The Case for International Drug Policy Reform
The United Nations is under pressure from both local and global organizations leading up to a General Assembly Special Session (or an UNGASS) in 2016. The Special Session will focus on state drug policy, specifically on achieving the goals that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) set in 2009 . These include promoting supply-reduction measures, viewing the issue as an international one requiring cooperation, and a slew of other measures that are designed to “countering the world drug problem altogether.”
In 1961, the UN adopted the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which aims “to combat drug abuse through coordinated international action,” and consolidates previous legislation into a single mandate that drug offenders “shall be liable to adequate punishment particularly by imprisonment or other penalties of deprivation of liberty.” The Convention states that these punishments are only necessary for serious offences against the limitations on possession, use, trade, distribution, manufacture and production of drugs exclusively to medical and scientific purposes. Now, this article argues not for the abandonment of punishments used to deter drug use, but for a lessening international and domestic pressure to conform to strict and antiquated prohibition laws.
As of November 11, over 60 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and businesses from four continents agree that a more moderate approach is necessary. Stopthedrugwar.org have released and signed an open letter demanding that the UN reform the policies that bind countries to the international standard of prohibition. They ask that world leaders from UN member states allow governments to make changes to their country’s drug laws without repercussions. The letter calls for a shift “in line with international human rights standards, and that prioritizes health, including access to medicines, security, and development,” and signatories include the Human Rights Watch, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). This article will explore the reasons for which the United Nations should relax international codes of drug prohibition, for the sake of upholding human rights and public health standards across the world, rather than lowering them for addicts.
In light of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that each person is born free and equal in dignity and rights and has rights to life, liberty and security of person, existing drug control measures around the world result in human rights abuses. These include, ill treatment by police, mass incarceration, and denial of essential medicines and basic health services. Though the UN’s declaration of human rights is, according to its title, universal, it systematically fails to be so in regard to users of illicit drugs. In a world where alcohol and tobacco use is protected and regulated, marijuana possession is cause for execution in Singapore and an Oklahoma woman is spending 12 years behind bars for a $31 marijuana sale where she saw her children twice in two years. The illicit nature of the drug industry makes users who inject drugs needlessly susceptible to HIV/AIDS. Furthermore, there are widespread racial disparities in drug arrests across the world — one such example is in the state of Kansas: blacks represent 7 percent of the population (as of 2011), yet 23 percent of all drug-related arrests.
According to UNODC, it is impossible to categorically document all of the human rights abuses that drug users suffer because oftentimes people who use drugs find themselves needing to hide from view due to social exclusion, stigmatization, and criminalization. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, echoed the same sentiment in a statement, saying that “the veneer of consensus that for so long sustained the failed global drug war and insulated it from critical examination is now broken.” Such critical examination came to fruition in May when an activist group protested Indonesia’s execution of 8 people for nonviolent drug crimes at a UN General Assembly meeting.
In light of these human rights abuses, this article advocates for what is known as the harm reduction approach to drugs, endorsed by the Human Rights Watch, which focuses on policies, programs and practices which aims to (obviously) reduce the harms of drug use, without necessarily requiring the cessation of use. The important part of this approach is that it complements approaches that seek to prevent or reduce drug use, but accepts that many users are unable or unwilling to stop. Instead of eradicating by way of incarceration and forcing the drug trade, representing an estimated 230 billion US dollars per year, underground and into illicit markets, the goal is to provide people who use drugs with options that help to minimize the risks of continued use, and potential harm to themselves or others. The underlying assertion is simple: the choice to use narcotics should be discouraged, but rehabilitated instead of put away and respected instead of delegitimized. Hence, removed from the reach of basic health resources.
In practice, the letter’s call for policy reform should break down into a slew of policies which aim to bring drug users into the public health’s reach and protect their human rights to liberty and security of person. The World Health Organization specifies syringe exchange programs and opioid substitution therapy (where clinics administer illicit drug users a heroin/opioid replacement drug with the effect being reduced dependency and reliance on HIV-transmissive behaviors) as components of a comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention and care plan. Vancouver, British Columbia’s injection sites and detox facilities are surrounded by controversy, yet cannot meet demand. By contrast, only 3 percent of injecting drug users in Southeast Asia have access to harm reduction programs.
So drug use is certainly not an activity that we should encourage, but our current efforts to combat it are worsening the problem instead of fixing it. Hence, the UN should listen to the co-signed letter, to the World Health Organization, and to people to not have their access to human rights impeded by addiction or recreational drug use. It should work to relax international pressures to maintain prohibition policies with regard to illicit substances.
