The largest ever study investigating medical cannabis as a treatment for cancer, published this week in Frontiers in Oncology, found overwhelming scientific support for cannabis’s potential to treat cancer symptoms and potentially fight the course of the disease itself.

The former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has been taken into custody after the international criminal court issued a warrant for his arrest for his so-called “war on drugs”.

The former leader, who will turn 80 this month, is accused by ICC prosecutors of crimes against humanity over his anti-drugs crackdowns, in which as many as 30,000 people were killed. Most of the victims were men in poor, urban areas, who were gunned down in the streets.

Leila de Lima, one of the fiercest critics of Duterte and the “war on drugs” who was jailed for more than six years on baseless charges under his former government, said: “Today, Duterte is being made to answer – not to me, but to the victims, to their families, to a world that refuses to forget. This is not about vengeance. This is about justice finally taking its course.”

Josalee S Deinla, secretary general of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers, which represents the victims of the war on drugs, said that justice was “finally catching up” with the former leader.

Rights groups urged the government of the Phillipine president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, to swiftly surrender him to the ICC.

Marcos, who was previously allied with Sara Duterte, had in the past refused to cooperate with the ICC investigation. However, his stance shifted after the two families became embroiled in a feud, and his government said more recently that it would cooperate if the ICC asked international police to take the former president into custody.

Duterte became president in 2016 after promising a merciless, bloody crackdown that would rid the country of drugs. On the campaign trail he once said there would be so many bodies dumped in Manila Bay that fish would grow fat from feeding on them. After taking office, he publicly stated he would kill suspected drug dealers and urged the public to kill addicts.

Since his election, between 12,000 and 30,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed in connection with anti-drugs operations, according to data cited by the ICC.

Even as his crackdowns provoked international horror, he remained highly popular at home throughout his presidency.

Police reports often sought to justify killings, saying that officers had acted in self-defence, despite witnesses stating otherwise. Rights groups documenting the crackdowns allege police routinely planted evidence, including guns, spent ammunition and drugs. An independent forensic pathologist investigating the killings has also uncovered serious irregularities in how postmortems were performed, including multiple death certificates that wrongly attributed fatalities to natural causes.

Duterte, who appeared before a senate inquiry into the drugs war killings in 2024, said he offered “no apologies, no excuses” for his policies, saying: “I did what I had to do, and whether you believe it or not, I did it for my country.” During the same hearing, he told senators that he had ordered officers to encourage criminals to fight back and resist arrest, so that police could then justify killing them – but also denied authorising police to kill suspects.

Duterte also told the hearing that he kept a “death squad” of criminals to kill other criminals while serving as a mayor of Davao, prior to becoming president.

Human rights groups welcomed his arrest as a major breakthrough for families whose loved ones were killed. Human Rights Watch called it “a critical step for accountability in the Philippines” that “could bring victims and their families closer to justice”.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Tuesday said that cocaine is only illegal because it is produced in Latin America and suggested that legalizing it could diminish criminal organisations' profits.

Petro during a cabinet roundtable compared cocaine to whisky and and said is "not worse than whisky." "That is what scientists are analyzing. What indeed is affecting the US is fentanyl, which is killing them," he said.

He suggested that criminal syndicates' operations could be effectively eliminated through worldwide cocaine legalisation. "It could be sold like wine," he said, suggesting that regulated sales could prevent youth consumption.