50 Years Later, The Drug War is Collapsing | Drug Busts Will Never Fix Broken Policy | Drug Court Expands to Dubbo

All the drug policy and related news from the past week in one place.

Jun 18, 2021

Hello!

Happy Friday and welcome to issue #44 of Drugs Wrap, a weekly compilation of the top stories in drug policy from across Australia and around the world.

What a week! Many fascinating stories in the wrap and it’s worth clicking through to get the full story on a lot of these - personal highlight is the mum in Good Housekeeping (!) using psychedelics to overcome postpartum depression.

It’s been 50 years as of yesterday since disgraced US Prime Minister Richard Nixon announced that drug abuse was ‘public enemy number one’, beginning half a century of punitive measures that have caused more harm and suffering than they have solved.

It’s worth reminding ourselves of the origins of this phoney war. The below is an excerpt from Dan Baum’s 2016 article ‘Legalize it all’ in which he speaks to Nixon’s former advisor, John Ehrlichman:

‘“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect.
‘The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
‘We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did’.

The anniversary of the drug war has been marked with a slew of articles across the world resolutely condemning it and calling for an end to policies that favour criminalisation over individual liberty or assistance.

Not unrelated was a bill introduced in the US this week to federally decriminalise all drugs. While it doesn’t stand much chance of passing, it’s a sign of how far we’ve come in shifting our attitudes to drug policy and it appears to reflect the opinions of the majority of Americans.

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Let’s get to it.

Operation Ironside: Drug Busts Will Never Top Policy Reform as a Lasting Fix

Penington Institute chief executive John Ryan has penned this op-ed in The Australian in the fall out of the Operation Ironside round-up of drug dealers tricked into using police-operated ‘encrypted’ messaging app An0m.

‘Capturing hundreds of alleged criminals is unlikely to be anything more than a short-term disruption to the flood of drugs Down Under.

‘It is a fool’s errand if we think managing drug problems can be done best by law enforcement. In fact, a focus on supply comes with disturbing consequences.
‘We need to move away from the binary approach of being hard or soft on drugs. We need to think about how we can be smart about drugs’.

In related news, the reason the An0m app operation was finished wasn’t that police had got enough information on the people they were after, it was because the app’s popularity overwhelmed police resources. They were monitoring 2.67 million messages a fortnight and simply couldn’t keep up.

Interestingly, US privacy laws stopped FBI agents from downloading and reading messages from the An0m app, meaning no one in America was arrested as part of the operation.

The head of strategic policing at the national think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Dr John Coyne, expects crime rates to rise over the next six months as drug supply is impacted by the operation.

‘Not Enough to be Tough on Crime’: Pioneering NSW Drug Court Expands to Tackle Regional Ice Epidemic

On Thursday, NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman announced Dubbo as the next site for the Drug Court as part of a drive to be ‘tough and smart’ on drug crime.

The government will commit $27.9 million over four years to fund the expansion of the court, which enrols participants in an intensive 12-month program following referrals from the Local and District Courts.

The specialist court, which seeks to keep drug-dependent offenders out of prison, already exists in the Sydney CBD, Parramatta and the Hunter region and has achieved impressive results: the reoffending rate among participants is 17 per cent lower than for people outside the program.

The University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre has welcomed the announcement.

Ambitious Plan to End HIV Transmission in Australia Within Four Years

The Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations says Australia can end HIV transmission in the country by 2025.

About 900 people are diagnosed with HIV each year in Australia.

Professor Andrew Grulich co-authored a paper for the federation, which showed a federal government investment of a further $53 million in testing, treatment, prevention and a campaign to reduce stigma would prevent 6000 infections by 2030 and save $1.4 billion in health costs.

the federation’s chief executive Darryl O’Donnell has taken the plan to federal Health Minister Greg Hunt to show that small amounts of money could avert those infections and bring HIV to very low levels.

‘The challenge is whether or not governments take the next step’.

Australia’s Cocaine Crisis on Sky News

An upcoming special on Sky News this Sunday at 7:30 AEST looks at Australia’s ‘escalating cocaine war’. Hosted by Peter Stefanovic and produced in collaboration with News Corp, the special follows the Australian Federal Police-led ‘sting of the century’, Operation Ironside.

Stefanovic examines the ‘extraordinary’ extent of the international cocaine trade as quantities of the drug now reaching Australian shores hit unprecedented levels.

The half-hour special focuses on why Australia’s cocaine consumption per capita leads the world and how the so-called ‘party drug’ impacts every level of society.

This Week in Weed

Legalise Cannabis WA MP Brian Walker ‘Seeking to Right an Injustice’

Washington State Greenlights ‘Free Joint Initiative’ to Incentivise Vaccinations

‘It’s Discriminating’: Study Finds No Justification for Medicinal Cannabis Driving Ban

Campaigners for Military Veterans Dumbfounded After Cannabiz Discovers DVA has Funded Cannabis for PTSD – and Even Psoriasis

Creso Pharma and Red Light Holland Announce Merger

Novel Delivery Formats Failing to Grab Market Share From Oil and Flower

The Lambert Institute: A Guide to Prescribing Medicinal Cannabis for Doctors

Mark McGowan: Why Won’t You Legalise Cannabis?

Could Amazon Start Selling Cannabis?

Around the World

The War on Drugs Turns 50 Today. It’s Time to Make Peace

Many articles this week commemorating the golden anniversary of the drug war but this one from the Washington Post is a standout.

In 1969, when Nixon first took office, the nation’s entire federal drug budget was $81 million. Nixon asked Congress for $350 million to fight the drug war. Fifty years later, the United States has expended approximately one trillion dollars waging war on illegal drugs.

That money has bought some 30 million arrests and millions of imprisonments. Today, nearly 500,000 Americans are incarcerated for drug offences; the federal government expends well over $9 million every day, more than $3 billion a year, just to lock up drug offenders.

Black Americans are almost six times as likely as white Americans to have been incarcerated on drug charges, even as white and Black Americans use illegal drugs at around the same rate. The War on Drugs — a civil war waged by U.S. authorities against the tens of millions of Americans — is America’s longest wars in which the light at the end of the tunnel remains dim.

As we pass five decades of the drug war, polling shows that 71 per cent of American’s believe the policies are not working, while nearly 60 per cent support decriminalisation and 55 per cent support the legalisation and sale of drugs.

On the anniversary, the first-ever bill to federally decriminalise possession of all currently illicit drugs—and incentivize states to follow suit—has been introduced in Congress. The legislation aims to promote a public health and evidence-based approach to substance misuse. The bill is titled the Drug Policy Reform Act (DPRA) and was drafted in partnership with the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA).

On Monday, the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, held that low-level crack cocaine dealers are not eligible for lighter resentencing under the First Step Act, even if this act was passed in 2018 to do just that.

YouTube has announced that it will ban election, alcohol, gambling and prescription drugs ads on its platform.

VICE has put together a guide on testing your drugs for fentanyl for people who use opioids.

Canada: B.C. Mayors Back Vancouver’s Bid to Decriminalise Drugs, Urge Federal Support

A plan by the City of Vancouver to gain Health Canada approval to decriminalise small amounts of illicit drugs has won support from the mayors of seven other British Columbia cities.

A statement signed by the mayors of Victoria, Saanich, Nanaimo, Kamloops, Burnaby, New Westminster and Port Coquitlam says they support the so-called Vancouver Model to eliminate criminal penalties for simple possession and they want the federal government to do the same.

They urge Health Canada to approve what they call the ‘groundbreaking’ approach, saying it will allow other municipalities to study decriminalization and understand it as a way to counter the overdose crisis.

How Much Did Drug Kingpin “El Chapo” Earn From Drugs?

Joaquín Guzman Loera, or more commonly known as “El Chapo,” was the Mexican drug king who previously led the Sinaloa drug cartel. In that position, Guzman is estimated to have a net worth of $ 1 billion.

In his 30 years of practice as the head of a cartel, Guzman is believed to have earned over $12,666,181,704 by processing over 600,000 kg of cocaine, 200 kg of heroin, and at least 420,000 kg of marijuana. The former drug trafficker was active from the early 1990s until his arrest in 2016.

UK: 50 Years In, The War on Drugs Us An Unmitigated Disaster

Similar reports from the UK, where the Misuse of Drugs act turned 50 last week. Ian Dunt starts strong and continues acerbically through the piece, systematically dismantling every aspect of the UK’s approach to drug policy over the past five decades.

‘There’s arguably no piece of legislation in the modern era which has been more ineffective, needlessly cruel or morally insane than the Misuse of Drugs Act. Last week saw its 50th anniversary’.

BBC’s new drama ‘Time’ has been praised for its accuracy of prison life, with drug dealers at the top of the hierarchy, by one former inmate.

A senior police officer on the isle of Guernsey has criticised current drug sentencing practices, saying the current system is harmful to citizens.

Scotland’s drugs policy minister has called for a four nations meeting to discuss reform of drugs legislation. Angela Constance has written to Home Office minister Kit Malthouse, seeking to discuss overdose prevention facilities and pill presses.

Lost Cause: 50 Years of The War on Drugs in Latin America

The Washington Post has done some excellent work to mark the occasion this week, putting together a five-part series from Latin American journalists examining the impacts of US foreign policy on the region over the past five decades.

The pieces cover Brazil’s racist wave of mass incarceration, Colombia’s toxic battle against crops that won’t go away, Peru’s five decades of strategic failure, Honduras: the narco-state that illustrates U.S. contradictions, and Mexico’s militarization has put violence first.

Zimbabwe: Covid Complicates Efforts To Curb Substance Abuse

As LOCKDOWNS and job losses spur a spike in drug and alcohol use, a national coalition advocates for more affordable and accessible treatment programmes. In 2019, an estimated 180 people in the country died directly due to substance abuse disorders, a number that has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, according to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The coronavirus pandemic’s impact on livelihoods and mental health has intensified the problem.

Thousands In The Philippines Have Died In War On Drugs — Body Cams May Change Things

The Philippine National Police have announced that many officers will now wear body cameras. This comes years into a war on drugs in which police have killed thousands during anti-drug operations.

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