Next year the General Assembly of the United Nations will put global drug policies on its agenda. Some people think this signals the dawn of a new era, a Spring of drug policy reform. I am more skeptical. In the global drug war, the end of winter is not as close as some have suggested. However, there are many advocacy opportunities NGOs should not miss.

Last year, Drugreporter gave a detailed account of the attack on harm reduction in Budapest, which resulted in the closure of the two largest needle and syringe programs. This year, we have produced a movie, based on interviews with key professionals and drug users, about what has changed on the streets of the District 8 of Budapest since then. Watch our video with English subtitles!

Watch this inspiring video interview with a Catalan harm reduction activist, about how drug consumption rooms have helped to reduce drug problems in Barcelona!

Please watch our video interview with a Catalan cannabis activist, about how political attitudes to cannabis are changing in Spain.

On 6-10 July, 2015, fifteen activists participated in video advocacy training provided by the HCLU and the Indonesian Drug Users’ Network (PKNI) in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Slovakia needs to find a common solution to guarantee harm reduction for all in need – argues a local harm reduction provider, Odyseus, in a video produced jointly with Drugreporter.

"Legal highs: could this be the end of the road?" – asks Joe Shuts in his article, published in The Telegraph. He refers to the new blanket ban the UK government has recently introduced to stop the flood of so-called legal highs, new psychoactive substances which have been spreading all over Europe since 2009. Should other governments follow the British example and adopt similar bans? The answer has to be a resounding "No". 

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.   

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.