Transaction Search Form: please type in any of the fields below.
Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 12:05 am
Time: 12:05 am
Results for drug policies
3 results foundAuthor: Stoové, Mark Title: External Component of the Evaluation of Drug Policies and Services and their Subsequent Effects on Prisoners and Staff within the Alexander Maconochie Centre Summary: Meeting the health and wellbeing needs of our detainees presents distinct challenges. Most of our detainees have complex health histories - 91 percent of surveyed inmates reported a lifetime use of illicit drugs, with two-thirds of those having a heroin addiction. Three quarters of respondents reported that their current prison sentence was related to drugs and 79 per cent reported that they were affected by drugs when they committed the relevant offence. While the Report acknowledges that the ACT Corrections Health Program and Forensic Mental Health counselling services are providing effective services and activities for the inmates, it also demonstrates that there is more work to be done. Details: Melbourne: Burnet Institute, 2011. 197p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed November 15, 2011 at: http://www.health.act.gov.au/c/health?a=sendfile&ft=p&fid=1302161190&sid= Year: 2011 Country: Australia URL: http://www.health.act.gov.au/c/health?a=sendfile&ft=p&fid=1302161190&sid= Shelf Number: 123367 Keywords: Drug Abuse TreatmentDrug OffendersDrug PoliciesPrisoners (Australia) |
Author: Latypov, Alisher Title: Drug Dealers, Drug Lords and Drug Warriors-cum-Traffickers: Drug Crime and the Narcotics Market in Tajikistan Summary: This report presents research on the role played by the police, petty drug dealers and users in the street level drug trade in Tajikistan. Synthesizing information received from interviews with individual Tajik drug users, annual reports from the Tajik Drug Control Agency as well as lesser- known studies by local researchers, the study brings to light a number of interesting details of the street level drug trade in Tajikistan and discusses their implications for drug policies in the region as a whole. The main findings are: 1. the drug trade is evolving and becoming more mobile whereby cellular communications are used to arrange meetings or direct delivery of drugs to one’s home by the dealer in lieu of the previous practice of using specially-designated apartments or homes for the sale/purchase of drugs; 2.there is an emerging tendency amongst dealers to have purchasers transfer money to their bank accounts to facilitate larger drug sales; 3.heroin in Tajikistan is now more widely available, easier to acquire and of higher quality – all of which is consistent with changes in the prices of high purity heroin in the country in recent years; 4.the current situation in those towns bordering Afghanistan indicates a strong correlation between HIV risk behaviors and expanding HIV epidemics among injecting drug users; 5.new types of drugs like pill-form methadone from Iran and cocaine and ecstasy from China and Russia are available on the drug markets in Tajikistan, with the latter becoming especially popular in night clubs frequented by Tajik youth; 6.the Tajik drug market is being connected to drug markets in other countries through new routes between Tajikistan and China, with drugs moving in both directions, and Tajikistan and Iran. This research likewise illustrates the shocking state of corruption in Tajik law enforcement agencies and penitentiary facilities whereby police and prison officers directly facilitate the distribution of drugs. Law enforcement officials provide (confiscated) heroin to favored dealers, arrest or harass competing dealers and exploit drug users in various ways for the sake of information, money or sexual favors. Drug users are also routinely arrested, often by planting evidence on them, to meet arbitrary quotas, which all but ensures that the activities of larger criminal and drug trafficking organizations will go on unimpeded. Moreover, while the analysis of data from the Tajik Drug Control Agency suggests that the volume of opiates coming to or transiting Tajikistan from Afghanistan might, on the whole, have diminished over the past few years, the reported decrease in opiate seizures appears to be misleading as corruption in law enforcement has kept the country awash in heroin and other drugs. To address these challenges, this study suggests stepping up state prosecution of corrupt police and corrections officers, re-visiting contemporary drug policies through the lens of human rights, introducing policies that discourage targeting and arresting drug users for the purpose of police performance assessment, and providing more harm reduction, drug treatment and legal aid opportunities to people who use drugs both in community and prison settings. Details: Vilnius, Lithuania: Eurasian Harm Reduction Network, 2011. 23p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed on January 23, 2012 at http://idpc.net/sites/default/files/library/Drug_warriors_in_Takijistan_0.pdf Year: 2011 Country: Tajikistan URL: http://idpc.net/sites/default/files/library/Drug_warriors_in_Takijistan_0.pdf Shelf Number: 123749 Keywords: Drug DealersDrug PoliciesDrug Trade (Tajikistan)Drug Trafficking (Tajikistan)HeroinIllegal Drug TradeOpiatesPolice Corruption |
Author: Trautmann, Franz Title: Further Insights into Aspects of the EU Illicit Drugs Market: Summaries and Key Findings Summary: • Our estimates for the EU cannabis market suggest a range of approximately €7 billion to €10 billion for 2010. These estimates are likely low as they do not account for the “consumption gap” (see below) that is created when data from general population surveys are used to measure substance use. Prior estimates of the EU cannabis market ranged from €15-35 billion. • This difference arises from two key findings of this study: o Cannabis users who use more frequently also smoke more each time they use. This is true across the seven countries studied. o Occasional users are more likely to share than are frequent users; that still further reduces the amount they consume at each session. o This picture also seems to apply to amphetamine, ecstasy and cocaine use. • Prior estimates multiplied the number of users by the average number of sessions per user and the average amount per session; this will lead to overestimates of the quantity consumed because, for example infrequent users are the vast majority of all users and they use much less per session as the result of sharing. • Our study also shows that intensive users are a small to modest fraction of cannabis users (between 5% and 25%), but are responsible for the bulk (between 55% and 77%) of the total amount of cannabis annually consumed in all countries. Infrequent users of cannabis, using less than once per month, form the largest group of past year cannabis users but account for 2 percent or less of the quantity consumed. • Another important finding is that users stating that they used in the past month and specifying the quantity used in the past month do not consume (the same amounts) each month. Multiplying their consumption by twelve to obtain an annual estimate may result in an overestimation. There are also other factors which might have led to earlier overestimations of cannabis consumption. One might be overstating the share of ‘high consumption users’ among past year. Finally, earlier studies have used higher estimates of amounts of cannabis used per unit compared to those we found in our study. • Substantial prior research finds that opioid substitution treatment (OST) such as methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) contributes substantially to a reduction of drug use related harm and to better health. Research shows that OST reduces the frequency and intensity of illicit heroin use among treatment clients. Drawing from a wider lower and upper bound range, the study calculates that the amount of pure illicit heroin consumption averted per Problem Heroin User retained in MMT each month ranges from a conservative estimate of 1.26 grams to a high estimate of 3.09 grams. This compares with estimates for the amount of pure heroin consumed when not engaged in MMT, which ranged from 1.79 to 4.5 grams. At an individual level, changes on this scale are equivalent to a 70 per cent reduction in the amount of pure heroin consumed while retained in MMT. • Extrapolating these estimates across the four case study Member States considered, we conclude that retention in MMT may reduce total pure heroin consumption by around 30 per cent. Assuming 221,452 Problem Heroin Users from a wider population of 505,173 were in receipt of MMT across these four Member States, total monthly consumption of pure heroin is estimated to have reduced by between 0.28 and 0.69 metric tons, from an estimated total of between 0.9 and 2.3 metric tons consumed. • Enforcing laws against the production and distribution of cannabis dramatically inflate their costs. The increase is largely driven by producers and traffickers requiring compensation for their risk of arrest, incarceration, seizure, and violent injury as well as by the inefficiencies associated with having to operate covertly. • Drug markets to some extent follow the same laws of economics of licit markets, as attested by our Delphi survey of European drug experts about key trends of the illicit drugs market and policy responses in the EU. The majority of experts stress the analogy of the illicit drugs market with other (licit) markets. For example, it is important to maintain working relations with suppliers and employees. A study of 33 failed transactions in the Dutch cocaine smuggling trade found that the smuggler mostly tried to understand what went wrong and work out a reasonable way of arranging compensation. However about 40% did involve either violence or its threat; how that affects behaviour within the market remains to be worked out. Details: Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2013. 46p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed April 5, 2013 at: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/anti-drugs/files/eu_market_summary_en.pdf Year: 2013 Country: Europe URL: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/anti-drugs/files/eu_market_summary_en.pdf Shelf Number: 128295 Keywords: Drug Abuse and AddictionDrug Abuse and CrimeDrug PoliciesIllicit Drug Markets (Europe) |