General News Archives - Page 28 of 76 - Drug Policy Network SEE

National Consultant Opening with UNMIK/UNODC

Posted on 28/03/2021 by Milutin

The United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) invites qualified applicants in the relevant occupational group to apply for the vacancy opening for the National Consultant in Kosovo* for the position of Drug Demand Reduction Evaluation and Reporting Officer.

The Consultant will closely work with the UN Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) Regional Project Manager (Belgrade) and UN Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) Rule of Law (RoL) Advisor (Pristina) in facilitating following tasks:

Communicate with the UNODC Regional Project Manager (Belgrade) and UNODC RoL Advisor (Pristina) to agree on the work plan
Communicate with the International Consultant on the reporting requirements
Prepare the WHO/UNODC substance use disorder treatment facility survey (cultural adaptation and expert proofreading)
Prepare the COVID-19 impact assessment questionnaire on drug treatment services (cultural adaptation and expert proofreading)
Run the approved questionnaires with the selected facilities/organisations to test the applicability and clarity of questions (cognitive/pilot testing)
Modify the questionnaire based on the received comments from testing phase
Facilitate the implementation of surveys with treatment facilities and organisations (nominated by the Ministry of Health),
Provide statistical analysis of collected data
Submit the processed data along with the narrative (in English language) to International Consultant for further processing

The deadline for applications is 02 April 2021.

To read the Terms of reference follow this link>>>.

We have the project logo!

Posted on 27/03/202107/04/2021 by Milutin

Following the Open call for project logo and visual identity of the project “No risk, no borders for young people“, the Project team decided that the winning proposal is the one created by Aleksa Antić from Kruševac, Serbia.

Aleksa’s idea is that:

The umbrella represents the “Drug Policy Network for Southeast Europe”. It symbolizes a shield and support for all young people in Southeast Europe. It empowers them and gives them a strong boost to stay on the right track. The umbrella pulls them forward like a sail and does not allow them to fall.

The character, symbolizes a young person and all youth. It holds an umbrella in one hand while in the other maintains balance and shows the power of the youth by lifting the clenched fist high above.

A unicycle or the wheel represents all the obstacles that young people face nowadays, it shows the speed and that all barriers can be crossed quicker by choosing the right path. In a modern world, we have to move rapidly and things in life can be unstable sometimes, so that is why it is important to keep the balance, keep the speed, and not to fall down.

The map of West Balkan is shown like a shadow in the background, a shadow from the past, without the borders that separates, divides, and stops. However, at the same time it’s been framed with cracked and broken lines, lines that slowly disappear, and melts down behind the bridge.

А thin thread connects the words NO and RISK it brings them into direct connection, in the same time it erases the boundaries that separate them, and makes the bridge, the bridge that connects divided. The words are written in such a way, in an unformed style, hand-drawn, with a touch of optimism and youth, to put NO RISK in the forefront, as a call to the right path, a path without risk, a path of youth, understanding, peace and tolerance, a path without borders.

“No Borders For Young People” is a tagline. It follows the project, and speaks more about the goal of it. That’s why it is clearly written at the bottom, as a main slogan for the end.

Aleksa is 20 years old, living in Kruševac (Serbia). He finished local Medical high school. Due to the pandemic, for the last 6 months he volunteered as a nurse in a local hospital. Graphic design became his hobby for the past few years, thanks to his brother who has more experience. However, it’s slowly becoming his passion and he is loving it.

Budget Advocacy Guide

Posted on 26/03/202130/03/2021 by Milutin

From the HRI webpage

How money is collected and distributed through public budgets influences the lives of millions of people in every country in the world. Those decisions might ensure food and shelter for many, or deprive others from essential healthcare services. Budget advocacy, which is a tool to influence those decisions, can make an impact on millions of lives.

Essential healthcare includes harm reduction services for people who use drugs. These services – such as needle and syringe programmes (NSP), opioid agonist therapy (OAT), drug consumption rooms (DCRs), overdose prevention with naloxone, and drug checking – protect against HIV, TB and hepatitis C (HCV) and save lives. Not only are they effective, they are cost-effective and cost-saving, and they have a positive impact on individual and community health.

Yet, the provision of these services is critically low. Only 1% of people who inject drugs live in countries with high coverage of both NSP and OAT. The harm reduction response to stimulant use remains underdeveloped, drug checking services are scarce and DCRs only formally operate in 12 countries, all of them located in the Global North. In 2020, only 15 countries permitted peers of people who use drugs to distribute naloxone.

Meanwhile, HIV infections among people who inject drugs continue to rise, accounting for almost half of new infections in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa in 2019. Prevalence of HCV among people who inject drugs is 50-times higher than among the general population, overdose deaths have skyrocketed in many countries around the world and stimulants use in Asia and sub Saharan Africa is increasing. Despite the fact that many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) include harm reduction in their national policy documents, few of them actually invest domestic resources in these life-saving services, even where the need is great. This is often due to the criminalisation of people who use drugs, stigma and discrimination. At the last count, only US$188 million was invested in harm reduction in LMICs – just over one tenth of the US$1.5 billion UNAIDS estimates is required for an effective HIV response among people who inject drugs. The majority of this funding comes from international donors.

The Harm Reduction International published a new resource for harm reduction advocates. This guide provides civil society and communities representatives with an introduction to budget advocacy and some tools and strategies to support advocacy for sustainable harm reduction funding.

To read the Guide, follow this link>>>.

A great insight into the new EU Drugs Strategy

Posted on 24/03/2021 by Milutin

DPNSEE hosted the Webinar on EU Drugs Strategy 2021 – 2025 on Wednesday 24 March 2021. The Webinar was supported by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).

The webinar was supposed to serve as a source of inspiration to support all those involved process of design, implementation and evaluation of drug strategies.

The EU Drugs Strategy 2021 – 2025 was presented by Danilo Ballotta, Coordinator – Institutional relations at the EMCDDA (link to Danilo’s presentation>>>).

Iga Jeziorska, from Youth Organisations for Drug Action, Chair of the Working Group on the EU Action Plan at the EU Civil Society Forum on Drugs (link to Iga’s presentation>>>) and Adrià Cots Fernández, Research and Advocacy Officer, International Drug Policy Consortium spoke about the civil society involvement in the process of designing the Strategy.

A more critical view on the Strategy was offered by Péter Sárosi from the Rights Reporter Foundation (link to Péter’s presentation>>>).

Discussions in three separate discussion rooms followed on three main pillars of the Strategy: Reducing supply (facilitated by Željko Petković, Assistant Director, Service for Combatting Drug Abuse at the Croatian Institute of Public Health), Reducing demand (facilitated by Matej Košir, Deputy Chairperson, Vienna NGO Committee on Narcotic Drugs, UTRIP Institute, Slovenia) and Harm reduction (facilitated by Marios Atzemis, DPNSEE Board member, European AIDS Treatment Group Greece).

More than 70 representatives of governmental organisations, both on national and local level, academia, civil society organisations, international organisations and donor community participated.

The Webinar offered a comprehensive and interesting insight into the Strategy and caused an interesting discussion and exchange of views.

The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs: Sixty Years of an Epic Fail?

Posted on 21/03/2021 by Milutin

In 1961, the Member States of the United Nations set themselves a goal to eliminate illegal opium production by 1979 and that of cannabis and coca by 1989. In 1998, they proclaimed to be ready to achieve a world without drugs within 10 years.

Meanwhile, the use of illicit substances has increased at twice the rate of the world population, and today production and trafficking of drugs are completely out of control.

Sixty years of prohibitionist policies and the War on Drugs have caused more damages than those caused by the substances themselves in sanitary, social, criminal, environmental and economic terms.

Science for Democracy organises a webinar on 30 March, from 6 to 8 pm CET to mark the 60th Anniversary of the adoption of the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

The webinar will address the historical background of the UN Conventions on narcotics and will look at the future of drug policy with experts and activists from around the world.

To register, please follow this link>>>.

Guide to Buying Marijuana Online in 2021

Posted on 20/03/202121/03/2021 by Milutin

The recreational use of cannabis was legalized in Canada on 17 October 2018. It is legal for both recreational and medicinal purposes.

As of January 2019, online sales of cannabis for recreational use were well underway across Canada, via the provincial or territorial governments. Most provinces also had storefront operations selling cannabis, either operated by the government or private enterprise. The number of retailers is likely to remain limited, largely due to insufficient supply of legal cannabis from licensed producers.

Mom Canada (Mail Order Marijuana) are one of the earliest online dispensaries that sell quality medical and recreational cannabis products in Canada. The have been shipping their top quality THC and CBD weed edibles, seeds, treats and other goodies to our Canadian customers for quite some time now.

Mom Canada published their Complete Guide to Buying Marijuana Online in 2021.

The Guide is available following this link>>>.

For more information, contact Laura Minor – laura@collaborationmail.com.

Webinar on EU Drugs Strategy 2021 – 2025

Posted on 19/03/202119/03/2021 by Milutin

The Drug Policy Network South East Europe and the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) invite you to participate in the webinar that will provide information on the new European Union drug strategy.

The EU Council approved the EU Drugs Strategy on 18 December 2020 setting out the political framework and priorities for the EU’s drug policy in the period 2021-2025. The strategy aims to ensure a high level of health promotion, social stability and security and contribute to awareness raising. On the basis of this strategy, the Council will prepare an action plan which will set out concrete measures to achieve these priorities.

With this strategy, the EU and its member states reaffirm their commitment to an approach which is based on evidence, comprehensive and balanced between demand and supply reduction of drugs, with the preservation of human rights at its core. At the same time, this strategy uses the lessons learned from the COVID-19 crisis in the drugs area and takes a future-oriented approach, promoting research, innovation and foresight to respond more effectively to increasing challenges and to anticipate them.

The webinar may serve as a source of inspiration to support all those involved process of design, implementation and evaluation of drug strategies. It is especially suitable for regional drug strategy makers, regional civil society groups, European and other interested participants.

The EU Drugs Strategy 2021 – 2025 will be presented by Danilo Ballotta, Coordinator – Institutional relations at the EMCDDA.

We also expect inputs from the civil society activists. The full list of speakers will be published before the webinar.

The Webinar will be held via Zoom on Wednesday 24 March 2021 starting at 13:00 CET. The Webinar will last for 90 minutes.

The Webinar will be delivered in English, with translation into Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian. We are exploring opportunities for translation into other languages of South East Europe.

As the number of participants is limited, please register by Tuesday 23 March using the following link>>>.

European Web Survey on Drugs 2021

Posted on 18/03/202121/03/2021 by Milutin

The EU drugs agency (EMCDDA) launched today the European Web Survey on Drugs 2021. Targeted at people, aged 18 and over, who have used drugs, the survey aims to improve understanding of patterns of drug use in Europe and help shape future drug policies and interventions.

The voluntary, anonymous survey – one of the agency’s targeted ‘leading-edge’ monitoring methods – will run this year in 31 countries and 28 languages. As in previous years, it will be promoted nationally by the Reitox focal points and their partners, as well as through targeted social media advertisements.

In 2016, the first European Web Survey on Drugs was launched. It ran in 16 countries and more than 80 000 people participated. In 2021, this survey will run in over 30 EU and neighbouring countries!

New to this year’s round is the participation of the agency’s partners from the Western Balkans and the European Neighbourhood Policy area through the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA7) and EU4Monitoring Drugs (EU4MD) projects.

The new questionnaire, which will run for six weeks, is structured in modules on: socio-demographics, drug using patterns, access to treatment, access to drugs (amounts usually bought and prices paid) and how COVID-19 has affected patterns of drug use. Its findings will contribute to the emerging knowledge base on drug-using practices in Europe and on the quantities of drugs used. This will help enhance market size estimates at national and European level and contribute to policy development more widely.

Links for your the Survey in SEE countries are Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Kosovo*, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia.

Bolstering resilience among civil society in the Western Balkans

Posted on 16/03/202115/03/2021 by Milutin

The Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI TOC), through their Observatory of Illicit Economies in South Eastern Europe (SEE-Obs) and the Resilience Fund, published Stronger Together: Bolstering resilience among civil society in the Western Balkans report.

As the space for civil society appears to be shrinking in the Western Balkans, this report looks at organized crime and corruption in the region from a civil society perspective. It aims to give an overview of how civil society organizations in the Western Balkans deal with issues related to organized crime and corruption and highlights their main activities and concerns.

The GI-TOC’s experience of engaging with community actors all over the world has shown that individuals and community groups are able to build their individual and collective capacity to respond to and recover from organized crime. This report shows that courageous and committed CSOs across the Western Balkans are doing the same, but would benefit from further support to help strengthen communities’ resilience.

More about the report is available from this video

To read the report, follow this link>>>.

GI TOC shall present the report at the webinar scheduled for Friday 19 Mar 2021 at 11 AM (CET). Interpretation to Albanian, Macedonian, and Bosnian-Montenegrin-Serbian will be available during the event.

This webinar will draw together insights from civil society actors from across the Western Balkans working on organized crime and corruption and identify good practices across the region. During the 90 minute discussion we will also explore how these organizations’ resilience can be strengthened and how CSOs themselves can contribute to strengthening resilience in their communities and across the region.

Registration is required: .

Voices of frontline workers

Posted on 15/03/2021 by Milutin

European harm reduction services needed to be innovative and adapt very rapidly in response to the fast-changing landscape of the pandemic and its associated national control measures. Preliminary research on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on drug services and PWUD has noted decreases in available harm reduction services.

Frontline harm reduction workers play a crucial role in public health response during COVID-19 and are instrumental in implementing these rapid-scale changes required to keep vital services operational.

Their experiences during the pandemic provide critical data to understanding the effect of the pandemic on the vulnerable population of PWUD and the health services they depend on.

This Correlation European Harm Reduction Network (C-EHRN) report on the impact of COVID-19 on vital harm reduction services seeks to bring these voices of front-line workers at drug consumption rooms (DCR’s), harm reduction outreach teams and PWUD themselves to highlight their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report includes sections on:

General Harm Reduction Response to COVID-19
Drug Consumption Rooms
Outreach services
Opioid Substitution Treatment (OST)
Government & municipality response
Drug Supply
Digital and other Innovations
User experiences in the streets
Homelessness
Social Isolation for PWUD

Our member organisations from Bosnia Herzegovina and Greece contributed to the report with their experience.

The briefing paper is available following this link>>>.