Poppy cultivation in Badakhshan, Afghanistan. Getty Images / Paula Bronstein. All rights reserved. In
April 2016, the international community will convene for the United Nations
General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS). This event, held two years
early due to the urgency of the drug situation and intensity of drug-related
violence, presents an opportunity to question the fundamentals of international
drug policy. Despite overwhelming evidence that a century-long quest to control
human behaviour and drug markets through international treaties and national
legislation has failed, there is little expectation of change. The vested
interests in retaining the status quo are significant, with sclerosis
legitimised through the recurrent exhortation to improve international
co-operation.
Major
institutional and policy change is required and will ultimately be unavoidable.
The treaty system and international drug control institutions stemming from the
first international drug conference in 1909 have set us on an orientation
within drug policy that does not reflect the dynamics of global drug markets or
protect us from drug related harms. Control efforts and resources are skewed
toward drugs such as cocaine and heroin, when synthetic drugs such as
methamphetamine dominate markets. Enforcement is focused on countries of the
global south, when the global north is the world’s key zone for the manufacture
and export of illicit substances, and where the bulk of drug trade profits are
realised.
Framed by history
From its initiation, the
drug control system has responded to the perceived risk from narcotic plants
grown in the global south. In 1909, the ‘great powers’ of the day met
in Shanghai to discuss controls on opium, a freely traded commodity derived
from opium poppy. The result was a seismic market shift, overturning centuries
of colonial engagement in opium poppy cultivation in far flung empires of south
Asia, and ending the popular use of opium for purposes of pain or pleasure.
The resulting 1912
International Opium Convention of The Hague was the first international drug
treaty. It set the intellectual and institutional direction for the drug
control system, strategies and approaches that operate today. To put it another
way, today we respond to the complex, transnational challenges of HIV/AIDS,
internet-based drug sales and international organised crime through a framework
devised by imperial powers at a time when women could not vote or wear
trousers, when nose size and skin colour
were seen to determine brain size and
civility, and when addiction was understood as a problem of ‘godlessness’.
The vested interests in retaining the status quo are significant.
Over the course of a
century, the treaty system has evolved through to the most recent 1988
Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic
Substances, incorporating into the control system a diversity of plants, weeds,
shrubs and chemicals deemed “evil” and harmful to the “health and welfare of
mankind”. At no point has the United Nations, which administers and
oversees the treaty system, reconsidered first principles – as set out in 1912
and institutionalised in the 1961 Single Convention
on Narcotic Drugs – that it is desirable or even possible for states to
prohibit access to a selected range of intoxicating substances.
Sovereign states remain
locked into the goal of eliminating, or at least significantly curbing the
production, distribution and use of drugs. They must cooperate on international
control efforts and, in line with the 1961 Single Convention, they are required
to treat participation in the drug trade as “punishable offences when committed
intentionally”, and as “serious offences […] liable to adequate punishment
particularly by imprisonment or other penalties of deprivation of liberty”.
A legacy of failure
These efforts to control
human behaviour and to terminate the supply of harmful substances cannot
succeed, even if recurrently stepped up, militarised and coercively enforced.
According to the
latest figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 1 out of 20 people between the ages of 15 and 64
years used an illicit drug in 2013. This is despite punitive national policies to prevent consumption, including
by depriving users of illegal drugs of their freedom, access to their children,
employment
and medical care, and even their
right to life.
The use of cocaine, heroin, cannabis and amphetamines
remains a ‘global habit’ in a
borderless world, configured around a sophisticated, lucrative and
innovative transnational market that supplies a diversity of ever cheaper drugs
to an estimated 246 million people.
The 1961 Single Convention
looked to eliminate opium use within 15 years, with a 25-year schedule for
cocaine and cannabis. In 1998, the UN promoted a “drug-free world”, to be
achieved within
ten years, and a host of cultivating countries have, over the decades,
committed to achieving zero-cultivation of narcotic drug crops. But just as
demand reduction targets have never been met, neither have those relating to
supply. At over 7,000 tonnes in 2014, opium production reached its highest
level since the 1930s. There was an estimated 120,000 hectares under coca bush
cultivation in 2013 (with potential for the manufacture of 662 to 902 tonnes of
cocaine). Meanwhile, as stated in the UNODC’s “World
Drug Report 2015”, advances “in cannabis plant
cultivation techniques and the use of genetically selected strains have led to
an increase in the number of cannabis harvests, as well as in the yield and
potency of cannabis”.
As set out by Yury Fedotov, executive
director of the UNODC,
“we have to admit that, globally,
the demand for drugs has not been substantially reduced and that some
challenges exist in the implementation of the drug control system”. This
acknowledgement has not led to any questioning of mission, or the plausibility of prohibiting access to certain drugs
– even with evidence that nine out of ten users are not considered dependent or
problematic. Neither has there been engagement with the reality that making
certain substances illegal has made them more attractive to produce and supply.
Criminalisation has converted freely growing plants into billion dollar crops,
high profit margins incentivise illicit supply, while the ‘success’ of drug
seizures serves only to elevate prices. A utopian goal is being pursued through
a strategy that makes it unachievable.
A northern bias
In policy and
implementation, drug control remains overwhelmingly preoccupied with opium
poppy and coca leaf. International counter-narcotics efforts and assistance –
both military and development – have focused on ‘producer’ states such as
Colombia, Bolivia and Peru (coca leaf), Mexico (opium poppy) and south Asian
countries such as Afghanistan, Burma and Laos PDR (opium poppy). However, as
successive UNODC World Drug Reports demonstrate, opioids and cocaine are not
the most widely consumed drugs, or arguably the most dangerous.
Contemporary drug markets,
measured in terms of seizures and reported use, are increasingly dominated by
synthetic drugs: ‘Amphetamine Type Substances’ (ATS) such as methamphetamine
and amphetamine, as well as Ecstasy (MDMA) and a raft of ‘New Psychoactive
Substances’ (NPS) of which 450 were reported in 2014. The key manufacture and
export zones for these drugs are not the global south, but west and east
European countries and north America. Patterns of drug flows are the reverse of
the dynamics envisioned in the treaty framework. The old delineation of
consumer and producer states no longer exists, and the global north is now the
key producer region, including for cannabis.
This raises the more
difficult question of accounting for the inconsistent application of
counter-narcotics efforts, and the gross inequalities in terms of costs and
impacts. An estimated 164,000 people were killed during the counter-narcotics
surge of 2007 to 2014 in Mexico, a
death toll higher than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. But the thought of
militarising supply control in the Netherlands – a leading producer country –
on the level experienced by Mexico, is unconscionable. Why are Colombia,
Bolivia and Afghanistan acceptable theatres for violent weaponised
counter-narcotic operations, and not Poland or Canada?
Moreover, the lack of
high level violence in the drug markets of these northern producer countries
signifies that illicit markets can be peaceful. From this perspective, it is
the disruptive market interventions, weapons flows and training of paramilitary
counter-narcotics units that are the drivers of violence in the global south,
not the drug markets themselves. Similarly, in relation to northern
interventions, how can it be the case that the EU and US fund cannabis
eradication in the global south while legalising or decriminalising
domestically?
The north’s deflection of
its leading role in the drug trade is institutionalised in the treaty system
and international drug control institutions. The result is that we have
remarkably little information about the evolving threats to mankind’s ‘health
and welfare’ posed by synthetics. As set out in the preface to the 2013 World Drug
Report, ATS use “remains widespread globally, and appears to be increasing in
most regions”, with crystalline methamphetamine “an imminent threat”. Yet while we have each hectare of coca and opium
meticulously researched, there is a paucity of data and information on the
manufacture of synthetic drugs, or their
consumption. It was not until 2008 that the UNODC launched dedicated ATS
analysis through the UNODC Global SMART
Program (Synthetics Monitoring: Analyses, Reporting and Trends), with the
aim of generating, analysing and reporting on the synthetic drug market, and
improving global responses to the rise in ATS manufacture, trafficking and
consumption.
A utopian goal is being pursued through a strategy that makes it unachievable.
Drug control is
constantly re-legitimised by a moral
narrative of protecting health, welfare and security. Yet by downplaying the
role of European and North American countries in the drug trade, and the
historical salience of synthetic markets by default, the system is creating
public health risks, it cannot anticipate change in dynamic markets, and it has
an insufficient evidence base for policy. Indicative of this is the
acknowledgement in the 2016 World Drug Report that, “the sheer number, diversity and transient nature of
NPS currently on the market partly explain why there are still only limited
data available on the prevalence of use of many NPS. Those difficulties also
explain why both the regulation of NPS and the capacity to address health
problems related to NPS continue to be challenging.”
In 2012,
the International Narcotic Control Board that monitors treaty enforcement, set
out that, “dividing countries into the categories of “drug-producing”,
“drug-consuming” or “transit countries” has long ceased to be realistic. To
varying degrees, all countries are drug-producers and drug-consumers and have
drugs transiting through them.” Despite institutional acknowledgement of market
transformations, the new geopolitical realities of the drug trade are not
reflected in enforcement activities, in the language of drug control
institutions, or in the allocation of resources for research, education,
treatment and rehabilitation. These remain concentrated on coca and opium
poppy, cocaine and heroin.
From the
local to the global level, we are, with some small exceptions, locked into
arcane, counterproductive and illogical policies that violate fundamental
rights and freedoms, spread disease,
exacerbate violence, and which impede
development – in the view of other UN agencies. The UNODC, which sits in an
institutional
silo, uses the benign term “unintended
consequences” to refer to the wholly negative impact of counter-narcotics
policies and how these are disproportionately borne along stratified racial,
class and geographic lines. The myths, Victorian moralism and hypocrisy that
frame international drug policy need to be confronted if we are to progress to
rights-based interventions that genuinely reduce harm. In other words, drug
policies which are fit for the twenty-first century.
This article is published as part of an editorial partnership between openDemocracy and CELS, an Argentine human rights organisation with a broad agenda that includes advocating for drug policies respectful of human rights. The partnership coincides with the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs.