Part 3. The EU Institutions, the EU legislation papers on Drugs, power balance between the EU Institutions, and some consequent conclusions

The text below is only a part of the whole document. Although each part is published under a separate link, all of them should be considered as different chapters of one and the same document.

Part 3. The EU Institutions, the EU legislation papers on Drugs, power balance between the EU Institutions, and some consequent conclusions

The EU Institutions in charge of the EU drugs policy:

The Council of the European Union: The Council of the EU is the main decision-making body at EU level. The ministers of the EU member-states form the Council of the EU.

The Horizontal Drugs Group (HDG) is one of the working groups of the Council of the European Union. The group is formed by representatives of the EU member states. The HDG facilitates and mediates the joint work of the EU Council / the Member States and the European Commission.

The European Commission (EC) is the main coordinating body of the EU.

The EU Institutions' authorities

The EC is independent from the EU member-states and works only at EU level.

The EC is authorized to make proposals for amendments, to give recommendations, to writes reports on the progress of the EU member-states, etc.

The documents developed by the EC are recommendatory.

The EC is the one that drafts first the EU Strategy on Drugs and the EU Action Plan on Drugs.

The EC delivers the draft to the Horizontal Drugs Group.

The HDG reviews the draft, developed by the EC, makes amendments and presents the new proposal to the Council of the European Union for voting.

After a review and possible new amendments, the EU Council adopts the proposal of the HDG.

The EU legislation papers on Drugs

The EU Strategy On Drugs (2005 - 20012) and the EU Action Plan On Drugs (2005 – 2008; 2009 – 2012) are the main legislation papers in the EU policies on Drugs..

The EU Strategy on Drugs

The EU Strategy on Drugs is based on the fundamental principles: respect for human rights and dignity, liberty, democracy, equality and solidarity. As a consequence of these principles the EU demands a health approach to the drugs problems and appoints priority areas: demand reduction, supply reduction and the cross-cutting international cooperation and research and information.

The Strategy only sets the framework, the overall objectives, and the priority areas. Its practical implementation is provided by the EU Action Plan.

The EU Action Plan on Drugs

The EU Action Plan on Drugs focuses on concrete objectives in the priority areas, outlines concrete tasks and actions, and appoints concrete assessment tools and operational indicators for measuring the progress of the EU member-states.

Both, the Strategy and the Action Plan, have a recommendatory character and aim mainly at providing added EU traditional values to the national Strategies on Drugs of the EU member-states. Within the frameworks of the Strategy and the Action Plan, the EU member-states are free to enact any laws, legislations, and policies on drugs, they find appropriate.

Still, the national authorities in the area of drugs are obliged to provide to the EC annual reports on their progress. In regards with the received data, the EC makes progress-evaluation reports, recommendations, proposals, draft the EU legislation papers, proposes amendments to the EU Action Plan, etc.

Power balance and conflicts between the EU Institutions

The HDG is a working group of the Council of the EU. The members of the HDG have much better political interests to protect their national governments' political freedom, than to support the EC.

The national governments are obliged to report at a regular base to the EC on their work and progress. The EC analyzes the national governments progress, makes progress-evaluation report for national level, and if weak points in the EU legislation papers are revealed, the EC recommends amendments to enable improvements at EU level. The EC proposals have to be approved by the HDG and adopted by the EU Council.

If the EC recommends better tools to monitor the work at national level, and the EC proposal is adopted, then the EC will gain a powerful weapon to control and influence the national governments. The HDG is not willing to reduce the political independence of their governments and will not accept such proposal. And if the HDG delivers the proposal to be voted by the EU Council, the EU member-states' ministers in the area will never empower the EC against their national governments by voting it.

The EC could partly counter-weigh to the national government by involving the Civil Society as a stake-holder in the EU drugs–policy debate.

The EU Civil Society Forum on Drugs should be considered as the first attempt of the EC to change the status-quo.

The EC will be less dependent on the official data reported by the national governments, if the experts' team of the Forum can provide the EC with an accurate data, monitored at national level.

Through adequate recommendations and accurate monitored data, the Forum members may enable the EC strengthen the control at national level and pursue the EU member-states improve their work.

Increased influence of the EC at local level also means increased influence of the EC at inner EU level. Despite the differences in their narrow personal interests, the close cooperation between the EC and the Civil Society may be mutual beneficial.

Conclusions:

The EC needs accurate information to evaluate the work of the EU member-states' national governments. The EU member-states national governments provide the information to the EC for the EC progress-evaluation reports. The EU member-states will never provide willingly information that will result in a negative report. The monitored data of the Civil Society may be used by the EC as a control indicator of the accuracy of the official data.

There is a conflict of interest in EU drugs policy making process. The involvement of the Civil Society in the drugs-policy debate can partially restore the balance in the powers at EU level.

At the moment the EC is pressed by the Civil Society demands to amend the EU legislation papers in a way that will ensure practical improvements. Such changes will also be beneficial for the EC. These changes will substantially reduce the political independence of the national governments (that also form the EU legislation bodies). Only the cooperation of the Civil Society with the EC may bring such changes, if the both sides put coordinated pressure on the national governments on both national and EU level.

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Part 4. Theory and practice: 1st Civil Society Forum on Drugs, the role of INPUD, and the possibilities of the Forum

The text below is only a part of the whole document. Although each part is published under a separate link, all of them should be considered as different chapters of one and the same document.

Part 4. Theory and practice:

1^st Civil Society Forum on Drugs, the role of INPUD, and the possibilities of the Forum

2008-2012

The current EU Strategy on Drugs is valid until 2012. The current Action Plan, 2005-2008 has three years to secure the implementation of the Strategy and one year – 2008 – when the progress at both national and EU level will be evaluated and the next Action Plan (2009 - 2012) will be developed and adopted.

The Forum should be regarded as an event with historical importance. As such, practical changes, influenced by our work at the Forum, would be possible in years. Consequently, for the coming years our main goal will be to establish as traditions:

The participation of the People Who Use Drugs as a full-right member in the experts' team;

The recognition of the People Who Use Drugs as an important stake-holder in the drugs-policy debate;

The acknowledgment of the People Who Use Drugs as an equal reliable partner.

At each meeting of the Forum, we will also make sure that the recommendations for amendments in the EU legislation papers that might enable our peers advocate for more effective drugs policies at national level are included in the final outcomes.

Qualitative vs Quantitative

The current EU Action Plan contains almost 100 different objectives and at least twice more concrete tasks for the EU member states to achieve.

The assessment tools and indicators the EU Action Plan appoints are mainly (if not all) quantitative.

Practical example: the EU member-states report on their progress in prevention by quoting only the number of the implemented prevention programs. This allows the EU member-states' governments to report highest efficiency without even being aware of the practical results of their policy. More over, reporting on the efficiency and the sustainability of the programs appears to be non-beneficial and therefore is neglected.

The current quantitative indicators, set by the Action Plan, make the objective progress-evaluation reports of the EC impossible. Consequently, through the EU Council, the EU member states will work against including qualitative indicators in the EU Action Plans.

The qualitative indicators may also empower the Civil Society Organizations, working at local and national level. Apart from a more objective progress-evaluation, the qualitative indicators may also provide a reliable advocacy information. INPUD first recommendation to the EC as a Forum-member is to persist in proposing qualitative indicators as amendments to the Action Plan.

Concrete

The Drug Users' Community is not mentioned at all in the current Action Plan. Therefore, our topmost priority is to start with aggressive evidence-based advocacy for separating the Drugs Users as an important stake-holder in the implementation of the national policies on drugs. No improvements in the area are possible until our needs, opinion, and evaluation of the results are not taken into consideration.

Once the need for cooperation between the decision-makers, the professionals/service providers, and the DU Community is acknowledged and officially recommended, INPUD can start working for adopting the changes that will enable practical improvements in the national policies on drugs.

The current Action Plan sets framework of well defined objectives but a wrong approach to their implementation and progress reports. The very first change INPUD will advocate for will aim mainly at directing the EU drugs policies to the correct starting point. As a practical change this means to replace “the number of the programs implemented” - the main evaluation tool in the current Action Plan - with the appointed below set of indicators. This will secure the implementation of the most effective and efficient treatment and harm reduction programs, in regards with the realistic possibilities the UN Conventions on Narcotic Drugs allow.

The set of indicators should oblige the governments to report also on:

Needs assessment – If needs of the clients and the best solutions are not carefully studied and evaluated the new program is doomed to failure and from the very beginning it is a waste of money and time. More over, the implementation of effective programs is often impossible because few other programs already work, although inefficiently, in the area.

Equal access to the program, secure coverage of the hidden populations and marginalized groups, work in direction of capacity building – to enable sustainability each one of these aspects should be considered when a program is to be opened.

Impact over the estimated curves of the patterns and types of drugs use, of blood born diseases' transmissions, etc, e.g. back up information from the community regarding the practical results of the program – as obvious, the only objective evaluation of the implemented programs is their practical results in the DU community and the information for that can be given only by the people from the community.

The number of the programs – If all recommended above is taken into consideration, the number of the programs in the area is also important indicator. Still, if the governments are requested to report annually on the number of the implemented programs, their most beneficial approach is each year to open as many programs as possible and disregard their sustainability. If the indicator differentiates two different categories – the number of the newly implemented programs together with the number of the previously opened and still operating programs, before opening a new program, the governments will have to evaluate in details the needs, to provide high efficiency, cost effectiveness, and the capacity-building in order to ensure the sustainability of the newly opened program. Thus will redirect the focus from opening unnecessary programs to the aggregate effectiveness of the programs – a fundamental condition for improvements in the national policies on drugs.

As said, if the above appointed recommendations are adopted as amendments to the Action Plan, the EU policies on drugs will be placed at a right starting point. Meanwhile, radical changes and substantial improvements at national level will be enabled. Inevitably new, unforeseen at present, problems and obstacles will occur. INPUD long term advocacy goals might be determined only when the first practical results are analyzed and evaluated.

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Part 5. Summarized information about the way the Forum was held

The text below is only a part of the whole document. Although each part is published under a separate link, all of them should be considered as different chapters of one and the same document.

Part 5. Summarized information about the way the Forum was held.

The 1^st EU Civil Society Forum On Drugs took place in Brussels, on December 13 – 14, 2007. The agenda was proposed by the EC and consisted in resume of the following panels:

Registration; Opening and Introduction (the EC); Brief Presentation Of the Participants (tour de table)

Presentations (the EC):

Progress Review Of the EU Action Plan On Drugs;

Recommendation On Drugs And Prisons

Information About the Grant Programme On Drug Prevention, That Is To Be Launched In January 2008

Workshops Introduction (the EC)

Progress Review Of the EU Action Plan On Drugs;

Recommendation On Drugs And Prisons

Workshops

Closing pannel

Presentations From the Workshops And Discussion

Conclusions and next steps

The opening was made by the chair and moderator of the Forum - Mr. Carel Edwards. He started with a short introduction to the main aspects of the Forum – forming the team, the input the EC needs from the experts, the authority of the EC, the realistic possibilities for influencing practical changes, etc. After the short representation of the participants the EC presented:

Progress Review Of the EU Action Plan On Drugs – the EC presented their view on the current EU policies on drugs – accomplishments, achievements, failures, objective obstacles, expert's recommendations and input needed to influence improvements. The focus was on the EU Action Plan On Drugs which implementation is to be evaluated by the EC during 2008 as meanwhile a proposal for the next Action Plan has to be developed and presented to the HDG.

Recommendation On Drugs And Prisons – the EU still has not adopted any official documents to ensure regulations at EU level in the area. The presentation focused on the EC evaluation of the current situation and the recommendations, the EC found important to be considered, when the EU regulation papers on drugs and prisons are developed.

Information About the Grant Programme On Drug Prevention, That Is To Be Launched In January 2008 – the last presentation was only informative, as the possibilities of the new grant program of the EC were reviewed.

In the introduction of the workshops the EC set concrete requirements about the input they will need. The expert team was asked to focus on revealing the weak points in the presented documents (the EU Action Plan on Drugs and the EC recommendations on drugs and prisons) and make recommendations for amendments.

INPUD representative Milena Naydenova chose to work on the EU Action Plan. Since the very beginning of the workshop the cooperation between the supporters of the harm-reduction and the prohibition was not possible. To secure the experts' recommendations from all possible views and approaches the representatives of the EC, who hosted the meeting without moderating it and directing the discussions offered the team to split again to two working subgroups.

Till the closing session the event was focused on the analysis of a part of the EU Action Plan and the recommendations that can enable a more effective implementation of the EU Strategy at national level.

During the closing session the recommendations of the three working groups were presented and discussed. The EC took the responsibility to accomplish and email to the members of the Forum the summarized outcomes and to organize the next meeting of the Forum in three months. Meanwhile the participants should inform the members of their organizations about the event as the EC promised to take into consideration all email remarks and comments sent by the participants after the event.

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Public Health Hero: Dr. Thomas Kerr (rabble news)

Dr. Thomas Kerr

Read the original article on rabble news

>by Am Johal
January 7, 2008

Dr. Thomas Kerr is a Research Scientist with the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. In his current role at the BC Centre, Dr. Kerr is a principal investigator of several large cohort studies involving injection drug users, HIV-positive individuals and street-involved youth.

Dr. Thomas Kerr has been called a "public health hero" for his work in a controversial area — Vancouver's Eastside medical injection site program. Dr. Kerr's research evaluating North America's first safer injecting facility, Insite, has contributed significantly to academic, public and government discussions, both nationally and internationally. He spoke on the phone with Am Johal.

Am Johal: You recently won a research award related to your work with Insite. Can you tell me about that?

Dr. Thomas Kerr: I was awarded a Canadian Health research award in the area of knowledge translation. There is now a growing pressure on researchers to make sure that their work is translated into language that people can understand and that it is transferred to appropriate people, not just other researchers, but the broader public, policy makers and others. We’ve tried to communicate our findings in a way that the broader public can understand. It’s a credit to our entire research team to have our work recognized by the national research community.

You were involved with the supervised injection site, prior to it being open. I’m wondering if you can talk to the period prior to the site being opened?

I was working as a counsellor at the Dr. Peter Centre. I was working with people living with HIV/AIDS including many injection drug users. We experienced first-hand the frustration of dealing with their challenges without being able to deal with their addictions.

There was a growing pressure to set up a pilot project. I was doing my PhD at the University of Victoria and was gaining more experience in research. A number of community-based AIDS organizations and organizations serving drug users wanted to develop a pilot study of a safe injection site. Given that I had a background in both health care and research, people thought I was an appropriate candidate. I travelled overseas, went through the literature and developed a model that would work in Vancouver.

From the outset, we wanted to implement a pilot project and evaluate it rigorously. It was always the plan to proceed cautiously. We wanted to ensure the appropriate level of scientific evaluation.

There have been well over 20 peer-reviewed articles supportive of the site in terms of what the intent was and the outcomes have been. Can you speak to that?

The main findings were that the site was having a positive effect [on] reducing public disorder, HIV/AIDS risk behaviour such as needle sharing, assisting people in getting into detox and addiction treatment. We’ve also looked at studying whether adverse effects were occurring — but we did not find that the site led to an increase in drug use, new drug users starting to inject, drug related crime or open drug use.

Have the rates related to communicable diseases tailed off?

We haven’t really looked at that closely enough yet. From an epidemiological perspective, I’m sure that’s the way to go about it. This is a tiny pilot facility. With 12 seats open 18 hours a day, we have a small pilot facility and only a small number of injections that happen every day in this neighbourhood. The site only covers about five to ten per cent of injections that happen in the neighbourhood each day.

For many, the wait is too long or the site is closed when they want to use it. The way to investigate this is not to look at the population level, but rather to look at a sub-population who uses the facility. At that level, we have some relevant examples. There have been close to 1000 overdoses and nobody’s died. We’re continuing to look at numbers like that.

A recent federal government study attempted to place conditions on your research on Insite. Can you speak to that?

Health Canada put out a request for proposals. We were offered one contract. The contract contained an intellectual property clause that stated that the researchers could not utilize the information produced under the contracts unless approved by Health Canada, and it was said that this approval was expected to be given within six months. Our lawyers at UBC and community partners had major issues with that. We contacted a lawyer at UBC, since most of the members of our research group are faculty at UBC, and we were told that as faculty we are prohibited from taking the contract. In essence, it would be taking part in research in secret. We felt it had to be undertaken in a transparent way.

We requested Health Canada make an amendment. We didn’t receive a formal reply. Our request was ignored. We never heard from Health Canada again.

Do you view this as a politicization from the previous research you were engaged in related to the supervised injection facility?

It is interference in the natural evolution of evidence-based policymaking. They were essentially putting a gag order on researchers. We could not communicate our research or speak to the media. We weren’t prepared to work under such draconian conditions.

There has been criticism from both the U.S. government and the International Narcotics Control Board regarding Insite. Can you speak to this international dimension of this debate?

The U.S. drug czar made a trip to Vancouver and called the safe injection site ‘state-sponsored suicide’ before we even opened the doors. He wasn’t prepared to take an evidence based approach or to take a look at a rigorous approach to a complex issue. It’s very unscientific.

The INCB is an archaic and irrelevant body. The international drug conventions were created long before we had the problem of HIV/AIDS. These policies are not relevant in this era of pandemics of infectious diseases. There were legal assessments carried out for the INCB by UN experts on whether supervised injection sites violated international law. Those expert lawyers said that no — there were no international law being broken here. Despite the fact that they had elicited this opinion, members of the INCB continued to state that they were in contravention, which is totally irresponsible. Making public statements that are incongruent with their own expert legal opinions is outrageous. It’s sad that a UN body like the INCB takes positions that are incongruent with the policies of UNAIDS and the World Health Organization.

Anything else?

We have a very serious public health problem here. It exists locally, nationally and internationally. This one intervention seems to be working really well. There is no debate about whether this works or not. We shouldn’t allow this issue to be politicized and allow it to overshadow the scientific evidence.

We need to disengage from this misrepresentation of the science and the research. Other jurisdictions should be allowed to move forward with their proposals. We need to end the human suffering associated with drug addiction rather than engage in these predictable debates that are distorted by politics.

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Time to ditch a failing drug policy (Danny Kushlick, tdpf)

www.tdpf.org.uk

From Blogs Independent

Guest author: Danny Kushlick

In calling for the legalisation and regulation of drugs again, chief constable Richard Brunstrom has suggested that aspirin is more dangerous than ecstasy. Whether or not this is the case isn’t clear (apparently the Department of Health could not supply the number of those who die as a result taking aspirin each year). However, as Mary Brett (Europe Against Drugs) tells us in the Mail, “This was an extremely stupid and irresponsible comment. Aspirin is taken as medication to help people get better. Ecstasy is taken to upset the chemical balance of the brain deliberately”. Thanks Mary (she’s a teacher you know).

Commenting on the substance of Brunstrom’s remarks, the Mirror leader said: “Clearly, 40 years of prohibition has been a disaster. Our country is awash with drugs. Criminals are raking in billions… and billions are being wasted on the largely futile “war” on drugs.”

These vastly different views encapsulate precisely the fault lines in the debate on the future of drug policy: one, knocking Brunstrom for having the temerity to question the absolute success of UK (and global) drug prohibition; the other going right to the heart of the matter – prohibition doesn’t work. Indeed, the Mail followed the news piece with a relentless ad hominem attack on Brunstrom, with no analysis of his views on drug policy.

Happily, at least the debate is being kept alive in the media, with some excellent pieces being penned over the last few years. Sadly, the media is the only place where this issue is receiving an airing. For most politicians and Whitehall officials, questioning the status quo on drug policy is taboo (with some surprising exceptions) and the vast majority of NGOs, professional bodies and Government Quangos remain totally silent on the issue. To me it beggars belief that organisations and individuals that work with those most negatively affected by prohibition fail to speak out. That includes: development organisations that work in the drug producer countries, those in prison reform, drug treatment organisations, drug policy think tanks, criminology academics, and the legal field.

Brunstrom suggests that legalisation and regulation will take ten years. Transform is in agreement that this is probably a bare minimum. But in that time, the UK drugs trade will have made £70 billion for gangsters (globally that figure will be over £3 trillion). At the same time, UK families will have paid close to £200 billion of crime costs, either as tax payers or as victims. The illegal trade will have ruined, for another decade, Afghanistan, Colombia, the Caribbean and blighted every major urban environment in industrialised countries.

However, politicians will continue to trot out the “tough on drugs” propaganda for a combination of easy votes and the maintenance of our special relationship with the US. The UK public meanwhile, will continue to be swindled out of billions to support a failed regime. The challenge from the media will not be enough to force politicians to expose prohibition to significant scrutiny and explore alternatives. Those who know the score have a choice - stay silent about the massive social costs of a counterproductive policy that benefits only organised crime and cynical politicians or to speak the truth. Brunstrom’s courage should inspire others to follow his example.

Danny Kushlick is Director of Transform Drug Policy Foundation. Visit www.tdpf.org.uk for more information

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