The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Just over two months ago three grandmothers were introduced to pot for the first time by an intrepid video production team in the state of Washington in the United States where the use of recreational marijuana is legal. The women were given a bong, a vaporizer, marijuana tea and offered some snacks and a card game. The results are both hilarious and sobering. We witness the grandmothers starting to relax, laugh a lot, tell some dirty jokes, talk about their new experience and realise that...
Is the War on Drugs doing more harm than good? In a bold talk, drug policy reformist Ethan Nadelmann makes an impassioned plea to end the "backward, heartless, and disastrous" war on drugs.
He highlights many reasons to end the global obsession with stamping out drug use, amongst them, raising the important point that current drug laws are driven by racism. According to Nadelmann, “If the principle smokers of cocaine were affluent older white men and the principle consumers...
April M. Short -
Phil Wolfson is a psychotherapist who lost his 16-year-old son to leukemia more than three decades ago. He wrote the book Noe: A Father-Son Song of Life, Love, Illness and Death about the experience of watching his son navigate adolescence while succombing to the terminal disease. His personal experiences, he says, place him in a strange position of “too much knowledge” when he works with patients who are dealing with devastating loss, as well as anxiety and PTSD symptoms that...
In a discussion at a San Franciso event that principally focused on decriminalising marijuana in the "War on Drugs", Sir Richard Branson argues that it is also worth decriminalising heroin. He refers to Portugal where heroin use is treated as a health problem. Heroin users are not sent to prison, but instead have access to state funded outlets where they can get their drugs as well as clean needles. Consequently, the number of HIV cases has decreased dramatically and the problem...
Laura Carlsen -
Without a doubt, the 68th UN General Assembly will be remembered as a watershed. Nations reached an agreement on control of chemical weapons that could avoid a global war in Syria. The volatile stalemate on the Iran nuclear program came a step closer to diplomacy.
What failed to make the headlines, however, could have the longest-term significance of all: the Latin American rebellion.
For Latin American leaders, this year’s UN general debate became a forum for widespread dissent...
In 2011 a group of world leaders including seven ex-presidents set up The Global Commission on Drug Policy to end the 40-year 'War on Drugs' -- but wars are easier to start than they are to finish.
Narrated by Morgan Freeman, "Breaking the Taboo" is a film that follows the Commission on its mission to break the political taboo over the US-led War on Drugs and expose what it calls the biggest failure of global policy in the last 40 years. It calls for the United Nations and all...
