An addict prepares heroin in Lamu on the east coast of Kenya.
Reuters/Goran Tomasevic
South Africa is only one piece in a larger puzzle of the heroin trade along the continents east coast.
An officer and his dog walk the halls at a school in Indianapolis.
AP Photo/Michael Conroy
When police coax information from low-level offenders with threats of harsh sentencing, it breeds distrust in the community and ultimately contributes to mass incarceration.
Popular populist.
EPA/CRISTINO
Anti-American and anti-corruption stances have given the president of the Philippines broad appeal.
In the work of many rappers today, the legacy of Tupac Shakur lives on.
Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Tupac’s sensitivity, intelligence and creativity confronted the hostile forces that antagonized black youth across the country in the 1970s and 1980s.
Some 13 people ‘disappear’ in Mexico every day, and the country is on track to record 30,000 homicides this year.
Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
A controversial report claims that Mexico is more violent than Afghanistan and Yemen. It’s wrong on the details but right that Mexico is, in effect, a war zone.
Paula Olson/NOAA
Both focus too much on controlling supply and not enough on demand.
Erik De Castro/Reuters
Trump’s encouragement of Duterte suggests that US pressure on regimes around the world to uphold civil liberties may have become a thing of the past.
Mexican protesters confront the marines sent in to disband them.
Reuters
A controversial law to officially engage Mexico’s armed forces in fighting crime has human rights groups dismayed.
Illicit drugs are priced differently depending upon which stage of the supply chain they are located.
AAP/Alex Murray
Let’s take claims about the value of drug seizures with a grain of salt.
Punitive measures and forced rehabilitation don’t work.
Jorge Silva/Reuters
As in other parts of the world, the war on drugs in Southeast Asian countries has huge social, moral and medical costs. Now, an approach that places harm reduction at its centre is gaining support.
Latin America’s drug war, in action.
Carlos Jasso/Reuters
In this TC Global Explainer, two Latin American scholars lay out the basics of drug policy, expose the ‘war on drugs’, and offer reform suggestions.
Dozens of inmates escaped after multiple recent prison riots in Brazil.
Reuters
In Brazilian prisons, overcrowding, corruption and gang infiltration are a combustive combination. But it all started with bad drug policies.
Armed security forces take a part in a drug raid in Manila.
Damir Sagolj/Reuters
Duterte says there are three million drug users in the Philippines. There are almost certainly many fewer than that.
Iron fist: Duterte and the Philippine Air Force.
Romeo Ranoco/Reuters
The foul-mouthed, tough-talking president of the Philippines is ironically a pragmatist on foreign policy.
Potential medicine, or dangerous drug?
ThorPorre
Complaints about the ban of kratom, often used by recovering opiate addicts, have been vociferous, but not always backed by facts.
Dai Kurokawa / EPA
There are many similarities between wildlife poaching and the cultivation of drug plants like the coca bush or the opium poppy.
A rally outside Baltimore City Hall, July 27, 2016.
REUTERS/Bryan Woolston
Violent cops are just playing by the rules American society has created for them. It’s time to change the rules.
Australia has a higher proportion of inmates in privately operated prisons than any other country.
AAP/Paul Miller
Recent developments in the US suggest it might be time for Australia to rethink its reliance on private prisons.
Residents of a Manila neighbourhood gather at the scene of the killing of an alleged drug dealer by police.
EPA/Francis R. Malasig
To understand Rodrigo Duterte’s rise to power and the public support for killing drug dealers and users, we need to distinguish the empirical from the normative – the ‘what is’ from ‘what should be’.
Jim Thorpe and Ben Johnson were both banned from the Olympics. But if each had played at different points in history, they would have been allowed to compete.
Nick Lehr/The Conversation
In sports, what’s considered fair play has changed throughout history. At one point, even looking ‘too poor’ was grounds for exclusion.