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Transform Drug Policy Foundation
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Transform Drug Policy Foundation seeks to minimise drug-related harms to individuals and communities by bringing about a just and effective system to control and regulate drugs.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'drugs'
International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy launched
On Human Rights Day 10.12.09, Transform Drug Policy Foundation welcomes the launch of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy. The launch announcement is copied below.‘Individuals who use drugs do not forfeit their human rights...T...
Czech Govt Allows 5 Cannabis Plants For Personal Use From 2010
From the Wall Street Journal today we learn that the Czech Republic is to join the growing list of countries decriminalising adult personal possession and use of small quantities of cannabis, and in the Czech case various other plant based drugs:The...
Transform submission to the Home Office review of the ACMD
Transform have prepared a response to the Home Office review of the ACMD available in pdf here*. The introduction is copied below.Introductory Comments Transform is supportive of the concept of an independent expert Government advisory body on drugs...
Transform debates Nixon Drug Tsar on BBC World Service
I had a great opportunity today to discuss global drug policy on the BBC World Service (broadcast internationally) with Dr Robert Dupont, the first director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the second US Drug Tsar from 1973 to ...
Transform launch new guide to legal regulation of drugs in the House of Commons, Nov 12th
Transform is pleased to announce that our latest publication, 'After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation' will be launched at an event in the House of Commons on November the 12th, with simultaneous launches taking place in the US (at the Dr...
New Scientist: 'Blueprint for a Better World: Legalise drugs'
This weeks' edition of New Scientist magazine has a cover feature titled 'Blueprint for a better world' that considers 10 'radical ideas for transforming society and changing the way countries are run'. One of them is the legalisation and regulation...
Argentine Supreme Court to decriminalise drug possession today
So, in the same month that the UK Government is making political capital from attaching long prison sentences to several new drugs few people have even heard of, in a seemingly parallel universe not populated by drug warriors, other countries are qu...
Mexico decriminalises personal drug possession
On Thursday Mexico finally enacted legislation to decriminalize personal possession of small quantities of all drugs (plans reported/discussed in more detail here back in May).The legislation will operate in a somewhat similar fashion to the Portuges...
Baltimore police call for an end to the drug war
This is a short clip from MSNBC news, featuring interviews with the authors of a recent Washington Post article 'It's time to legalise drugs'; Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of "Cop in the Hood", and...
Home Office designates drug posession as 'victimless' crime
It is interesting that the Home Office Statistical Bulletin 'Crime in England and Wales2008/09, Volume 1: Findings from the British Crime Survey and police recorded crime' published this week, notes (p.33):"The BCS excludes.... those crimes termed as...
Transform submission to Consultation on Sentencing For Drug Offences
Last week we submitted our response to the Sentencing Advisory Panel's Consultation on Sentencing For Drug Offences. It asks some fundamental questions about the premises on which the recommendations for change are based. Read the full Transform sub...
Walter Cronkite, 1916-2009 'The Drug Dilema; War or Peace'
Walter Cronkite 'the most trusted man in America' 1916 -2009Copied below is the epilogue by veteran newscaster Walter Cronkite, who died last week, at the close of "The Drug Dilemma: War or Peace," The Cronkite Report, June 20, 1995: Every America...
PM hears case for Impact Assessment of drug laws
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has held an important meeting with drugs policy campaigning group Transform, and Lembit Öpik, Liberal Democrat MP for Montgomeryshire to hear the case for an impact assessment of drug laws.Danny Kushlick, Head of Policy a...
Prohibition doesn't work, so lets have more prohibition!
Kathy Gyngell, author of a new Centre for Policy Studies report - 'The phoney war on drugs', is wrong to say we are losing the ‘war on drugs’; it is a rhetorical war that could never be won. And in (somewhat reluctant) defence of the UK Governmen...
How cocaine markets have been hit by the financial crises
The following commentary on the recent SOCA report has been prepared for the Transform Blog by Axel Klein, Lecturer in the Study of Addictive Behaviour, Centre for Health Service Studies, University of Kent. On May 12th a government agency reported t...
US drug debate continues apace: Four letters in the Wall Street Journal
More evidence that the US drug policy debate has moving decisively towards both mainstream and the pro-reform agenda came from the recent engagement of the Wall Street Journal, that ran pro-legalisation piece (mostly focusing on cannabis) by Yale Law...
Mexico to decriminalise possession of drugs
Both Houses in Mexico's legislature have now approved a bill decriminalising possession of small amounts of all drugs for personal use. Both the Senate and Congress have supported the bill, meaning that President Calderon, just needs to rubber stam...
Transform organise major session at IHRA Bangkok conference: 'Can Harm Reduction End the Drug War'
Transform has organised a major session at the upcoming International Harm Reduction Conference in Bangkok next week, titled Can Harm Reduction End the Drug War, the session abstracts for which are copied below.The broad principles of harm reduction...
Mexican Drug War: Year of the Dead
Below is a video of a recent talk about the Mexican drug war at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado given by Sanho Tree, a drug policy analyst from the Washington based Institute for Policy Studies (and occasional Transform ...
New York City Bar Association: 'A Wiser Course; Ending Drug Prohibition'
From a statement issued this week by the New York Bar AssociationIntroduction In 1994, the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on Drugs and the Law concluded that the societal costs of drug prohibition are too high to justify it as a policy...
Transform on Newsnight and David Frost
A couple of interesting media appearances for Transform last week.The first was an invitation to debate drug legalisation/regulation with Anne Widdecombe MP on David Frost's Al Jazeera show; 'Frost over the World'. This was significant in that the sh...
MP calls for impact assessment of drugs policy in Prime Minister’s Questions
In today’s Prime Minister’s Questions Lembit Opik MP requested a meeting with the PM to propose a full impact assessment of current drug policy. His full question was: “A new European Commission report on drugs shows that despite prohibition ...
United Nations Drug Policy - the Skeptics Chime In
This short flim produced by the HCLU in conjunction with uber-blog Boing Boing provides commentary from various figures in the drug policy reform movement on the current events at the UN in Vienna where the Commission on Narcotic Drugs is meeting to...
Fear prevails at the UN as voices for drug law reform are smeared
Today Ministers from around the world are in Vienna for the High Level Meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs to set a new ten-year UN drug strategy. Whilst fear and inertia has generally prevailed amongst our political leaders, we have also ...
Ecstasy: truth is the foremost casualty in the war on drugs
On Wednesday 11th Feb the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) will announce the outcome of its review of the classification of ecstasy, and in all likelihood will recommend it be downgraded from Class A to Class B. A Transform spokes...
The Future of Harm Reduction: The US and the countdown to Vienna
The latest on this story from Reuters (including transform quote) and more importantly, given the high level audience in the States, a New York Times editorial ( below):from ReutersU.S. and Europe split over drugs policyBy Luke Baker LONDON (Re...
Should caffeine be a made a class B drug?
The week before last witnessed the first decent media drug panic we’ve had in a while, although unusually this one was not about cannabis, ecstasy, or cocaine. It followed the publication of a paper (from Durham University’s department of psychol...
Book review: The globalisation of addiction
'The globalisation of addiction' by Bruce Alexanderreview by Mike JayBruce Alexander is best known - though deserves to be much better known - for the 'Rat Park' experiments he conducted in 1981. As an addiction psychologist, much of the data with wh...
Lords debate alternatives to drug prohibition
This post has been updated with the debate transcript, along with links to any media coverage (below) Transform Drug Policy Foundation Media release 20/01/09 No embargo Lords to debate alternatives to drug prohibition The House of Lords will...
Obama lifts federal ban on funding needle exchanges
The Obama White House has launched its new website, www.whitehouse.gov. Under the header "The Agenda - Civil Rights", the site highlights various relevant issues including; homophobia and its affect on HIV/AIDS, contraception (including in prison...
