Archive for the ‘War on drugs’ Category

Canadian cops support safe injecting, not (04/04/08)

The Canadian city of Victoria (not Vancouver, sorry) is still dithering over a home for its needle exchange programme: no-one wants it in their back yard. British Columbia’s top health official has a solution: open supervised injecting sites around the city. The cops are not too pleased.
In an editorial in the British Columbia Medical Journal, [...]

Tree-huggers learn from junkies: needle exchange goes green (31/03/08)

Needle exchange usually gets a pretty bad press. So I was surprised, as I wandered by accident into the greenosphere today, to find that harm reduction models could save the world.
Colin Beavan draws a parallel between injectors and consumers. You can’t break an addiction to consumer goods any more easily than you can break [...]

Vancouver’s needle exchange is homeless (25/03/08)

Drug use and homelessness go together in many cities around the world. The Canadian city of Vancouver, for many years a shining example of sensible drug policy, is no exception. Now, however, it’s the city’s much-vaunted needle exchange programme that is being thrown onto the streets according to Cindy Harnett of the Times Colonist.
The [...]

Should people who have unprotected sex live near schools? (17/03/08)

Anyone convicted in South Dakota of intentionally exposing a sex partner to HIV will have to sign up as a sex offender, according to a bill signed into law today.
The AP reports this as though a person has to infect their partner before they become a sex offender, but the law appears to cast [...]

Heroin tops cannabis as prisoners’ drug of choice (14/03/08)

There’s more smack than dope in British jails, according to newly-published data (pdf) from the Ministry of Justice. In random testing, 4.2% of prisoners tested positive for opiates, 4% for cannabis. In a couple of jails, heroin use was up at 16%. Some people say that prisoners are switching to heroin because it doesn’t hang [...]

UK’s drug strategy: common sense and controversy (27/02/08)

Britain today published it’s new drug strategy (pdf here or here). It’s actually pretty sensible, but it will probably be howled at by footsoldiers on both sides of the War On Drugs. On the one hand, the government plans to cut benefits (welfare payments) for addicts who refuse to turn up to treatment programmes. That [...]

“We know it works” department: Boston Globe supports clean needles (13/02/08)

Yet another sensible voice raised against the ban on federal funding of needle exchange programmes. The Boston Globe editorial even includes the mandatory “We know it works” quote. What it doesn’t mention is that an end to the ban within the US would probably have a very important knock-on effect internationally, because it would open [...]

Same old same old: Bush tries to close down DC needle exchange funding (08/02/08)

The capital of the United States has HIV rates higher than those of Congo and Ethiopia. A lot of those infections are among drug injectors. Many in the city were hugely relieved when a ban on funding for needle exchange programmes in DC was effectively dropped just a couple of weeks ago. The city’s mayor [...]

Big pharma does smack (28/01/08)


Junkies on the frontline (28/01/08)

Some good news for drug injectors in the US: a nasal spray that costs less than US$ 10 can reverse the effect of an opiate overdose . Some even better news: programmes giving out these sprays have sprung up across the country. A programme on National Public Radio reports that these kits, which put drug [...]

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