If you are interested in submitting to or developing an idea for the special issue, the editors would love to talk to you about your idea(s) - you can email me direct via [email protected]

Topics may include: decolonisation in drug policy and research; epistemic justice and drug policy; Indigenous knowledges and drug policy; Majority world (or Global South) perspectives and drug policy; gender and decolonial feminist approaches; and drugs, environmental and racial justice.

The Editors particularly welcome work locally grounded yet globally aware of the ongoing entanglements of colonial power and knowledge.

This special issue is in part a response to this and other calls for drug policy research and practice to acknowledge its role in processes of colonisation and to commit to undo its relationship with colonial relations of power.

He went on to say that prohibition has and continues to be used as a tool of colonial violence through the "triple whammy of discrimination, racism and stigma" and that "decolonisation is everyone's business".

In 2023 Prof James Ward (Pitjantjatjara and Narungga scholar) gave a land acknowledgement where he said "Indigenous, Black and Brown peoples who use drugs are over-policed, have higher rates of arrest, fatal overdoses, prosecution and incarceration for drug use than other identifiable population"

In this excellent peice, @Na'ama Carlin writes about how the report seeks to silence speech on Palestine on university campuses.
www.crikey.com.au/2025/07/15/i...

It's a strategy based on special treatment, rather than based in solidarity with the broader project of anti-racism.

It's another tactic in a long line of attempts to stop academics calling attention to one of the most pressing events in modern times, the current genocide in Palestine.

You can read the chapter here: www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...

We argue that in time, with careful planning & cooperation with communities who understand local dynamics, we may find new ways to co-produce safety in other settings or, as Hassan has said 'invest in the people you love, and who love you for all of your flaws and fuckups'

The chapter breaks the illusion that public safety can only be realised through state policing & explores alternative approaches to the production of safety that is not reliant on police & state control — what Mariam Kaba describes as a movement towards the abolitionist horizon

Contemporary harm reduction allows the approach to operate at scale in each of these case studies (through needle exchange, drug consumption rooms, peer user and harm reduction organisations involved in planning festivals), but also places people who use in proximity to police

Professionalisation of informal peer user community organising in the 1980s, in part because of the HIV/AIDs crisis, helped to transition harm reduction into government policy - but often in ways that were divorced from original concern about reducing contact with the state

We explore how, around the same time, dance parties with strong cultures of drug use and dance music saw the development of clandestine locations to shield participants from police intervention.

We emphasise the way harm reduction among people who inject emerged in practice through the work of trans women of colour, and those doing street-based sex work, who developed some of the most enduring public health initiatives which were at the time entirely 'unsanctioned'

The chapter explores mutual aid practices among communities of people who use drugs, who developed strategies to save their own lives in response to prohibition & increased policing surveillance through two case studies: among those who inject & rave/freeparty communities

Thanks @ingridm.bsky.social! Lovely words from a great colleague :)

I focus on overdose prevention sites and spotting services as examples that are best placed to address overdose and related harm.

You can read the article here: thepolicymaker.jmi.org.au/prioritising...

I make the case that recent discussion of an 'opioid crisis' narrows the focus of public policy, and ignores how criminalisation and stigmatisation of people who use drugs create and exacerbate the conditions most likely to lead to overdose.