Drug user peace initiative: A war on the health of people who use drugs

This report is one of five documents produced by the International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD) as part of their “Drug War Peace” initiative – relaunched in January 2015. This report focuses on how the war on drugs increases the risks asociated with drug use, impacting in public health, violence, and welfare. As the report states:

Numerous risks are associated with drug use, and every year there are around 183,000 drugrelated deaths. Risks that can be associated with drug use notably include death and morbidity (from overdose and blood-borne infections, for example), and there are additionally large costs, including financial and social costs of violence, costs of policing prohibition, as well as costs to healthcare infrastructure.

• The risks and costs that can be associated with drug use are used to justify prohibition.
• But prohibition has failed in its misguided ambition to decrease drug use.
• Not only has prohibition failed to decrease drug use, but the fact is that many of the harms and costs that are associated with drug use are substantially driven by prohibition: most of these harms are, in fact, in and of themselves produced by prohibition and criminalisation.

Click here to read the full report.

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