In a Wednesday interview with the Associated Press, Russia's anti-drug chief sai

In the last eight days, the decriminalization of drug possession has gone into effect for 150 million Latin Americans. Last Thursday, as part of a broader bill, Mexico (pop.

Another video from the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, this time in partnership with the Swedish Drug Users Union. Sweden's government is one of the world's most prohibitionist, but nevertheless has moved toward harm reduction in recent years by expanding needle exchange into a national policy. Previously needle exchange was happening only in two cities in the nation's south.

Well, there's still no needle exchange in Stockholm, according to HCLU, it's even hard to get into a methadone maintenance program, and those who do often face negative attitudes from the program's staff. Check out the video below, or here.

In a report that was actually completed last October but not published until this week in the New England Jo

A bill that decriminalizes the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use in Mexico is now the law of the land, although it will not go into effect for one year to give states time to ad

A congressional study released Tuesday reveals that US military forces occupying Afghanistan have placed 50 drug traffickers on a "capture or kill" list.

The Obama administration has shifted gears in Afghanistan, rejecting the Bush administration's emphasis on opium poppy eradication in favor of attacking Taliban-linked drug trafficking networks as

US and NATO casualties in Afghanistan jumped sharply this week as some 4,000 US Marines and 650 Afghan army troops poured into Helmand province, Afghanistan's largest producer, which supplies more

Gretchen Peters certainly has a sense of timing.

Thousands of US Marines poured into Afghanistan's southern Helmand province this week to take the battle against the Taliban to the foe's stronghold.

As summer arrives in Afghanistan, it's not just the temperature that is heating up.

From the 1970s until 2000, anyone caught possessing, distributing, or producing heroin in Louisiana was eligible for a prison sentence of life without parole.

"God's Middle Finger" is not a book about drug policy. It's not really even a book about drugs; it belongs to the travel literature genre.

Despite fighting in the courts to shut down Insite, Canada's only safe injection site, Canada's conservative federal government is providing fundi

The German parliament has voted to allow the prescription of heroin to addicts who have not responded to other treatments. The lower house of parliament approved the measure May 28.

According to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, top NATO commander in Afghanistan, US Gen.

With drug strategies and welfare reform plans in the British Isles moving toward pushing drug users into treatment and from treatment into the workplace, the British government is going to have to

Here’s drug czar John Walters shamelessly using a young woman’s death as an opportunity to plug student drug testing:

Heroin killed 19-year-old Alicia Lannes, and her parents say she got the drug from a boyfriend.  Experts say that's how most young kids get introduced to drugs: by friends or relatives.
…
While teen drug use is declining, Walters says a Fairfax County heroin ring busted in connection with Lannes' death proves it's still a problem.  He supports a federal program used in more than 4,000 schools to randomly drug test students.

"There's no question in my mind had this young woman been in a school, middle school or high school with random testing," said Walters, "She would not be dead today." [FOX DC]

Walters sounds supremely confident, as usual, yet the reality is that random drug testing is often impotent when it comes to discovering heroin use. Student drug testing programs typically rely on urine tests, which can only detect heroin for 3-4 days after use. Only marijuana -- which stays in your system for up to a month – can be effectively detected this way. Thus, random testing actually incentivizes students to experiment with more dangerous drugs like heroin that increase your chances of passing a drug test.

And thanks to the complete failure of the drug war, heroin is stronger today than ever before:

The drug enforcement agency says the purity of heroin found in Virginia is typically higher than usual—making it more deadly.

"They tend not to know how to gauge the strength and they usually take more than they need to," said Patrick McConnel, who oversees Treatment for Youth Services Administration Alcohol and Drug Services.

There are no easy answers here, to be sure, and I don’t claim any monopoly on the solutions to youth drug abuse. But I guarantee you that the problem isn’t our failure to collect more urine from young people. As long as the most dangerous substances continue to be manufactured, distributed, and controlled by criminals, the face of our drug problem will remain the same.

The government of Thai Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat announced a new anti-drug offensive last wee

Last Friday, researchers with the North American Opiate Maintenance Initiative (NAOMI) unveiled their long-awaited