AFP Reanimates Old Tactics for Halloween | World First Psilocybin Trial for Anxiety Greenlit in Australia | Drug Policy is a Barrier to Climate Action

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

Nov 04, 2021

Hello!

Happy Friday and welcome to issue #64 of Drugs Wrap, a weekly compilation of the top stories in drug policy from across Australia and around the world.

The AFP returned to old tactics this week with the launch of a new campaign comparing people who use meth to Halloween monsters. It’s a shockingly out of date tactic that further stigmatises and dehumanises people suffering from addiction and feels very much like clutching at straws in desperation to win a losing battle.

Thankfully that rhetoric no longer seems to land - at least, based on my own observations, which admittedly are rather biased - but the fact that leading newspapers like the Sydney Morning Herald can publish op-eds decrying the drug war surely counts for something.

On the psychedelics front, Monash University has been greenlit to undertake one of the world’s first and largest trials of psilocybin for the treatment of generalised anxiety disorder. Interestingly, therapists involved in the trial will also be allowed to legally take the drug in order to provide better treatment.

Detroit has also become the largest city in the US to decriminalise the use of psychedelics, bringing the total to 14 across America.

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Let’s get to it.

AFP Return to Old Tactics With Halloween Drug Scare Campaign

The Australian Federal Police released a new social media campaign on Halloween to highlight the ‘real horror’ of illicit drug use.

The ‘Have a Conscience’ campaign outlines how Australian drug users could be ‘bankrolling drug syndicates responsible for overseas human trafficking and sexual servitude, plus contributing to significant environmental damage in some of the world’s most pristine forests’.

The campaign aims to ‘challenge the perception that cocaine is a harmless drug’.

News Corp has of course lapped it up, splashing stories about Australia becoming ‘Mexico-lite’ unless the nation changes its insatiable appetite for drugs.

‘The AFP's campaign to change attitudes towards illicit drugs represents the first major push-back against the defeatist attitude which has seeped into the [national consciousness]’ one line reads.

It’s endlessly frustrating to see the national debate dragged backwards in this way but perhaps comforting to know that this kind of rhetoric no longer holds the weight that it once did.

Let’s Be Honest - Most of Us Have Used Drugs, Including Me

Fair play to the SMH - they’ve been publishing some great pieces recently calling out the hypocrisy of the war on drugs and this latest one from Professor Catharine Lumby, Chairperson of Unharm, is no different.

‘Like most of my cohort I have occasionally used illicit recreational drugs since. And like most of them, I have never developed an addiction to illicit drugs. Alcohol has caused many people I know far more trouble than cocaine or cannabis’.
‘Let’s be honest about recreational drugs: lots of professional, educated and socially privileged people do them at some point. The Unharm survey shows most users are over the age of 30, earn more than the median income per year and report largely positive experiences. They are not fringe-dwelling risk-takers’.
‘Our survey also found that illicit drug users care about safety and over three-quarters would prefer to access illegal drugs via a pharmacy or regulated provider. Yet, many of our politicians ignore the evidence on drug use and like to pretend it can be policed out of existence, even while drug markets continue to expand’.
‘Unharm is not promoting drug use. It simply wants to see realistic and evidence-based policies that create safer use and a healthier society. At the moment, all we are doing is criminalising and harming already marginalised communities’.

Penington Institute Launches November Issue of The Bulletin

The Penington Institute have released their latest edition of The Bulletin.

The November issue showcases strategies developed both overseas and here in Australia for engaging with people who use drugs on the crucial topic of COVID-19 vaccination, delves into the increasing use of social media as a platform for trading substances in a world in lockdown, and looks into the key takeaways from Australia’s Annual Overdose Report 2021 from a frontline worker’s perspective.

It also features a Q&A conversation with Allan Ragi in Nairobi, Kenya, where he shares the successes and challenges of his organisation’s work in campaigning against threats such as HIV/AIDS in vulnerable populations.

World-First Trial of Psilocybin Therapy for Anxiety Disorders to Begin in Australia

Incannex Healthcare, in partnership with Monash University, has obtained ethics approval to begin the first-ever clinical trial investigating the effects of psilocybin assisted psychotherapy to treat generalised anxiety disorder

Late last week, the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC) greenlit the second-phase clinical trial to treat GAD with a combination of psilocybin and specialised therapy as psychedelics trigger changes in perception, mood and thought.

Monash University are looking to recruit 72 participants in this trial, making it the largest psychedelic research and development programme in Australia.

This trial, led by the Clinic Psychedelic Research Lab within the Department of Psychiatry and the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health will be held at Monash University and is set to start patient recruitment early next year.

Drug Law Reform in Australia and The ACT Will Save Lives Not Destroy Communities

Bill Bush, president of Families & Friends for Drug Law Reform, has written an op-ed in the Canberra Times in which he rejected the AFP narrative that decriminalisation in the ACT would mean that ‘organised crime will want to target this community because they can move their product quite easily’.

‘If the Commissioner is so bent upon protecting the ACT community from drugs, how does he explain the booming state of the Australian illicit drug market as revealed in the Illicit Drug Data report published earlier this month - a 28 per cent increase in border detections of methamphetamines; a 1961 per cent increase in MDMA; and a 447 per cent increase in cocaine in the decade to 2019-20?’.
‘If Kershaw and his mob were effective, prices should be rising, purity declining and availability becoming more difficult’.
‘Instead they have the hide to proclaim victory on the basis of statistics that prove their failure. To add insult to injury the AFP, through its Drug Harm Index, uses the level of their seizures as the basis for the benefit they claim they provide to the Australian community’.
‘The law that Mr Kershaw wants to maintain is a driver of "stigma and discrimination [that] is directed at both those people with mental illness and those who support them". In the words of the Productivity Commission these are among the "key factors driving poor outcomes in Australia's mental health system’.

This Week in Weed

Cannabis experts develop a radical new way to measure cannabis intake

Is CBD or THC better for depression? New study says it’s CBD

Aussie study reveals cannabis may help relieve endometriosis pain

Consultation over reform of imported cannabis standards drags on amid ‘complex technical issues’

Preliminary data shows SAS-B approvals hit 12,206 in October

Bumper Cannabis Crop for Afghan Farmers

‘It’s Mind-Boggling’: The Complex, and Growing, Use of Medicinal Cannabis in Australia

Around the World

Drug Policy is a Barrier to Climate Action

A bold promise has been made to the world at the UN climate conference (COP26) today: to end deforestation by 2030. This pledge does not however, mention the impact of drug policy.

The so called 'war on drugs' is a massive driver of climate change. It is also a barrier to urgent climate action. The lack of regulation of the illicit drug trade has led to devastating consequences for the environment; from narco deforestation, crop eradication, toxic chemical dumping, and displacement of farmers from their lands.

However, the success of the COP26 is contingent on governments controlling their own resources and having political power to turn pledges into action. For some countries this is simply not the case.

Many countries, who play host to the earth's largest rainforests and diverse ecosystems, are caught in a complex triangle of prohibition, corruption and organised crime, which undermines sustainable climate solutions.

We need more honest conversations about this inconvenient truth which is why Health Poverty Action have teamed up with students from SEEDS for Change and LEAP UK to produce 12 exclusive interviews with politicians, academics and activists that explore the link between drug policy and climate change and expose how prohibition, organised crime and corruption are a barrier to achieving climate action and justice.

Philippines Rights Body's Drug War Probe Bolsters Police Abuse Allegations

An investigation by the Philippines' rights commission into the killings in President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs has found that dozens of people were shot in the head, chest and abdomen, suggesting an intent to kill rather than self defence, it said on Tuesday.

The Commission on Human Rights' (CHR) report, which bolsters findings by the justice ministry that pointed to foul play in dozens of deadly police operations, is the latest to challenge the government's narrative of the war on drugs.

The commission said it reviewed 579 incidents of ‘drug-frelated extrajudicial killings’ and violence from 2016 to February 2020, 451 of which were allegedly linked to police operations and involved 705 victims.

Duterte has defended the police and argued that all those killed were drug dealers who resisted arrest.

US Jail Distributing Lifesaving Naloxone to Every Leaving Inmate

Aroostook County Jail in Maine is launching a pilot program to give a naloxone kit, naloxone training and opioid recovery resources to every person leaving incarceration.

The initiative is funded by a $1 million federal grant to combat substance use disorder stigma and prevent overdose deaths.

Somewhere between a quarter and 40 percent of the people who died of overdose in Aroostook County this year had been incarcerated at the jail. Distributing these kits could be a huge step in the right direction for The County.

‘We’re trying to stop deaths. We’re on the downslide and the street drugs are not getting safer. It is a priority, not only for us as an organization and a community, but as the state and nationally — to try to get naloxone into as many people’s hands as possible’.

Laos Makes Asia's Largest Ever Drug Bust

Police in Laos have made the biggest single drug seizure ever recorded in Asia, intercepting 55 million methamphetamine tablets and more than 1.5 tonnes of crystal meth, the UN's crime agency said.

Strict COVID measures on China’s Yunnan border with Myanmar appear to be deterring drug traffickers from moving through China and instead increasing shipments through Laos and Thailand.

This has resulted in regions like Laos being ‘absolutely flooded’ with methamphetamines.

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