Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) is pressing ahead with plans to deliver a Heroin Assisted Treatment facility in the city centre. This work continues while the HSCP maintains a dialogue with the Scottish Government on how best to progress a Safer Drug Consumption Facility in the city in order to tackle the ongoing HIV outbreak affecting people who…

Researchers have repeatedly shown the efficacy of harm-reduction approaches, like SIFs, to addiction. As Dr. Thomas Kerr, Associate Director of the British Columbia Centre on Substance Abuse argues, the scientific evidence surrounding safe injections sites is clear: “There’s no real serious academic debate.” So why isn’t the United States, currently facing the worst overdose crisis in history, taking the idea of…

In about one hundred locations across Canada, Europe and Australia, supervised drug injection facilities allow visitors to inject heroin and other drugs in a clean, well-lighted space under the watchful eye of trained personnel who can rescue them if they overdose. […]

Legislation to decriminalise drugs, including heroin, cocaine and cannabis, for personal use could be enacted in early 2019, Minister of State for the National Drugs Strategy Catherine Byrne has indicated. On Thursday, she appointed a working group to look at “alternative approaches to the possession of drugs for personal use”. It will have its first meeting on December 11th. […]

Responding to news that Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the police to resume their role in supporting his administration’s controversial ‘war on drugs’, James Gomez, Amnesty International’s Southeast Asia and the Pacific Director, said: “In returning police to his anti-drug operations yet again, President Duterte has consigned the poorest and most marginalised people in the Philippines to another catastrophic…

The law was merely a reflection of transformations that were already happening in clinics, in pharmacies and around kitchen tables across the country. The official policy of decriminalisation made it far easier for a broad range of services (health, psychiatry, employment, housing etc) that had been struggling to pool their resources and expertise, to work together more effectively to serve…

It is time for international justice mechanisms to step in and end the carnage on Philippine streets by bringing the perpetrators to justice,” said James Gomez, AI’s regional director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. […]

The Victorian Greens are defying the Labor Government’s opposition to pill testing with a new plan to reduce overdoses a​nd save lives at festivals. On Wednesday morning the Greens first read a bill that would give medical and forensic experts an exemption from criminal charges to conduct lab-grade pill testing at major events. […]

With its origins going back 25 years in countries like the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria (and even back to San Francisco in the late 1960s!), drug checking in all its guises is sweeping both hemispheres. […]

Advocates are still keen to bring pill testing to Groovin the Moo in Canberra next year, saying their plan to trial testing at Saturday’s Spilt Milk festival was “vandalised” by the Liberal Party. […]