Section 27, a South African legal rights organisation, points to fears of sexual violence and abandonment as key in preventing women from disclosing [ 44] and echoes the UNAIDS approach in challenging criminalisation of HIV transmission.
In essence, criminalisation leads to stigma, and stigma leads to harassment".
Yet drugs that have consistently been shown to have minimal harms, such as MDMA and LSD, are classed as Schedule 9 (illicit), resulting in the criminalisation of users at considerable personal and public cost for what is a victimless crime".
Most study participants described the ways in which criminalisation had forced them to confront the divergent imperatives of individual autonomy, criminal justice and public health, often resulting in ambivalence about their professional values, which in turn had led on to a deep unease around the entire topic.
First discovered in 1913 by the Merck pharmaceutical company in Germany, MDMA became a popular recreational drug in the 1980s – leading to its criminalisation in the US in 1985.
But while huge leaps have been made in drug treatment over the last 30 years, the status quo – namely the day-in, day-out criminalisation of the addicted, the poor and of young people, accompanied by the increasing and inevitable risks of an unregulated market – is scandalous.
Mr Shany said: "While the 2013 Act represents some improvement on the previous situation it does not address many of the committee's concerns and has left in place the criminalisation of abortion, even in circumstances in which we deem (member) states to be under an obligation to allow safe and legal abortion".
Martha Tureti, World Vision's gender and development co-ordinator in Kenya, believes criminalisation has failed to eradicate the practice in the country.
This appears to be based on a convenient misapprehension about how laws work, whereby apparently they're a zero sum: if you add some criminalisation in one place, it must automatically decrease in another.
More than 1,000 cannabis users have gathered in Hyde Park to smoke weed and eat dope-infused picnics in a mass act of civil disobedience in protest at criminalisation of the drug.
