Russell Brand told MPs at the House of Commons, Home Affairs Select Committee, in the UK that he thinks addiction needs to be treated as an illness and dealt with in the public health system, rather than primarily in the criminal justice system. Prior to his recovery, Brand himself had been arrested no fewer than 12 times for drugs. Now he's working to promote a rehabilitation program called Focus12, headed by Chip Somers.
 
Check out what he had to say to the committee, in this video:
 

 
Meanwhile, Sir Richard Branson, who is also outspoken about the failure of the war on drugs, answered readers questions at the Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail.

Here's a sample of what he said:

Who benefits from a continued war on drugs?

Sir Richard Branson: The cartels making hundreds of billions of dollars a year benefit the most. They are able to establish monopolies on products that have high demand, and they are flourishing. After this, especially in the United States, there is a major private prison industry that depends on drug convictions - each prisoner costs over $40K a year, while treatment is under $10K.

Read the full Q&A with Branson, here.

According to NOW Magazine:

Despite the authors’ assertion that three T.O. safe injection sites would reduce overdose deaths and HIV and hepatitis C infections, Health Minister Deb Matthews quickly declared that the province has no intention of pursuing the matter at this time because “experts continue to be divided on [their] value.”

...

Councillor Gord Perks, who represents Parkdale, an area seen by many as the logical place for a supervised program, says council needs to be open to the study’s findings. 

“It’s very clear that these facilities would save lives, reduce health care costs and reduce harm to our neighbourhoods,” he says. “So I think that from a good policy perspective but also from a moral perspective we have to try to find a way to meet the recommendations.”

-
You can read NOW Magazine's article on their website.
You can read the study on the Toronto and Ottawa Supervised Consumption Assessment Study website.

 
Last week all 31 delegate leaders at the Summit of the Americas agreed (some to greater or lesser extents) that the war has failed and that it's time for new approaches.

As The Globe and Mail's editorial reported from the Summit of the Americas, Guatemalan President Otto Perez urged other leaders to "stop being dumb witnesses to a global deceit” and consider treatment, harm reduction and decriminalization as viable alternatives.

Meanwhile, The Economist Magazine reported a part of the deceit going on, on the other side of the world in Tajikistan, which is a location also featured in Raw Opium.

Indeed, as Raw Opium shows there is a lot of speculation about high level officials being embroiled in the drug trade, and there are known incidents of corruption.
 

If you'd like to read more, check out The Economist Magazine article here.

You can read The Globe and Mail's article here.

 
During the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, on the weekend, Stephen Harper conceded that the war on drugs is a failure, after listening to Latin American leaders explain how costly the largely US-led war is. However, Harper still appears hardline on his criminal justice approach to drugs, insisting on mandatory minimum sentences in his Omnibus Crime Bill (a bill that has been critiqued by many drug policy reform advocates).
 
Watch CBC's Newscast to find out more:
 

Files from: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/04/15/pol-milewski-harper-war-on-drugs.html

 
Listen to an illuminating discussion about the documentary and drug policy that took place on March 22, 2012 in New York City:

Featured Speakers:

Peter Findlay, Director of Raw Opium
Scott Calbeck, Associate Producer and Researcher for Raw Opium
Neill Franklin, Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Vanda Felbab-Brown, Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution and 2012 Open Society Fellow
Russ Maynard, PHS Community Services Society Program Director

Moderator:

Amy Goodman, investigative journalist and syndicated columnist, author, and host of Democracy Now!

 
"I'll start with the caveat that this was an audience of people invited by the Open Society Foundations who presumably were already favourably predisposed to the messages in the film... and that Americans are often more effusive in their reactions than we more reserved Canadians. But having said that, I'd also have to say that the response to the screening was extremely positive. The best yet."

The evening started with Associate Producer/Researcher of Raw Opium, Scott Calbeck introducing the film to the audience of a hundred invitees. After the screening a panel discussion was moderated by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

Peter Findlay recalled: "Amy Goodman was very much what I was expecting: a genuinely dissident voice among American media. She's also a skilled on-air host and was quite deft in orchestrating the discussion. She started by asking me how we came to the film we'd just seen and I talked about how the research had led us to feel strongly that the film should try to tie together the seemingly disparate issues of addiction, enforcement and politics, in both a personal and global context.

The panelists were first-rate and each one was able to elaborate on very different aspects relating to the film: Neill Franklin, Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, on the failure of the domestic drug enforcement policy; Vanda Felbab-Brown, Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, on the international dynamics of drug trafficking; and Russ Maynard, PHS Community Services Society Program Director, from Insite on its battles with the feds and the situation on the ground in Vancouver.

...Just a few highlights for me were the spontaneous applause from the audience when Russ told them about Insite's victory at the Supreme Court last year; Neill Franklin's choked-up revelations about how the murder of a close friend/undercover cop he worked with when he was an officer turned him irrevocably against the failed war on drugs; comments from a member of the audience who works in harm reduction in NY who had also worked in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and who said the film brought their shared issues together in a way he'd never seen before; and the response to my final appeal to the audience to help us get the word out about the film, which ended with at least a dozen people directly approaching me after the screening to get cards and ask about getting involved in future screenings in the States.

Clearly the film's interweaving of the various storylines - personal, political, historical - resonated for the audience in exactly the ways we'd hoped for. As I sat watching the film in the dark for the first time with an all-American audience, the centrality of the US in the film, as the engine of the war on drugs both historically and symbolically - and the film's powerful critique of that - really hit me, and I was frankly wondering how the crowd would respond. At least for this group of Americans, Raw Opium hit the target on the head."