Tag: colombia
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Drug Decriminalisation Across the World
Tuesday, 31 December 2030
The criminalisation of people who use drugs compounds drug-related challenges and worsens health and welfare outcomes. Across the world, there is a growing number of jurisdictions where the possessio ...
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Coca price crash contributing to Colombia food insecurity, UN says
Friday, 14 July 2023
A crash in the price of coca, the chief ingredient in cocaine, is contributing to food insecurity in Colombia and causing displacement, as people leave areas that depend on the illicit crop, accordin ...
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If you care about the climate crisis, fight to legalize drugs
Friday, 07 July 2023
On June 26, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime released its annual report on the illicit drug trade. The headline is that despite millions of people killed, incarcerated and impoverished, a ...
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Amid worsening food shortages, we need to turn over a new leaf on the coca plant
Thursday, 23 March 2023
The coca leaf has been a staple in Andean communities for centuries, serving as a source of nutrition, as an aide for altitude adjustment, and as an energy boost. However, despite its many benefits, ...
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Cattle, not coca, drive deforestation of the Amazon in Colombia – report
Sunday, 19 February 2023
Cattle-ranching, not cocaine, has driven the destruction of the Colombian Amazon over the last four decades, a new study has found. Successive recent governments have used environmental concerns to j ...
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Colombia’s Congress agrees to final marijuana legalization bill, which key senator expects to be enacted by June
Thursday, 15 December 2022
Colombia’s Chamber of Representatives and Senate have voted to reconcile their respective versions of marijuana legalization bills that recently advanced, with both bodies accepting minor changes to ...
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Why Colombia should fully legalize cocaine
Tuesday, 15 November 2022
Colombia’s war on drugs dominated the headlines of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s October visit to Bogotá. Michael Crowley, a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, wrote of polic ...
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Booming cocaine production suggests the war on drugs has failed
Thursday, 13 October 2022
There is no shortage of people willing to plant and harvest coca; and there is no shortage of cocaine. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), global production hit a recor ...
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Colombia, largest cocaine supplier to U.S., considers decriminalizing
Saturday, 20 August 2022
Colombia is the largest producer of cocaine in the world, the source of more than 90 percent of the drug seized in the United States. It’s home to the largest Drug Enforcement Administration office o ...
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Prohibited Plants
Thursday, 18 August 2022
Across the world, the state of environmental stress is unprecedented. As scholarship and activism on ‘environmental justice’ points out, poorer and marginalised communities face particular exposure t ...
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Colombia’s first leftist president says war on drugs has failed
Monday, 08 August 2022
Colombia’s first leftist president has been sworn into office, promising to fight inequality and bring peace to a country long haunted by bloody feuds between the government, drug traffickers and reb ...
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War on drugs prolonged Colombia’s decades-long civil war, landmark report finds
Wednesday, 29 June 2022
The punitive, prohibitionist war on drugs helped prolong Colombia’s disastrous civil war, the country’s truth commission has found, in a landmark report published as part of an effort to heal the raw ...
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A Sustainable Future for Cannabis Farmers
Friday, 16 April 2021
Learn how lessening the barriers for small farmers while raising them for large companies can help to steer legal cannabis markets in a more sustainable and equitable direction based on principles of ...
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Colombia’s cartels target Europe with cocaine, corruption and torture
Sunday, 11 April 2021
At 5am on a chilly Tuesday morning last month, 1,600 police officers and balaclava-wearing special forces, bristling with arms and battering rams, were ordered into action around the Belgian port cit ...
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U.S. 'war on drugs' in Latin America needs overhaul amid COVID-19 challenges, report says
Tuesday, 01 December 2020
The United States’ anti-drug policy in Latin America needs to change if Washington is to effectively combat a problem worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, a U.S. congressional commission will say in a ...
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‘I will be left with nothing’: Why Colombians are watching the U.S. election closely
Monday, 02 November 2020
Coca fumigations started in Colombia in the early 1990s and intensified during “Plan Colombia,” a $10 billion U.S. campaign that ran from 2000 to 2015 and was meant to tackle Colombia’s armed leftist ...
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Colombia lawmakers seek to take control of cocaine market. It’s a long shot
Monday, 21 September 2020
Legislators weary of Colombia’s whack-a-mole anti-narcotics efforts propose to stop the often violent trafficking of cocaine that has plagued the country for decades. The plan calls for the national ...
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Coca leaf: Myths and Reality
Tuesday, 16 June 2020
Many myths surround coca. Every day press accounts around the world use the word coca in their headlines, when they refer in fact to cocaine. TNI's Drugs and Democracy Team expose the myths and reali ...
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The coronavirus has gutted the price of coca. It could reshape the cocaine trade
Tuesday, 09 June 2020
As a farmer eking out a living in Peru’s central jungle, Rubén Leiva grew one cash crop that seemed immune from global cycles of booms and busts. But the coronavirus pandemic has accomplished what ne ...
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The controversial new deployment of US troops in Colombia
Tuesday, 02 June 2020
The decision to send US troops into Colombia to help against drug trafficking is a troubling one, whether as part of the two countries’ security strategy or connected to broader efforts against Venez ...
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What lockdown? World’s cocaine traffickers sniff at movement restrictions
Wednesday, 20 May 2020
The world’s cocaine industry — which produces close to 2,000 metric tons a year and makes tens of billions of dollars — has adapted better than many other legitimate businesses. The industry has bene ...
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Canopy Growth exits cannabis cultivation on three continents in major international pullback
Thursday, 16 April 2020
Canopy Growth is ceasing cannabis cultivation in Africa, Canada, Colombia and the United States in a bid to “improve efficiencies” in its global operations. The company also said it is eliminating 85 ...
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Glyphosate and cocaine: Colombia's next drug war?
Monday, 09 March 2020
Pedro Arenas is afraid that they'll take flight again. "I expect it could be within the next months," he says. Since the end of last year, nine AT-802 firefighting aircraft have been deployed through ...
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Smokable cocaine markets in Latin America and the Caribbean
Sunday, 01 March 2020
The smokable cocaine market was established decades ago, and is definitely not a new phenomenon. Rather than disappear, it is undergoing a slow expansion: from constituting a rather localized and iso ...
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The ‘deja vú’ of aerial crop spraying in Colombia
Saturday, 29 February 2020
At the end of 2019 the government of Iván Duque presented a draft decree to resume the spraying of drug crops used for illicit purposes. It argued that spraying is the only instrument to curb the inc ...
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Colombia will tackle cocaine with a cancer-causing chemical. Only problem is, it won't work
Tuesday, 21 January 2020
The Colombian government has published a proposed law that will allow it to resume a controversial program of aerial fumigation of coca crops using glyphosate, a weed-killer thought to cause cancer i ...
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Human Rights and drug policy
Wednesday, 01 January 2020
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 ...
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Colombia
Tuesday, 31 December 2019
Overview of drug laws, legislative trends and drug policies in Colombia Colombia is in the midst of a peace process with the guerrilla groups, which includes the issue of drugs in the different phase ...
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UN Common Position on drug policy
Sunday, 01 December 2019
In November 2018, the UN System CEB adopted the ‘UN system common position supporting the implementation of the international drug control policy through effective inter-agency collaboration’, expres ...
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Growers' voices at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs
Monday, 25 November 2019
From 16 to 18 October 2019, representatives of member states, intergovernmental organisations, and civil society attended the 6th Intersessional Meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs. On 17 Oct ...
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Inside the Walmart of weed
Saturday, 23 November 2019
With Canada the largest nation to completely legalize marijuana, the world’s most valuable pot company, Canopy Growth Corp., founded in 2013 and now worth about $6.4 billion, is one of the most contr ...
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Canada’s cannabis colonialism
Wednesday, 09 October 2019
Canadian weed companies have their eye on a massive prize: the lucrative medical and adult cannabis markets that are emerging around the world. Much of the hype around corporate cannabis is linked to ...
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Facing stiff competition, will Colombia's marijuana industry go up in smoke?
Monday, 07 October 2019
Cannabis company Clever Leaves has only managed to export a few marijuana derivatives because of the tight regulations threatening to choke Colombia’s ganja industry. Colombia was one of the first co ...
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The Challenges of Medicinal Cannabis in Colombia
Monday, 30 September 2019
In July 2016, the Colombian government enacted Law 1787, which regulates the use of medicinal cannabis and its trade in the country. With this decision and a series of subsequent resolutions, Colombi ...
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Colombia is turning into a major medical marijuana producer
Saturday, 07 September 2019
Other countries are passing laws to permit the production, import and export of medical marijuana but Colombia has a leg up because it did so three years ago, says Rodrigo Arcila, president of the Co ...
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Cannabis in the Americas: It’s time to talk about marijuana policy
Tuesday, 03 September 2019
There is now a unique moment to build a coherent regulatory framework that would prevent the growing cannabis market from being concentrated in the hands of large for-profit conglomerates, beholden t ...
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Coca, the illicit plant that funded Colombia’s civil war, is flourishing again
Wednesday, 10 July 2019
It was eight years ago the last time planes came to spray poison on Noralba Quintero’s coca crop in the jungled foothills here by the mighty Magdalena River. Until recently, she thought those days we ...
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Colombia has 100-plus licensed cannabis firms, but only a handful have registered cultivars
Friday, 31 May 2019
Interest in Colombia’s medical marijuana market is booming, but out of over 100 licensed cannabis companies operating in the country few have finished registering their first cultivars, a prerequisit ...
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A death foretold: Colombia’s crop substitution program
Monday, 01 April 2019
The government’s failure to comply with the coca crops substitution program in Colombia has left the future of almost 100,000 families in limbo and sets up a major setback in the country’s drug polic ...
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Fair(er) Trade Options for the Cannabis Market
Thursday, 21 March 2019
Policy changes over the past five years or so have dramatically reshaped the global cannabis market. Not only has there been an unprecedented boom in medical markets, but following policy shifts in s ...
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Glyphosate alone won’t fix Colombia’s complex coca woes
Thursday, 14 March 2019
Colombia’s Constitutional Court is debating lifting a judicial ban on the spraying of glyphosate during the aerial fumigation of illicit coca crops, a decision that is unlikely to fix the nation’s co ...
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New gangs 'Uberise' Europe's cocaine supply and bring more violence
Friday, 14 December 2018
A surge in the supply of pure cocaine to Europe has led to a rise in drug-related murders as new criminal gangs muscle into a market previously dominated by the mafia, the EU drugs agency has said. T ...
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Connecting the dots...
Friday, 26 October 2018
How can we resolve the tensions between current drug control policies and states’ human rights obligations? The international human rights framework clearly establishes that, in the event of conflict ...
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Colombia continues to break records for cocaine production, report says
Wednesday, 19 September 2018
Colombia is desperate to shed its reputation as a nation dogged by the drug trade, but new figures from the United Nations show that it continues to break records for producing cocaine. In 2017, arou ...
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Murder in Colombia’s peace laboratory
Thursday, 19 July 2018
Colombian campesinos in Briceño, Antioquia have voluntarily uprooted their coca plants in exchange for government support to grow new crops. But with much aid delayed, the local economy has collapsed ...
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Colombia coca production hits new record high, US figures say
Tuesday, 26 June 2018
US estimates of coca production in Colombia show the Andean nation has set a new record for the amount of the drug-producing crop under cultivation, confirming a trend that has been transforming regi ...
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Record coca, record murders: the flipside of “peace” in southern Colombia
Wednesday, 20 June 2018
Hundreds of Colombian farmers, activists, and community organisers have been killed over the past 18 months, despite the landmark peace deal that supposedly ended 52 years of war. For them, and for l ...
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Colombia sees billion-dollar bonanza from legacy of marijuana trade
Thursday, 03 May 2018
Farmers who want to be part of Colombia's medical marijuana project are required to destroy their illegal crops. Colombia has already issued 33 licenses and hopes to grow as much as 40.5 tons a year ...
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Medicinal cannabis policies and practices around the world
Tuesday, 24 April 2018
Although cannabis remains a prohibited substance worldwide, in recent decades a series of political, legislative and judicial processes in various parts of the world have given rise to various forms ...
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“The drug market is thriving” while the Commission on Narcotic Drugs limps along
Sunday, 08 April 2018
“The drug market is thriving” is one of the key messages in UNODC’s 2017 World Drug Report. This is an important admission from the UN’s lead agency for drugs given that it is now less than nine mont ...
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