.

We need to be brave and look outside of the box.

sgrochowski@postmedia.com

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They've saved hundreds of lives. Will B.C. provide a safe drug supply to help save theirs? - Vancouver Sun

Often, large systems keep grinding on in illogical and futile ways because no one understands how much their day-to-day actions hurt average people.

An investigation by Sun-Times reporter Frank Main and Better Government Association reporters Casey Toner and Jared Rutecki lifted the veil on one such system: the long-running practice of arresting people for small amounts of illegal drugs, only to quickly release them without any criminal charges.

Many cops go on making the arrests because it is a way to respond to complaints from Chicago residents about brazen drug-dealing in their communities. But many judges, prosecutors, police officers and others in the system recognize how counterproductive it is to arrest people for small, user-level amounts of illegal drugs.

To dip into our bag of cliches, it does more harm than good.

The first story in the investigation, published in the Sunday Sun-Times, documented just how much harm the practice causes to the people caught up in this pointless system most of them Black men who have always paid the highest price for our societys many missteps in the so-called war on drugs.

For anyone living just a few dollars ahead of financial disaster, a short time in jail even though they are released without a conviction or going to trial can cost them their job. They might lose their homes. They might lose their personal relationships. If their car is impounded, they may have no way to scrape together a couple of thousand dollars to get it back. Their lives are ruined.

It also costs taxpayers. The Sun-Times and the BGA calculated that, between 2013 and 2018, it cost more than $100 million to briefly jail people on low-level drug charges, excluding medical care costs.

After analyzing 280,000 drug possession cases over nearly two decades of court data compiled by The Circuit a collaborative of news organizations the Sun-Times and BGA found that about half were dropped at their earliest stages. That dismissal rate has soared in the most recent years. In 2018, 72% of such cases were dropped.

Instead of letting this system lumber along, damaging peoples lives left and right, its time to fix it. The investigation found that tens of thousands of Chicagoans have been put behind bars on drug charges for a short time, even though everyone in the system knew the charges would be dropped. Thats a huge toll on personal lives, as well as for every taxpayer who has to foot the cost.

Legislation that would make possession of under three grams of heroin or methamphetamine and under five grams of cocaine a misdemeanor instead of a felony passed the Illinois House in the spring session, but has gone nowhere in the Senate. Were told thats because violent crimes have started to spike, alarming politicians who dont want a vote easing criminal penalties even for non-violent, low-level drug offenses to be used against them in the next election.

We dont know if the new limits in that legislation are too high, but its clear Illinois needs to follow the lead of states that have decriminalized small amounts of illegal drugs. Now, possession of even a trace of such drugs as heroin is a felony.

Another possibility is police could just stop arresting people for user-level amounts of illegal drugs. Police in 2016 began a diversion program to allow some people caught with small amounts of drugs to go into treatment instead of the courts, but the program benefits only a small fraction of arrestees. Expanding the program might make a dent in the problem.

Good solutions, though, arent easy to find. Since February, police in Oregon, using a new law, have written 1,300 tickets for drug possession instead of arresting people. Hundreds of millions of dollars were set aside to expand drug treatment. But records show few drug users have entered treatment to the extent that reformers had hoped.

Overdoses have skyrocketed during the pandemic. The New York Times reports more than 100,000 Americans died of overdoses in the 12 months ending in April, a record high and 30% more than the previous year. Imaginative new policies treating drug addiction as a health problem instead of a crime are needed.

Yet year after year, the Illinois system has marched along, throwing people into jail without providing a solution to the scourge of drugs and drug crime.

More of the same is not an answer.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.

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We must find a better way to deal with low-level drug crime in Illinois - Chicago Sun-Times

These were just some of the harrowing stories we heard while developing the recently launched Global Drug Policy Index (which was released in November 2021) a way of comparing countries policies on drugs. Such stories suggest that drug policy all too often blights lives. But there are also inspiring individuals and communities working to help people who use drugs. They provide medicine to combat overdoses, needle and syringe exchange programmes to prevent the spread of blood-borne diseases, and drug checking services to inform people about the potency and quality of drugs that they might ingest.

It has long been clear that some countries have policies that cause harm and violate human rights, while others have more rational, evidence based and humane policies. But it has been difficult to assess and compare them.

The Global Drug Policy Index aims to fill this gap. It is designed to provide rigorous, transparent and comparative evidence about the quality of countries drug policies. Its a tool to hold governments accountable and ensure that policies are based on health, human rights and development.

Measure, compare, guide

The United Nations Human Development Index, Transparency Internationals Corruption Perception Index and Freedom Houses Global Freedom Index are just three examples of projects that measure and compare countries in complex areas of policy. Such indices are useful because they crystallise the performance of states and offer clear guidance on how to improve.

The Global Drug Policy Index was driven by the Harm Reduction Consortium and developed by academics at Swansea Universitys Global Drug Policy Observatory.

In the sphere of drug policy, academics often collaborate with policymakers, activists and people who use drugs. For the 30 countries covered in this first version of the Global Drug Policy Index, we consulted widely with organisations rooted within the communities affected by drug policies. We also surveyed 371 individuals with on the ground knowledge of each states drug policy.

The index specifies 75 policy indicators. These are derived from a recent UN report on best practice in state drug policy.

Based on how they perform on these indicators, states get a score from 0 to 100. One hundred would represent a full implementation of recommended policies across five areas.

The first area is the absence of extreme response, like the death penalty and extrajudicial killing.

Second is the proportionality of the criminal justice response. This looks at levels of violence, discrimination and human rights abuse in states policing of drug policy.

Health and harm reduction is the third. This focuses on the funding, availability and accessibility of interventions that reduce the harms arising from problematic drug use.

Access to controlled medicines is fourth. It looks at states provision of medicines for pain relief and palliative care.

Finally, theres development: programmes designed to provide alternative livelihoods to people who grow illicit crops.

Drug policies in African countries

Even a quick glance at the index results for states in Africa reveals a grim truth: African states are among the worst performers in the world in terms of drug policy.

Uganda scores just 28 in the overall index. The country has a perfect storm of punitive, highly violent drug law enforcement combined with minimal availability of basic medical interventions to reduce the harms caused by drug use.

In Kenya, which scores only 32 overall, access to harm reduction interventions is better, although still patchy. Our expert respondents in Kenya described frequent use of violence and torture by police, as well as arbitrary arrest. They said drug law enforcement was particularly harsh on women, certain ethnic groups, and the less wealthy. Such features are common in all low-ranked states in the Global Drug Policy Index.

In other African states evaluated in the index (such as South Africa, Mozambique and Senegal), the picture was more mixed. There were areas of good practice, including less extreme responses to drug crimes such as the death sentence. And there were some promising developments in harm reduction. But access to essential medicines is very limited across the continent. And most states are exercising disproportionate force in delivering their drug policies.

These problems arent separate. Money spent on police, courts and prisons is money that could be spent on healthcare and harm reduction. Sadly, it seems that Africas states are still largely operating from an outdated and discredited War on Drugs perspective. Even South Africa, a regional leader in decriminalisation policy, has implemented it in a cautious, limited way. Our expert respondents collectively judged that South African decriminalisation has so far been ineffective in reducing contacts between people who use drugs and the criminal justice system.

We hope the information contained in this index will help to develop constructive debates that will lead to more humane and evidenced based policies in the region. To achieve this, states should reorient their approaches to focus on the health and human rights implications of drug use. The index provides a clear guide to the types of policies and actions that will move them towards this goal. DM/ML

This story was first published in The Conversation.

Matt Wall is an associate professor in Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University. David Bewley-Taylor is the Personal Chair, Politics in Philosophy and International Relations at Swansea University.

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The Conversation: African countries perform badly when it comes to drug policies: A new index shows how - Daily Maverick

A former heroin addict who spent time in prison before becoming a pastor who helps people out of addiction slammed the government's "war on poor people".

Roy Farrell was 14 when he first got involved in crime as he hung on the streets, avoiding his mum's "soggy mashed potatoes".

Addiction came soon after when he started selling drugs and trying his supply of cocaine and, later, heroin.

READ MORE:Boris Johnson joins drug gang raids alongside force Tories cut to 'breaking point'

He told the ECHO : "I grew up, got kicked out of school at an early age, didn't really fit at home because they weren't on my wavelength, couldn't fit in different jobs because I didn't feel good enough.

"When you don't feel good enough, you want to go to a place where you feel that you can contribute, you feel that you have a say, you feel that you can make an impact.

" Gangs and crime was that for me. I felt I brought something to the gang. I felt I brought something to the group that I was a part of. Although it was being very negative, that's what I brought.

"So then you get caught up in drugs. The deeper you go in drugs, the more isolated you become.

" The more you get involved with drugs, the more isolated you become from society, family, your network of friends, everyone who loves you.

"You get disconnected."

As drugs took over Roy's life, the harder it became to escape;

Walls grew up between Roy and the positive influences that could save him.

Roy said: "The deeper I got in drugs, the less connected I felt to my family, the less I believed in myself that I could be anybody.

"The deeper I got in drugs, the less connected I was in taking a positive route in life because I just didn't feel that I could do that anymore. Because I was so deep in that lifestyle.

"And then the good friends that you grow up with, they don't really want to associate with you because you're living that life.

"Over time, you progressively detach from those people. They go on with their lives, they get married, they have kids, they get a good job.

"You're still living that life, you're still caught up in that whole cycle of prison, drugs, rehabilitation. I've been to rehab many, many times.

"I probably spent seven or eight years trying to break free from addiction, but in those seven or eight years, everybody has moved on with their life.

"Everybody's moved on. I'm still caught up on the hamster wheel trying to break free."

Now Roy is a pastor helping other vulnerable people with a history of addiction to get back on their feet and find purpose.

When he came out of prison the last time in 2004, Roy went to a drug outreach centre in Dublin where he found a leaflet for Victory Outreach, a church that works with people who've experienced homelessness and addiction.

Desperate to escape the temptation of home, Roy moved to Liverpool where a branch of the church had been set up.

He told the ECHO : "I've been doing this for 17 years now. The biggest thing with men and women that we have is lack of purpose and lack of identity.

"They don't know who they are, they don't know where they fit, and they're looking for purpose. They're looking for something to belong to, to cling to.

"And crime is always the easy option. Crime, and that lifestyle, is an easy option, because you're exempted, straight away.

"So it goes back to education for me, you know, how we educate people and how we can fit them into places and give them an identity and give them purpose."

Prime Minister Boris Johnson joined a 'county lines' drug raid in Liverpool on Monday, December 6 for the launch of a crackdown on drugs gangs and crime.

The Prime Minister also suggested penalising middle-class and so-called "lifestyle" drug users who don't fall into the prison cycle, by threatening to take away their passports and driving licences.

During the visit, he told the ECHO : "Half the homicides of young people in this country are caused by drugs gangs, at least half, and probably more when it comes to homicides of young men; its way over that, its a massive factor.

"Half the acquisitive crime in this country, burglary, robbery, are caused by drugs gangs. It doesn't have to be this way, it really doesnt you can change this. And the way to change it is to do what were doing.

"The 300,000 people who are the biggest problem, get them into rehab. Of course you have got to be tough on crime; Im not suggesting you should be soft.

"But in the end their problems are not going to be solved just by banging them up the whole time, because they come in and out of prison.

"You have also got to stop the gangs and thats what were doing here."

Pastor Roy Farrell wonders: "Is it a war on drugs, or is it a war on poor people?"

He fears that threats and punishment will drive a wedge between people caught up in drugs and the rest of society without proper supports to help them recover.

Roy told the ECHO : "I think some of it sounds pretty good. I think the rehabilitation side of it is definitely something that's needed, and less of a punitive approach.

"I think the punitive approach, you don't really get the victory with that.

"All you get is a more angry young person who goes inside a jail, gets schooled in other ways and how to commit crime.

"I think a more positive rehabilitation approach would be more beneficial. So the moment they come into prison, straight away, you're giving them purpose."

But prison is a hard place for people to get off drugs, even with the offer of support in there.

Roy still visits prisons as part of his ministry.

He told the ECHO : "The environment is very, very toxic. It's hard to explain that. But most of the people just go with the flow in the environment.

"I think they do try. I don't know what it's like now - I haven't been for many years. But I do pop in and out of prisons every now and again.

"The funding is limited. The opportunities are - there are some, but it's very difficult.

"In there, it's very difficult to make positive changes to your life. I know they do courses and they'll try and do work experience.

"I think if they did a lot more of that, like intervene early and try and create a pathway for them coming out of prison with the necessities in place, like shelter, finances, and something for them to do."

Nacro is a charity that works to "provide second chances" and to give hope to offenders on their exit from prison.

They echo many of Roy's views on the government's proposed approach to drugs and crime.

Nacro's service user involvement manager, Andrea Coady, said: "We welcome a lot of the Prisons Strategy White Paper as it provides a framework for giving people hope on their release from prison promising access to substance misuse treatment, mental health support, education and training whilst in prison, somewhere to live on release and better opportunities for employment.

"We now need to see these plans get put into action.

"Government has committed to ensuring that everyone released from prison has somewhere to live.

"This is critical to ensuring that people can rebuild their lives and make positive contributions to their communities, but long-term funding needs to be in place to ensure that this commitment becomes a reality, and we also need to make sure that people have the right support in place.

"We are also delighted to see that Government is considering restricting the numbers of people being released from prison on a Friday, which currently sets people up to fail as they struggle to access vital services before the weekend and can be left with nowhere to live and no support in the first few days after release, creating a mountain to climb before people have even begun their rehabilitation journey.

"On the bigger picture, this is a missed opportunity to make more radical change. England and Wales already imprisons more people than anywhere in Western Europe, and the prison population is set to grow to almost 100,000 people by 2026.

"A depressing ambition for any modern society, particularly when we know that the link between the size of the prison population and levels of crime just isnt there.

"Short prison sentences are less effective than community sentences at reducing reoffending, and we know that longer prison sentences are not an effective deterrent but can be a really costly way of damaging already damaged people.

"Building more prisons is not the solution to reducing crime and creating safer communities.

"Hope of a better life is what every person in prison needs to turn their life around, going forward we hope these proposals will give it to them."

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Heroin addict turned pastor slams government's 'war on poor' - Liverpool Echo

All semester, my undergraduate students have been researching the War on Drugs, to see if several get-tough measures, ranging from convictions to long sentences, have any impact upon a variety of crime rate measures for violent crime rates, murder rates and property crime rates.

Beginning in the 1970s, the longest war in the history of the United States has been undisputedly its War on Drugs. For as long as the legal battles have been waged against drug users and distributors, the question of its effectiveness has also been in question. With millions across the country being locked away for lifetimes, one question has been left unasked and unanswered; what affect does the enhanced drug sentencing of the War on Drugs have on other crimes? wrote Andrew Cunningham.

We sought to both ask and answer this question with our undergraduate research, wherein we researched crime rate and sentencing data from all 50 states and six territories of the United States and compared them against each other to see what impact drug related crime rates and sentencing have on violent crime rates and sentencing, as well as how the state politics fit into the picture. Additionally, we investigated any impact that sentencing of different types of crime had on other types of crime, regardless of their connection to drug offenses. Ultimately, our research was conducted in an effort to observe the question of the unintended consequences of Americas longest conflict.

Students in my American Judicial Institutions class (Thomas Bird, Kristina Calixto, Benjamin Hays, Jacob Jeffords, Abbey Reese, Bryant Sanchez, Jake Thrailkill and Karson Troth) gathered data on the length of drug sentences by state, from the U.S. Sentencing Commission and detox.net.

From the latter source, they uncovered the numbers showing the percentage of those accused of drug trafficking by state who are convicted, as well as those sentenced to prison for their crimes. And from the FBI, they collected data on all three crime rate measures by state, and in some cases, some territories.

From my research methods class, LaGrange College undergraduates Andrew Cunningham, Chase Davis, DeQueze Fryer, Shedrick Lindsey, Taren McGhee, Mason McLaughlin, Erik Moran, Brennan Oates, Karson Troth and Jonathan Williams ran the statistics to look for relationships between the variables. They discovered that there is no significant correlation between the length of drug conviction prison sentences, as well as the percentage of drug crime guilty pleas (by state) and violent crime rates, murder rates and property crime rates, by states.

The exception is where an increase in the percentage of those convicted of drug trafficking go to prison, it actually leads to an increase in the property crime rate in a state. This important information can be used to see if the War on Drugs is actually effective in lowering a variety of crime rates in a state. And our evidence shows that in recent years, it isnt helping much.

The students researched a number of articles and books that claimed the War on Drugs was necessary, or wasnt working. But rather than simply cite others evidence, they went out and gathered the data themselves, tested it with our statistics packages, and found some answers.

Perhaps an additional side effect to their research is the development of skills these students learned to test future political, economic and social arguments, rather than accept other articles.

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TURES COLUMN: Did the 'War On Drugs' reduce crime in the US? - LaGrange Daily News - LaGrange Daily News

The longer the war on drugs goes on, the more it resembles a political crusade against its own rotten legacy. When the zero tolerance approach produces high levels of drug use, a further crackdown is initiated. Record numbers of drug-induced deaths serve as rationale for doubling down on a status quo that is complicit in them.

The war on drugs is a failure. We know this. Weve long known it. In fact, there is such an abundance of evidence for its failure that we have more certainty here than in most areas of policy.

Globally, the war on drugs has had little impact since it was launched by Richard Nixon in 1971, when he named drug use public enemy number one. By the time a report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy was published in 2016, Nixon had been out of office for 42 years, and dead for 22. The report said that the banning of drugs had had little or no impact on drug use globally.

The war on drugs would probably have been halted years ago if it had the same impact in the rich world as it does in the poor one. As the investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein put it in his 2019 book Pills, Powder, and Smoke, the war on drugs will never end until African, South American and Asian lives matter as much as white lives in the Western Heartland.

Utopian urges often produce a mountain of corpses. Yet many still believe that an idealistic crusade to banish drugs will produce a different outcome; that the war is winnable. Hard-line prohibitionists echo historys other fanatical idealists and argue that a real war on drugs has never been tried.

Meanwhile the bodies stack up. In Mexico alone there were 33,341 murders in 2018, many of them drug-related. As many as 27,000 people have been killed in the Philippines since 2016, the human cost of president Rodrigo Dutertes savage drug war.

And for what? According to the International Drug Policy Consortium there was a 31 per cent global increase in drug taking between 2011 and 2016. In 2015 drug-related deaths reached 450,000 worldwide.

Nor should we forget the racist element to prohibition. Nixon himself blamed Jews for the popularity of marijuana in the counterculture of the 1960s. Every one of the bastards that are out for legalising marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews? he said.

Nixon was thrown out of office but the racist legacy of the war on drugs lives on. In the US, there is a drug arrest every 20 seconds, and Black and Latino people are disproportionately represented in state prison for drug offences, comprising nearly 60 per cent of the prison population. Some figures are even starker: in early 2018, 93 per cent of New Yorkers arrested for possession of cannabis were people of colour.

In recent years, US states have taken modest steps to bring about a more common-sense approach to drugs. Recreational marijuana is now legal in 19 states.

Yet here in Britain, politicians remain terrified of upsetting the curtain-twitching combatants of the drug war. We get announcements like this weeks 10-year drugs strategy from the government promising tougher action. Those in government who support a moralistic approach will probably see its futility once they leave office, succumbing to what the American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls retirement wisdom. They often do. But it is more than their political careers are worth to admit it.

In recent years there has been progress. Drug users have been recast as the victims of unscrupulous and malevolent dealers, rather than weak and depraved individuals. Yet the government still refuses to acknowledge it is prohibition that creates the army of pushers who supply them. It is because of prohibition that we now have county lines, a worrying phenomenon that is really just another consequence of a thriving black market.

Meanwhile, those who use drugs recreationally have been branded as middle-class, the go-to insult in these populist times. In a sinister twist even for a war that has ruined so many lives, the government has now threatened to remove the passports of lifestyle drug users.

At its core, the war on drugs is a destructive utopian endeavour. It is also a futile one: humans have always taken drugs. As Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand and now chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, recently told the Observer: The total elimination of drugs? Dream on, theres never been a time in human history where human beings havent resorted to some kind of substances that will take them out of their current reality for whatever reason.

It is impossible to suppress the demand for drugs. There will be no drug-free future as then-president Donald Trump put it at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in 2018. This is true however many crackdowns are announced. A British government report from 2005 found that police must seize 60 to 80 percent of drugs in the country for there to be a tangible effect on drug flows. They had never achieved a seizure rate above 20 per cent.

Indeed, the governments own independent review of drugs has stated that enforcement crackdowns have little sustained impact on overall drug supply, and that even if the police, Border Force and the National Crime Agency were sufficiently resourced it is not clear that they would be able to bring about a sustained reduction in supply.

Last year there were more than 4,500 deaths from drug addiction the highest figure since records began in 1993 and Scotland has the highest drug-related death rate of any country in Europe.

Policymakers know where the scourge of drug addiction is really tackled: in rehabilitation. It is reassuring, therefore, to see that most of the money in the governments latest announcement has been targeted here. But that is still addressing a symptom of the problem, rather than its root cause, which is prohibition.

It remains close to impossible to have a frank conversation about the tragic consequences of the war on drugs with proponents of get tough policies. Do you want your children taking drugs? they ask in self-righteous tones. How would you like it if someone you loved died of a drug addiction?

Yet all of this and more is a fact of life under prohibition. According to the Crime Survey England and Wales 2020, one in 11 people aged 16 to 59 report having used drugs in the past year, increasing to one in five people aged 16 to 24.

We need only look abroad to see how things could be different. In Portugal, where minor drug offences were decriminalised in 2000, drug-related deaths have fallen and are currently less than a tenth of the UK figure. As the Johns Hopkins-Lancet Commission of 2016 put it, Portugals enlightened policy has resulted in significant financial savings, less incarceration, significant public health benefits and no significant increase in drug use.

Those who want a fresh approach to drug policy are often wrongly accused of advocating a libertarian free-for-all. Ironically, that is what prevails under the black market in drugs, where criminal gangs make huge profits creating thousands of addicts and selling contaminated drugs.

And yet we remain wedded to a moralistic obsession with preventing people from putting mind-altering substances into their bodies. The ongoing drug war is the bad trip of policymaking and it always comes with the mother of all comedowns.

[See also: The government is bringing in new laws to target people who take Class A drugs]

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The government is tripping if it thinks this renewed war on drugs won't backfire - New Statesman

Over the last five years, Toronto has gone from a city known for incremental conservatism to one at the forefront of progressive drug policy moving from a war-on-drugs mentality to approving decriminalization of small amounts of illegal drug possession.

On Monday, following advice from Dr. Eileen de Villa, Torontos top doctor, the board of health voted unanimously to ask the federal government to exempt all city residents from criminal charges for possessing small amounts of illicit drugs like crack cocaine and heroin. Following in Vancouvers footsteps, Toronto would be only the second Canadian city to seek that status.

The citys recent evolution has been spurred by a mounting death toll from overdoses, successful cannabis legalization and a shifting police perspective.

For those on the ground who have seen the consequences of a drug poisoning crisis still plaguing the city with overdoses and deaths, decriminalization is the logical next step in a deliberate approach to tackling addiction as a health-care issue, while also changing the over-policing of Black and Indigenous people.

In 2005, after the HIV/AIDS crisis, activists came together to form the Toronto Drug Strategy Advisory Committee an odd mix of community users, health and justice workers, police officers and city officials who all sat at the same table

What resulted was the Toronto Drug Strategy, a plan to increase harm reduction and treatment options, reduce stigma and prevent overdoses, standing in stark contrast to the prevailing approach of treating drug addiction as a crime.

This was the era when everybody believed in the war on drugs, said Coun. Gord Perks, who now chairs the drug strategy implementation panel.

Perks said the panels work was bolstered by Vancouvers Insite, the first supervised injection clinic in North America.

Following its opening in 2003, the agency running Insite won a landmark legal battle against former prime minister Stephen Harpers government when in 2011 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled there should be a clear pathway for such sites to operate with federal permission.

That opened the door for Toronto and others to push ahead with its own supervised injection services.

In 2016, city council signed off on a plan to open three supervised injection sites across downtown in South Riverdale, Yonge-Dundas Square and Parkdale.

Coun. Joe Cressy, who chairs the citys board of health, said people in the downtown core witnessing the overdose crisis in their backyard knew the status quo was broken and were ready to support a new solution.

The overdose crisis has reached a point where its impossible to ignore, he said of the mindset.

But the process to apply and get approval for supervised injection sites from the health minister under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, as well as securing provincial funding, was slow.

Though the news finally came in June 2017 that both legal status and initial funding had been approved, workers needed time to get the specific sites up and running and a crisis of drug poisoning was catching up to them.

That summer, officials fears were realized: fentanyl, the deadly drug sweeping through B.C., had arrived in Toronto and overdoses related to fentanyl-laced drugs were climbing.

In August, community volunteers pitched a large, makeshift, khaki-coloured tent on the edge of Moss Park in the downtown east to try to stop their friends, colleagues and neighbours from dying.

The trained harm reduction workers supervised people injecting drugs they brought themselves, while offering training on how to use life-saving naloxone, a drug that can reverse the effects of an overdose.

Despite the unsanctioned site not being allowed under federal law, the unofficial outpost in the park became a crucial life-saving service that was tacitly allowed to continue operating by police and city officials as deaths mounted.

On Nov. 8, 2017, Toronto Public Health itself opened the first legal supervised injection clinic with Ottawas permission at The Works building on Victoria Street downtown.

Just a year later, on Oct. 17, 2018, another big shift occurred when cannabis became legal in Canada and retail shops have now popped up all over the city.

Though there were fears about underage access to legal weed and that legalization would create heavy usage, early Statistics Canada data showed youth intake had not soared just incremental increases in overall usage for the rest of the national population.

Research has long shown that a war on drugs that criminalizes those people one that began across North America in the 1970s has not had a significant impact on the supply or demand for drugs, a Toronto Public Health discussion paper published back in 2018 outlined.

According to that paper, criminalizing drug use has made drug users wary about accessing services and supports created criminal records that make it difficult to find work or shelter and forced risky behaviours that has led to infection, disease and overdose while costing Canadian taxpayers some $2 billion annually to enforce.

Now there are nine supervised injection clinics from Parkdale to South Riverdale, operated by trained staff who supervise consumption and monitor clients for signs of overdose and infection, while offering in-house services and referrals for addiction treatment and other basic needs.

In a further development in the new approach to drug addiction, the federal government in August 2020 announced it was funding a $1.58-million pilot to provide a safe supply of opioid drugs through two of the supervised consumption sites in an attempt to combat the contamination of street drugs. There was little, if any, blow back.

There have been unlikely supporters of the progressive policies in play.

Mayor John Tory, in a statement to the Star, talked about knowing two families who lost young people to overdose in the past year and earlier witnessing a woman inject herself in the neck in the unsanctioned Moss Park tent.

I had a strong urge to try to do more to help just from having met her.

In the summer of 2020, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police representing several forces responsible for policing drug users shocked observers when it wholeheartedly agreed with decriminalization.

Merely arresting individuals for simple possession of illicit drugs has proven to be ineffective, said a report released by the association.

Last week, the citys police chief Ramer wrote in support of Toronto Public Healths decriminalization plan.

Before Mondays vote, health board member Perks said he thinks of the people who didnt live to see their drug strategy come to fruition, or the services offered that could have saved them.

Like Cindy Reardon, one of the community members on the original drug strategy committee, who died in 2017 before the first supervised injection site opened.

Remarkable people, all of them, Perks said.

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How Toronto went from a war on drugs to pushing for their decriminalization - Toronto Star

By TCR Staff | December 8, 2021

Supervised injection sites for illegal drug users, recently rolled out for the first time in New York City, represent a smart and compassionate approach that has already been tested in other countries and will save lives where tough-on-drug policies have failed, according to the Washington Post. The two injection centers, in East Harlem and Washington Heights, allow illegal drug users to bring their own drugs and indulge under the supervision of trained staff who can intervene in the event of overdoses and provide users with addiction treatment options, the Post said in an unsigned editorial.

Mayor Bill de Blasio promised that the city would take no enforcement action against them and that all of the citys district attorneys, save for Staten Islands, support the facilities. Mayor-elect Eric Adams, who takes over in January, 2022, has also expressed support. A feasibility study conducted by the citys health department estimated that the program could save up to 130 lives a year. In New York, more than 2,000 people died of a drug overdose in 2020, the highest total since the city started keeping track in 2000, and more than 100,000 people died nationally in the 12-month period that ended in April, 2021.

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Will Supervised Injection Sites Succeed Where War on Drugs Has Failed? - Crime Report