This report argues that ‘drugs’ are a development issue and must be recognised as such by development agencies. The cultivation of opium poppy, coca leaf and cannabis for anything other than medical and scientific purposes is prohibited under the UN 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, as amended by the 1972 Protocol. However conditions of marginalisation and exclusion have sustained the cultivation of these low capital input/high yield drug crops. Poverty, insecurity and inequality also exacerbate the vulnerability of ‘bridge’ states to trafficking activities. These factors are development concerns requiring economic and political solutions.
Despite efforts by governments in Latin America, illicit drugs continue to provide one of the largest incomes for criminal organizations, enabling them to penetrate and corrupt political and social institutions.
How does national legislation in different EU member states compare and how effective is the adding of new psychoactive substances (NPS) to the existing schedules of drug laws versus legislative experimentation designing new schedules or applying controls under medicines or consumer protection regulations?
While in the Americas cannabis policy reform is taking off, Europe seems to be lagging behind. At the level of national governments denial of the changing policy landscape and inertia to act upon calls for change reigns. At the local level, however, disenchantment with the current cannabis regime gives rise to new idea.
The chemically-based frame of reference adopted by the UN Single Convention is mistaken in the culturally loaded and falsely “scientific” manner in which it was applied to different plants.
These are interesting times for drug law reform, which, as it gathers pace, is asking important questions of international law. A UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs is set for 2016 just as national reforms are challenging international treaties that form the bedrock of a global prohibition regime that has dominated since the turn of the twentieth century. States parties to the three UN drug control conventions must now confront the legal and political dilemmas this creates. This is the situation in which the US now finds itself following cannabis reforms in various states that are at odds with these treaties.
Caribbean states face challenges of youth involvement in crime, violence, gangs and other anti-social activities. It is not uncommonly heard the “drug problem” is to be blamed for this. This briefing wants to show this relation is far more complex and often misunderstood.
On the second anniversary of the enforced disappearance of prominent Lao civil society leader Sombath Somphone, rights groups firmly condemn the Lao government’s ongoing refusal to provide any information regarding Sombath’s fate or whereabouts.
The release of the draft policy, part of a process towards enacting a new National Land Law and “harmonising” existing legislation, was greeted with objections and criticism from farmers’ organisations and ethnic minority groups throughout the country.
There are some big problems with the current draft of the policy and they stem mainly from its failure to recognise that land has more than an economic function.
A distinguishing mark of the Narendra Modi government is the determined and methodical manner in which it is diluting, even scuttling, India’s already weak environmental regulation system in the name of promoting “fast-track clearances” and rapid industrial development.
The MA in Criminology is a one-year master’s programme that equips students with the knowledge, skills, and understanding required to work with local and global crime issues, crime policies, and crime control strategies.
The programme offers a multidisciplinary, critical, and comparative perspective on criminology.
The World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) is a mass-based social movement of small-scale fisher people from across the world, founded on 21 November 1997 in New Delhi, India, by a number of mass-based organisations from the Global South. WFFP was established in response to the increasing pressure being placed on small-scale fisheries, including habitat destruction, anthropogenic pollution,...
Stop Wapenhandel is an independent research and campaign organisation against arms trade and arms production. We unravels facts and figures and share our findings with activists, journalists, public and politicians. We campaign against arms export to poor countries, undemocratic regimes and countries in conflict areas. But also against the financing of arms trade and arms industry by...
The interaction of local drug markets with violence and crime is complex, and it is very difficult to separate it off from other types of criminal economies.
On the occasion of the UN climate change negotiations in Lima, Peru – known as COP20 – we reaffirm that rejecting REDD+ and ‘environmental services’, two manifestations of the so-‐called ‘green economy’, is a central part of our struggle against capitalism and extractive industries and the defence of territories, life and Mother Earth.
