The issue of cannabis legalisation around the world was once again thrust into the spotlight following a vote by the United Nations’ Commission on Narcotic Drugs to reclassify it as one that is less ...
U.S. law enforcement officials say Chinese “money brokers” represent one of the most worrisome new threats in the war on drugs. Small cells of Chinese criminals have upended the way narcotics cash is ...
As the UNODC put it, this was “one of the largest and most successful counternarcotics operations” in Asia’s history. Myanmar’s army and police, which conducted the raids, are naturally pleased. But ...
Police in Myanmar this week announced the largest synthetic drug seizure on record in Southeast Asia. Between February and April, security forces seized more than 200 million tablets of methamphetami ...
For nearly two decades Estonia battled a fentanyl epidemic so severe its overdose death rate was almost six times the European average. Once fentanyl landed, heroin disappeared. After Estonian police ...
The Transnational Institute (TNI) has always believed in the need to find global answers to global problems, been a strong defender of multilateralism and an advocate of a well-functioning United Nat ...
Beijing's leading drug enforcement body has blamed the legalization of marijuana in Canada and parts of the United States for a spike in the amount of drugs smuggled into the country, describing it a ...
China nominated a former Hong Kong police chief to lead the UN’s drug crimes division, the first time it has sought a global post since detaining Interpol’s chief last year. The effort to install And ...
A new ecstasy-like drug produced in China that has been linked to at least 125 deaths is feared to have spread to Britain, the National Crime Agency has warned in an alert to summer festival-goers. T ...
As cannabis companies eye expansion in European and South American markets, Asia is poised to be a new frontier for some major Canadian pot players. Despite being the world’s most populous continent, ...
China has made your iPhone, your Nikes. Now, it wants to grow your cannabis. Two of China’s 34 regions are quietly leading a boom in cultivating cannabis to produce cannabidiol, or CBD, the nonintoxi ...
Chinese cannabis-related stocks have been getting way too high this year for Beijing’s taste, prompting a crackdown to control the investor mania. Marijuana growth and consumption is illegal in China ...
The hemp plant has a history in China. It was probably twisted into the world’s first rope there around 2,800BC. Since its cooler sister, marijuana, became legal for recreational use in Canada and ma ...
Over the past decade, methamphetamine use has grown more popular in Myanmar, Thailand and Southern China. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with individuals who use methamphetamine, this briefin ...
Public Health England has expressed concern that increasing numbers of young people are using ketamine as a Guardian analysis of government data shows the number of police seizures of the drug increa ...
China vows to stem the supply of the powerful opioid fentanyl flowing into the United States. It pledges to target exports of fentanyl-related substances bound for the United States that are prohibit ...
Asia has the toughest penalties against drug use and trafficking but the legal landscape is shifting in several countries where cannabis once deemed ruinous to young lives, is emerging as a lucrative ...
Global attitudes on narcotic drugs are changing, but the shift has come too late for those caught up in Asia’s past decade of misguided and often lethal anti-drug campaigns. Over the past ten years, ...
The global cannabis industry is targeting China for production and investment, while the country’s investors are warming up to the idea of placing their money in the fast-growing market. Legal cannab ...
The Trump administration will open a week of high-level meetings at the United Nations General Assembly in New York with a drug policy event featuring President Donald Trump. Invites to the event are ...
China’s drug control agency said the United States should do more to cut its demand for opioids to tackle the use of synthetic drug fentanyl, but it vowed to step up cooperation after Chinese product ...
We want to understand why MDMA is today so cheap, so pure, and so abundant across the UK and the EU. Since 2012, pills have doubled or tripled in strength and now have to be taken in halves if you wa ...
Chinese officials have been quietly grilling Canada about illicit marijuana flowing to their country, prompting Ottawa to agree to work with them on the problem, an internal federal memo reveals. The ...
Shares in Hong Kong pharmaceutical company Meilleure Health International Industry Group soared by as much as 35 per cent on Thursday after it issued 312 million new shares to top Chinese hemp produc ...
The president declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, with most recent government estimates suggesting the more than 64,000 fatal overdoses in 2016 outnumber the total number of America ...
It seems an eternity ago that two top High Court judges called for the decriminalisation of cannabis in Hong Kong, arguing that enforcement legislation was outdated and good citizens were finding the ...
Thanks to government support and a long tradition, China has quietly become a superpower in hemp production and research. This growth has in part been made possible by government-funded scientists wh ...
The use or sale of cannabis is banned in Hong Kong under the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, which came into effect in 1969. Any person who cultivates any plant of the genus cannabis faces a HK$100,000 fi ...
Ironically, in Asia where cannabis cultivation first began, cannabis laws remain the strictest. China will probably be the last country to relax such laws because of its painful history with drug use ...
To get in front of production, the State Department and a group of U.S. senators asked the United Nations in October to add to the list of tightly controlled substances two key ingredients used to ma ...
The powerful tranquiliser ketamine should be kept off a worldwide illegal drugs list despite it being abused by clubbers, doctors are arguing. They say it should always be treated as a medicine and n ...
The supply chain for illicit fentanyl begins in China, but the problems Canada is experiencing start right here at home: No other country in the world consumes more prescription opioids on a per-capi ...
My supply of ketamine is under threat. I’m not a recreational drug taker. I’m an anaesthetist, and for me ketamine is medicine. In rural hospitals in Nigeria, injecting the drug is essential for preg ...
For decades, ketamine was only manufactured by pharmaceutical companies. Technically, it was too complicated to be made by amateur chemists. But in the past five years, that has changed. Chinese drug ...
The war on drugs is edging towards a truce. Half of Americans want to lift the ban on cannabis. America’s change of heart has led many to wonder if the UN conventions might be reformed to legalise so ...
As the world prepares for the 2016 Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS 2016), an increasing number of countries around the world now find the regi ...
An economic stir is happening in China, but it’s in an industry you might not expect. With more than half of the 600 relevant patents filed with the World Intellectual Property Office now owned by Ch ...
The approaching 2016 UNGASS and the meetings that will follow provide an important opportunity to reexamine the existing regime and improve global drug policy through robust policy evaluations and im ...
Human rights groups have urged the UK government to heed the recommendations of an influential parliamentary committee that has told the government to stop funnelling money into anti drug-trafficking ...
Executions for drug offences have escalated in countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia against a trend towards abolition globally, reveals a new Harm Reduction International (HRI) report The Death Pe ...
It is increasingly clear that there is a fundamental lack of oversight of how international aid – provided by the US, Europe and the United Nations to poorer countries – is used to pursue anti-drug e ...
Millions of dollars in international aid for drug enforcement is spent in countries with extremely poor human rights records and with little or no accountability for the resulting abuses, according t ...
In the Kokang and Wa regions in northern Burma opium bans have ended over a century of poppy cultivation. The bans have had dramatic consequences for local communities. They depended on opium as a ca ...
In the 1990s, Southeast Asia experienced a boom in the production and consumption of amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), in particular methamphetamines (meth). At the same time, the region has seen a ...
The world today is not any closer to achieving the ten-year targets set by the 1998 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs. These goals were “eliminating or significantly reducing the ...
A report published in March 2007 by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and the Open Society Institute Public Health Program, strongly criticises the INCB. It accuses the Board of becoming 'an obstac ...