Heroin

With elections looming on Saturday and his party trailing, Australian Prime Minister has announced a "zero tolerance" plan to take control of welfare payments for drug offenders.

A leading Scottish police chief says it is time to consider prescribing hard drugs to users in a bid to get a grip on acquisitive crime. Perhaps the Scottish new prime minister of Britain will lend an ear to the idea.

The Southeast Asian version of the drug war keeps producing more death sentences, with nine handed out Tuesday in Indonesia and seven more the same day in Vietnam.

A new report from the UN drug office warns that Central America is being submerged in drugs and crime. It recommends heightening prohibitionist efforts.

Arnold Trebach wrote "The Heroin Solution" in 1982. That it is still relevant and relevatory is a sad commentary on how far we've come since then. We review it on the occasion of its republication.

The death toll from a deadly combination of heroin and fentanyl rose all through last year. Now, the DEA says more than a thousand people died.

A Scottish Labor Party politician is taking his party to task for turning away from harm reduction policies in favor of a hard-line approach, and he says marijuana ought to be decriminalized, and maybe heroin and cocaine, too.

A hush-hush Home Office briefing paper says Britain should begin prescribing heroin to hard-core users, a major London newspaper reports. It could happen as soon as next fall.

The head of Britain's association of police chiefs is calling for prescription heroin to be made available to hard-core addicts in a bid to reduce street crime.

More than 120 medical experts, public health departments, and drug user advocacy groups have signed on to a letter urging Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt to take aggressive action to stem a wave of fatal overdoses related to heroin cut with the synthetic opiate fentanyl.