war on drugs

Victorious after Billy and Charlotte Caldwell’s bold struggle to change the legal status of medicinal cannabis in the UK in 2018, 20,000 patients have joined a new front line in…

US President Joe Biden has officially announced that all prior federal offences of cannabis possession are to be pardoned, urging state governors and legislators to do the same.  In a…

The deaths of 16-year-old David Celino and 9-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel in the same week in August have scarred the conscience of the nation. Their deaths, in separate circumstances and different…

When Gustavo Petro began his four-year term as Colombia’s new president on 7 August, he inherited a huge, but old problem: how to tackle Colombia’s drug problem. Despite billions of…

  The policy debate around drugs in the UK is muddled and tripolar. It’s split between people who believe in legalization, decriminalization, and continuing prohibition. The drugs prohibition laws we…

The drug war is a checklist of horrors. 27,000 dead. A bloodbath of genocidal proportions. In spite of it all, Duterte’s war remains popular.

  There are unimaginable amounts of money to be made through covertly manufacturing and transporting drugs. When that takes place in the shadows, outside civilised society and free of law…

Our current prohibitionist approach to drugs is incredibly easy to argue against, but rhetorical flourishes have, as yet, not translated into meaningful policy change. For policy-reform advocates looking to catalyse…

  In early January, as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced a tentative degree of policy experimentation by piloting, in three boroughs, a diversion scheme whereby young people in…

 You can now listen to this essay as part of the Volteface Audio Long Reads selection. Just click on the link above.  Like the thick smoky aftertaste that lingers after…