The Council encourages member states to divert drug using offenders from the criminal justice system and refer them to educational and/or treatment programs.

The Civil Society Forum on Drugs, an expert group of the EU Commission, is urging the Commission to provide adequate funding and staff to drug coordination and support demand and harm reduction interventions. 

Iveta Chovancová is the director of Odyesus, a harm reduction NGO based in Bratislava, Slovakia. We interviewed her about trends in drug policies in her country.

Read the story of Bojan Arsenijević’s (NGO Re Generation, Serbia) influencing experience about taking PEP, or post-exposure prophylaxis, which represents a combination of antiretroviral drugs that minimises the possibility of infection after accidental exposure to a potentially infectious material.

Amendments of the Law on Psychoactive and Controlled Substances in Serbia. Read about the controversial and not-transparent process of the adoption of the amendments, and the fight of NGOs to be involved.

How the Polish Ministry of Health wants to fight new psychoactive substances. Analogy with the myth of the Hydra and Heracles.

“Together with you, we create a city we want to live in.” David Pesek’s video and article about how local residents, NGOs and drug user activists recapture the city for a day.

“The numbers show us that the current Polish drug policy is not working,” says Adam Stasiak from the Polish Drug Policy Network.

“An example of not learning from good practice.” Darko Kostovski, a psychiatrist from Skopje, highlights the problems the clients of opiate substitution treatment face in Macedonia.

“We just do not have the time for that” – that sentence has echoed in my mind since the last conference. What does it concern? Drug policy. Who doesn’t have time for it? The Polish justice system. Polish Drug Policy Network organised a training which aimed to create a platform between judges, prosecutors, and addiction therapy specialists. Adam Stasiak summarises the lessons learnt.