A blend of poverty and lack of education, coupled with public hypocrisy and the absence of any real and efficient policies – it’s a recipe for a lethal Romanian cocktail which could prove to be more dangerous for drug addicts than the drugs themselves. The number of hard drug users in the country is steadily rising, while their average age is falling, with consumption-related diseases spreading faster than ever. It’s a situation that requires an urgent change in public views and national policies.

During the last few months in Poland, cannabis has been receiving a good deal of attention. This is a result of a few events – both positive and negative – which have placed the issue of cannabis regulation in the mainstream media limelight.

The HCLU’s Drugreporter has warned that rates of hepatitis-C infection among injecting drug users in Budapest almost doubled between 2011 and 2014 – in a period when access to harm reduction programs rapidly decreased. Government politicians are still denying the reality, and accuse harm reduction advocates of exaggerating the problem.

The Hungarian government banned 42 new psychoactive substances this year – but some of them are not new at all, for example Ibogaine. The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union is suing a government agency for not providing access to the assessment reports on the risks of these drugs.   

The Polish parliament recently pushed through a series of amendments – mostly relating to new psychoactive substances – to the country's law on counteracting drug addiction. Read about the Polish politicians’ total contempt for the opinion of civil society, as well as for evidence-based drug policy.

A new movie by Dhojo Wahengbam on the severe rights violations committed against people who use drugs in Manipur.

This March, our video advocacy team attended the 58th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the largest drug policy gathering in the world, to find out how governments and NGOs feel about the prospects of drug policy reform. We produced a series of short thematic videos, to give you an overview of the current state of political debate on the burning issues of international drug control.

Alin Rotaru, dubbed by the Romanian media, ”The Kings of Legal Highs”, was the owner of what was probably the first physical “ethnobotanical shop” in Romania, which opened in early 2008 in the eastern city of Galați. Read Drugreporter’s guest author Ștefan Iancu’s interview with him.

Researchers and medical cannabis patients met at the Prague Medical Cannabis Conference to discuss the latest developments in the field. On the sidelines, Drugreporter's guest author Iga Jeziorska interviewed two activists who were involved with the recent founding of the International Medical Cannabis Patients' Coalition.

A joint campaign by Bulgarian NGOs is warning that by the end of 2015, Bulgaria will completely lose its HIV prevention services. Read what needs to be done to keep rates of infection low in this Balkan country.