En noviembre de 2021 y cuando ya era un hecho que el Gobierno alemán enviaría una ley al Bundestag para legalizar el consumo y la posesión de marihuana en el país, cuyo proyecto fue aprobado el pasado día 16 de agosto, un equipo de investigadores encabezados por Justus Haucap, profesor de Economía de la Universidad Heinrich Heine de Düsseldorf, publicó un estudio construyendo un escenario económico basándose en un consumo de 400toneladas de cannabis al año en el país, un escenario que aportaría a los presupuestos públicos unos 4.700 millones de euros de ingresos y ahorros cada año. (Véase también: La industria alemana del cannabis se frota las manos ante los planes de legalización del Gobierno)

"La abstinencia no lo es todo", dice Heino Stöver. Tal vez, esa frase del investigador de adicciones de Fráncfort podría resumir las más de 200 páginas del séptimo "Informe Alternativo sobre de Drogas y Adicción”. Stöver presentó el informe en Berlín en su calidad de presidente de la asociación "Akzept", junto con la Asociación Alemana del Sida y otros expertos del campo de la investigación de drogas. Bajo el lema "proteger en lugar de castigar", el informe se centra en la reducción de los daños, también mediante la "distribución regulada por el Estado de sustancias ilegales", es decir: cannabis en las farmacias. El informe, explica Stöver, quiere crear una "vía alternativa al estancamiento de la política de drogas" en Alemania.

For a forgotten moment, at the very start of the United States’ half-century long war on drugs, public health was the weapon of choice. Before long, the funding ratio between public health and criminal justice measures flipped. The results of that shift are clear: Drug use is soaring. More Americans are dying of overdoses than at any point in modern history. It’s time to reverse course. Drug use and addiction are as old as humanity itself, and historians and policymakers likely will debate whether the war on drugs was ever winnable, or what its true aims even were. In the meantime, it’s clear that to exit the current morass, Americans will have to restore public health to the center of its approach.

The Drug Committee in Thailand approved three draft legislations for amnesty. If these drafts become law, even possessors of cannabis, who are not patients or research units, will be pardoned. “We have already passed the draft regulations, but there are still many steps left. The Food and Drug Administration [FDA] will have to put these drafts through public hearings and gather opinions for further review,” FDA secretary-general Tares Krassanairawiwong said. The approved drafts included three announcements designed to grant amnesty to government agencies, private firms, community enterprises, practitioners of traditional Thai medicine, research organisations, patients and everybody else who use and possess cannabis.

Mayor Femke Halsema plans to go through with a ban on coffeeshops selling weed to tourists in Amsterdam, she said in a letter to the city council. According to her, the enforcement of the residents-only criterion is "necessary" for the municipality to get a grip on the coffeeshop market and "inseparable" from any relaxation of the cannabis policy, such as regulated cultivation or expanded trade stocks, Het Parool reports. Over three million foreign tourists visit coffeeshops in Amsterdam every year, making the capital's cannabis market uncontrollably large and a portal to serious crime. Some tourists may resort to street dealers, but research could not estimate how many.  (See also: Amsterdam mayor plans to press ahead with tourist cannabis cafe ban)

Paderu is the main town in the area and the cannabis produced in the entire belt is popularly called Paderu ganja. This region is quickly becoming the cannabis capital of India, say officials. While cannabis is grown in several parts of the country, this region and the neighbouring Malkangiri district of Odisha has seen a spurt in cultivation. In the eight mandals, the area under cannabis cultivation is estimated to be 10,000 acres spread across 1,000 (of the total 3,000) villages, according to data available with the office of deputy commissioner of prohibition and excise (enforcement) of Visakhapatnam district. (See also: Modern technology to end ganja cultivation in Visakhapatnam Agency areas)

La ley de drogas de Argentina cumple 30 años este fin de semana, y a pesar de que la Corte Suprema de Justicia recomendó hace una década dejar de perseguir a los usuarios de sustancias psicoactivas con el trascendental fallo Arriola, las estadísticas muestran que hay casi tantos detenidos por tenencia de sustancias o cultivo de cannabis que por comercialización. El ministerio de Seguridad que dirige Patricia Bullrich es sólo un eslabón más del mecanismo de fondos públicos que en los últimos tres años gastó 122 millones de dólares en perseguir a usuarios de drogas y cultivadores de marihuana, según un informe realizado por RESET, una organización compuesta por abogados, psicólogos, trabajadores sociales, sociólogos, politólogos, licenciados en comunicación y estudiantes.

Australia’s cannabis industry could be earning the black market $25bn a year and, rather than policing it, we could be gaining revenue from it by legalising it, Greens senator David Shoebridge has said. “Law enforcement is spending billions of public dollars failing to police cannabis, and the opportunity here is to turn that all on its head by legalising it,” he said. In answer to a question from Shoebridge during Senate estimateson how much cannabis Australians consumed, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (Acic) provided data from the nation’s wastewater which found 14.6 kilograms of THC (the psychoactive compound found in cannabis) per thousand people a year.

The mayor of a town in North Brabant has been accused of acting too harshly after allegedly setting an autistic man out of his home when he was discovered with a cannabis plant. In October 2019, 34-year-old Robin said he had grown a single plant in a forest nearby his home in Bergeijk, according to RTL Nieuws. He was drying the branches and leaves at home when neighbours smelled it and called the police, who confiscated the plant and judged the amount to be high enough to sell. Apparently against the advice of the man’s guidance counsellor and some city council staff, the mayor of Bergeijk Arinda Callewaert decided to close his home under strict opium laws. Last month, the ombudsman for Rotterdam said these closures may effectively bypass people’s housing rights.

The Barcelona City Council is considering tightening regulations on access to cannabis social clubs. The concept of cannabis social clubs has drawn numerous locals and tourists to Barcelona over the years, who seek a legal way to consume cannabis rather than supporting the illegal market, especially since adult-use cannabis remains illegal in Spain. But now, the City Council is exploring ways to legally close cannabis social clubs, according to the Spanish online newspaper elDiario.es. The City Council, along with the Guàrdia Urbana, the municipal police force for Barcelona, has recently launched a renewed inspection campaign targeting about twenty cannabis social clubs, signaling a shift from their tolerance policy pursued over the years.

“Si sacas hierba del club te la guardas dentro de los calzoncillos; la policía suele estar en la puerta esperando para identificarte“. Es la regla de oro que uno de los socios de uno de los clubs de cannabis del Eixample de Barcelona explica a otro cliente. La Guardia Urbana ha declarado una guerra contra estas asociaciones de consumidores que han proliferado exponencialmente en la ciudad.A los consumidores locales se les suma un auténtico ejército de turistas que llegan a una ciudad que ven como exponente de la máxima tolerancia con el consumo de esta droga. La batalla legal y policial contra estos clubs se viene librando desde hace meses.

The manager of Berlin’s notorious Görlitzer Park has come under fire after creating zones for drug dealers to conduct their business. Amid harsh political criticism, the dealers say they have few other options. Berlin government authorities have strongly criticized the plan as an ‘open invitation to break the law’. Authorities have long considered drug dealing in Berlin’s Görlitzer Park to be a problem. Police raids are frequent but efforts to curb the sale of illicit substances have largely failed. Cengiz Demirci, the newly appointed park manager’s ‘solution’ to the issue has drawn criticism from the Berlin government, who argue that the move “supports organized drug trafficking”. (See also: Berlin park designates 'pink zone' areas for drug dealers | Neue Regel im Görlitzer Park: Platzanweiser für Dealer)

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has only managed to curb the supply of methamphetamines by less than 1% of annual consumption, proof that it has been a bloody failure, his main political rival, according to Vice President Leni Robredo, who was elected separately to the president.Thousands of suspected drug traffickers and users have been killed in the campaign that Duterte launched soon after he won election in 2016. Robredo, who recently served a brief stint as the president’s drug “tsar”, said vast quantities of the highly addictive drug were available because seizures had barely dented the supply. “It is very clear, based on official data, despite the number of Filipinos killed and the budget spent, the volume of shabu supply curbed didn’t exceed 1%.”

North Brabant is Europe's biggest producer of synthetic drugs, such as ecstasy and amphetamine. In 2017, 21 active ecstasy laboratories were dismantled in the EU, up from 11 in 2016 — and all of them were in the Netherlands, according to a report released by the EU drugs agency in June. Local government experts estimate the annual volume of waste from illicit drug production is about 255,000 kg per year. Most of it is dumped in the countryside, resulting in 109 reported findings in 2018, up from 83 in 2017. "It's a very complex issue, but we must seek to regulate this type of drugs on an EU-level in a different way," says Maarten Groothuizen, MP and justice spokesman for the D66 party, hinting at the Dutch gedoogbeleid (“tolerance policy”) that's already in place for the sale of cannabis in coffee shops.

A Cambodian official defended an anti-drug campaign that has been decried as rife with abuses, saying human rights “need to be put aside” to fight drugs that destroy families and fuel violent crime. The comments came in response to rights group Amnesty International, which said in a report that the campaign that has seen 55,000 people arrested had led to torture and caused dangerous prison overcrowding while fuelling corruption. Amnesty cited interviews with dozens of people who described arbitrary arrests by police and torture in prison and drug treatment centres. (See also: Cambodia: Abusive “war on drugs”, rife with torture and corruption, must be overhauled)

One in five of those found guilty of cannabis possession in England and Wales last year was black, official figures show, prompting accusations of racial injustice at the heart of the UK’s drug laws. Campaigners said the rate was grossly disproportionate when only an estimated 3 per cent of the population is black. They also warned of a link between the convictions and the police stop and search policy, a central concern during the Black Lives Matter protests. The latest figures, obtained from the Ministry of Justice, show one in five, 21 per cent, of those convicted in 2018-19 was black. But the true figure could be even higher, because in 23 per cent of cases data on ethnicity was not recorded.

As Canada prepares to legalize marijuana this summer, politicians are facing growing calls to grant a blanket amnesty for people convicted under the existing drug laws – many of whom belong to marginalized groups. Since the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was elected in 2015 on a manifesto promise to legalize cannabis, more than 15,000 people have been charged over marijuana-related offences – joining close to 500,000 Canadians with marijuana convictions on their criminal record. The Campaign for Cannabis Amnesty launched a petition asking the government to consider pardons for possession charges. The group hopes to gain at least 5,000 signatures by the end of May.

A recent study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction, found that a trio of policies adopted to combat the opioid overdose epidemic saved, combined, an estimated 3,030 lives in the Canadian province of British Columbia alone, between April 2016 and December 2017. The findings are a ringing endorsement of the policies adopted by the government of the province hit hardest by the epidemic: promoting access to the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, expanding access to supervised consumption or injection sites, and providing access to treatment known as opioid agonist therapy.

The half-million Canadians with criminal records for cannabis possession received some encouraging news. Four Liberal cabinet ministers held a news conference to announce that the government is bringing in legislation to expedite pardons for those who were busted with amounts of 30 grams or less. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told reporters that the intention is to remove the stigma of criminal records for simple possession, which will make it easier for people to find housing, employment, and volunteer in their community. (See also: Pardons for past cannabis crimes have major limitations, and there's no simple fix | NDP introduce a private member's bill calling for cannabis amnesty)