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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

Poppy cultivation in Mexico and Colombia is part of a local economy geared almost exclusively toward the illegal market abroad: it is driven by demand for heroin, primarily in the United States. Nort ...

Much has been made of the marijuana M&A spree afoot in Canada. Just this year alone, licensed producer Aurora Cannabis Inc. agreed to acquire CanniMed Therapeutics Inc for $852 million, which would c ...

According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, Colombia’s overall coca crop grew by a staggering 52 percent last year, to 345,000 acres, an area ten times the size of Miami. The military and police ...

The planned resignation of the US State Department's top anti-drug official raises further questions about the future of US counternarcotics efforts in Latin America, against a backdrop of uncertaint ...

Community policing has become the go-to security strategy in the Americas. But as the case of the Rio de Janeiro's "pacification" policing experiment shows, its impact has been limited and short-live ...