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The Belarusian Version of the War on Drugs

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Today Belarusian version of the War on Drugs is based on three pillars: expensive incarcerations, punitive drug laws, and an undying zeal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) to create a utopian “Drug-Free Nation”. The results, scored by our methods of combating narcotization are nothing but disaster: appearance of dangerous synthetic drugs, inability to prevent the epidemic of HIV, accompanied by open denying of basic human rights to the drug-using minority.
This policy brief will highlight the real costs of our “Zero Tolerance” approach to the issue of drug abuse and propose a number of policy recommendations, which will decrease the rates of drug addiction and drug-related pathologies.
SYNTHETIC CANNABIS (“SPICE”)
1. The war on drugs has turned Belarus into a testing area for new formulas of synthetic cannabis, or more commonly, “spice”. The frequent changes in the formula of the drug and the presence of synthetic substitutes (e.g. JWH-18 or CP-47,497) for natural cannabinoids in it, make spice an unpredictable, highly dangerous and often lethal narcotic substance (Public Health Ministry, 2014). Today, according to the results, derived from the independent researches, conducted by the leading non-governmental organization “Antimak”, up to 90% of junior college students have experience in using spice (Pasiak & Anisiak, 2013).
1.1 It is important to notice, that the changes in the formula of spice are caused by the effort of the Anti- trafficking unit under the

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