Coca field in an Amazon jungle village. Credit: Courtesy of Central Asháninka del Río Ene/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 10 2014 (IPS)

A top-level international panel called Tuesday for a major shift in global drug-control policies from prohibition to decriminalisation and regulation.

In a 43-page report, the Global Commission on Drug Policy denounced what has been known for more than four decades as the “war against drugs” as a failure and argued that new approaches prioritising human rights and health were urgently needed.“There’s no question now that the genie of reform has escaped the prohibitionist bottle.” -- Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance

“In this report, we set out a broad roadmap for getting drugs under control,” wrote former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who chairs the Commission. “We recognize that past approaches premised on a punitive law enforcement paradigm have failed, emphatically so.

“They have resulted in more violence, larger prison populations, and the erosion of governance around the world. …The Global Commission on Drug Policy instead advocates for an approach to drug policy that puts public health, community safety, human rights, and development at the center,” according to Cardoso.

Such an approach would, among other changes, encourage governments to regulate markets in currently illicit drugs, beginning with marijuana, coca leaf, and certain psycho-active drugs; seek alternatives to prison for low-level, non-violent participants in the drug trade; and ensure equitable access to essential medicines, especially opiate-based pain medications, according to the report, “Taking Control: Pathways to Drug Policies That Work.” It called for a pragmatic approach that would include experimentation and trial and error.

The report’s recommendations, which come as governments prepare for the 2016 U.N. General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs, drew a mixed response from the U.S. government which has largely driven international drug policy since former President Richard Nixon first declared a “war on drugs” in 1971.

“We agree that we should use science-based approaches, rely on alternatives to incarceration for non-violent drug offenders, and ensure access to pain medications,” said Cameron Hardesty of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

“…However, we disagree that legalisation of drugs will make people healthier and communities safer. Our experience with the tobacco and alcohol industries show that commercialization efforts rely upon increasing, not decreasing use, which in turn increases the harm associated with the use of tobacco and alcohol. In fact, if we take Big Tobacco as prologue, we can predict that that approach is likely to cause an entirely new set of problems,” she said.

Nonetheless, independent analysts said the Commission’s recommendations are likely to substantially advance the growing debate over drug policy if, for no other reason, than its membership is not easily dismissed.

In addition to Cardoso, its 21 members include former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, and former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, as well as former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Paul Volcker.

The report was released at a press conference that featured several of the Commission’s members in New York City Tuesday morning.

“This is a very important report that will provoke more serious discussion and debate,” Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, an influential Washington-based inter-hemispheric think tank, told IPS. “There have already been significant changes at the state level [in the U.S.] and in some countries in Latin America, and this will push things along.”

In 2011, the Commission published its first report in which it also condemned the drug war as a failure and made a series of recommendations designed to “break the taboo” against considering legalisation and regulation of some drugs as alternatives.

Having broken the taboo, the Commission offered political cover for some Latin American leaders, including former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, and Uruguayan President Jose Mujica (whose country last December became the world’s first to regulate the legal production, distribution, and sale of marijuana), to endorse far-reaching reform.

In mid-2013, the Organisation of American States (OAS) also released a report commissioned by the region’s reads of states that included legalisation as a policy alternative and that strongly favoured the view that drugs should be seen increasingly as a public health, rather than a security issue.

Among other measures, it proposed legalising and regulating marijuana production, distribution and sales – a recommendation that has since been adopted by voters in the U.S. states of Colorado and Washington. Nearly half of all U.S. states have legalised cannabis for medical purposes, and 17 states have decriminalised personal possession.

Virtually all observers agree that the drug war has been a signal failure. As prices drop for drugs that are have become purer with each passing year, governments have been spending an estimated 100 billion dollars annually on enforcement measures. The U.N. has estimated the value of global illicit drug trade at over 350 billion dollars.

The Commission offered a number of general recommendations in its report, beginning with a call for a “fundamental re-orientation of policy priorities” that would replace traditional goals and measures — such as amounts of drugs seized, the number of people arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for drug law violations – with “far more important” benchmarks, such as reducing drug-related harms, such as fatal overdoses, HIV infections, crime, violence, human rights abuses, and the power of criminal organisations that profit from the drug trade.

In addition to calling for equitable access to essential medicines, regulating markets for some drugs, and relying on alternatives to incarcerating non-violent, low-level participants in illicit drug markets, such as farmers and carriers, the report called for governments to be “far more strategic” in efforts to reduce the power of criminal organisations.

It noted that militarised “crackdowns” may actually increase criminal violence and public insecurity without actually deterring drug production, trafficking or consumption.

“…(I)n the longer term, drug markets should be responsibly regulated by government authorities. Without legal regulation, control and enforcement, the drug trade will remain in the hands of organised criminals. Ultimately this is a choice between control in the hands of governments or gangsters; there is no third option in which drug markets can be made to disappear,” according to the report.

“The idea behind this report and its timing is to ensure that there can be no repeat of the empty slogans, such as “a drug-free world, we can do it,” which was the theme of the UNGASS on Drugs in 1998, said John Walsh, a drug-policy expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

“To avoid a repeat, the idea is to ensure that a genuine debate will be unavoidable. That doesn’t mean that the world’s countries will rally around this new paradigm of legal regulation instead of prohibition, but the hope is that these issues cannot be ignored.”

“There’s no question now that the genie of reform has escaped the prohibitionist bottle,” said Ethan Nadelmann, the veteran director of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). “The former presidents and other Commission members pull no punches in insisting that national and global drug control policies reject the failed prohibitionist policies of the 20^th century in favour of new policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A report released Tuesday by the London School of Economics (LSE) depicts drug prohibition as a massive failure, a financial drain on economies and a violation of the basic human rights of citizens.

“The pursuit of a militarised and enforcement-led global ‘war on drugs’ strategy has produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage,” concluded the LSE’s Expert Panel on the Economics of Drug Policy, a group of 21 that includes five Nobel Prize-winning economists, former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz and Deputy Prime Minister of the UK Nick Clegg.“The LSE report in many ways articulates what has been said before - that we are wasting tremendous financial and human resources in the name of a failed paradigm." -- Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch

For years, opposition to drug prohibition has often been associated – accurately or not – with marginalised groups, either users themselves or the families of prisoners incarcerated under minimum sentencing guidelines.

Now, economists – perhaps the least likely victims of the war on drugs but vital to its deconstruction – are weighing in.

“The LSE report in many ways articulates what has been said before – that we are wasting tremendous financial and human resources in the name of a failed paradigm,” said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Programme.

“The question of the economics [of the drug war] have never really been gauged as strongly as it is being today,” Malinowska-Sempruch told IPS.

The report comes as more nations voice their displeasure with policies of interdiction that were hoisted upon them by powerful, conservative countries like the U.S.

In 2012, the heads of states of Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala delivered a statement to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asking for an “urgent” review of drug policy.

Last year, the Organisation of American States released a report that called for the easing of such policies and consideration of possibility of decriminalisation.

In New York for the 2013 U.N. General Assembly, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina called marijuana legalisation in Uruguay and the U.S. states of Colorado and Washington that year “visionary.”

And this past December, a leaked internal document containing draft recommendations from U.N. member states on drug policy showed many more willing to express their disquietude in private.

Failure by any measure

The LSE report found that policies of interdiction fail even their own narrow objectives.

“Evidence shows that drug prices have been declining while purity has been increasing,” wrote the authors.

The 100 billion dollars spent annually worldwide on law and order measures associated with drugs is not only largely wasted but ends up incurring bigger bills down the line.

One U.N study cited in the report found every dollar spent on opioid-substitution therapies (OST) like methadone “may yield a return of between four and seven dollars in reduced drug-related crime, criminal justice costs and theft alone.”

When accounting for health care costs, “total savings can exceed costs by a ratio of 12:1.”

But where prohibition is favoured over harm reduction programmes, drug use can lead to public health crises.

Russia, one of the few countries than bans methadone, has an HIV rate more than double most western European countries. Last year, the Russian government reported 55,000 newly diagnosed HIV patients, 58 percent of whom were intravenous drug users.

In recently annexed Crimea, Russian authorities announced they will shut down OST services.

Draconian drug laws can have a punitive effect not only on citizens but on the entire workforce of a country.

In 2000, the Polish government criminalised the possession of even the smallest quantities of illicit drugs. Within a decade, more than 100,000 Poles had gained criminal records and now find themselves barred from public sector employment.

All the while, in the U.S., the private prison industry and defence contractors have profited handsomely from enforcement expenditures and the housing of prisoners – staggering numbers of them.

Between 1979 and 2009, the number of prisoners in the U.S grew by 480 percent to 2.2 million; 1 in 5 – and half in federal prison – are locked up on drug offences.

Reports like the LSE’s set the stage for a showdown in 2016, when the U.N. General Assembly will have a special session dedicated to the future of drug policy.

Last year, for the first time, a majority of U.S. citizens said they favoured the legalisation of marijuana. But in the U.S. and around the world, laws lag behind the evolution of mores.

Despite headlined-grabbing votes in Uruguay, Portugal and small parts of the U.S., the vast majority of an estimated 230 million drug users worldwide still reside in countries that schedule drugs based on two strict U.N. Conventions: the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotics and the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances.

Still, the International Narcotics Control Board, an oversight body with quasi-judicial powers, is increasingly ignored by countries that see benefits from bucking the conventions.

“The conventions are just just a reflection of what states see them as,” says John Collins, coordinator of the LSE’s IDEAS International Drug Policy Project.

“They are realising that the conventions are a lot more flexible than previously interpreted,” Collins told IPS. “I think we are really reaching a tipping point.”

But while decades ago signing the conventions had little political fallout for member states, least of all for those – like the U.S. – who ghost-wrote them, unwinding their countless manifestations in trade agreements and international law will take more than a stroke of a pen.

Many smaller countries that are ill-affected by the war on drugs still prefer to risk their political capital on more cut and dry issues.

“The General Assembly in 2016 is a tremendous deal,” said Collins. “But I think what we should argue for more broadly is that the U.N. stop being a bully on this issue.”

“The main thing to look at is what member states are doing at a national and regional level. Let’s see how they react to cannabis regulation,” he added.

Intravenous drug users are the last in line to get support from Pakistan's government-run AIDS programme. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 24 2014 (IPS)

In the exclusive, rarified air of Davos, Thursday’s attendees at the World Economic Forum shared in a whiff of decriminalisation at a panel on drug policy in the Swiss alpine city that included former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Texas Governor Rick Perry and the head of Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth.

“I believe that drugs have destroyed many people, but wrong governmental policies have destroyed many more,” said Annan.  “When we realised [alcohol] prohibition wasn’t working, we had the courage to change it.”"How can I tell a farmer with half a hectare growing marijuana he will go to jail if in the [U.S.] states of Washington and Colorado it's legal?" -- Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos

Santos echoed a common theme, complaining of half-baked policies and lip service paid to drug reforms. Colombia, for many years Washington’s staunchest ally in the so-called war on drugs, has recently made an about-face, joining much of Latin America in questioning the increasingly violent consequences of prohibition.

Perry served as a foil for the other three panelists, though he agreed that U.S. states had the right to decide on policies independently from the federal government.

“I am not for legalisation of drugs,” Perry said. “We certainly would never jump out in front of a parade because that’s where the public seems to be going.”

“I’ve long wondered what it would take to persuade the Davos organisers to put drug policy on the main stage of the forum,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, in a statement. “Drug policy reform as a global political movement has come of age.”

Davos comes a month after a leaked internal U.N. document showcased disagreement among member states over the future course of global drug policy. Shortly after, Uruguay became the first country to legalise possession of marijuana, flouting existing U.N. conventions.

The response from the U.N.’s quasi-judicial International Narcotics Control Board was tepid and left the door ajar for more countries to challenge a faltering consensus on interdiction.

“I don’t see any evidence of any political will at the U.N. to penalise states that are exploring these options,” said Sean Dunagan, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent in Guatemala and current member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

The U.S., which largely wrote the U.N. conventions that codified the war on drugs, has emerged Janus-faced on the world stage, with a president who admittedly inhaled, recent legalisation in two U.S. states – Colorado and Washington – and a populace increasingly unbothered by drug use among their friends and neighbours.

“How can I tell a farmer with half a hectare growing marijuana he will go to jail if in the states of Washington and Colorado it’s legal?” said Santos.

Despite increasingly viral coverage of the few that flout interdiction – next week’s Superbowl pits teams from Washington and Colorado and has been dubbed the “Marijuana Bowl” – nearly all countries still schedule and criminalise drugs based on guidelines codified in the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotics and the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances.

“I see the conventions as lagging indicators. I don’t think they will be changed any time soon,” Dunagan told IPS.

In the developing world, Nadelmann says countries tend to pull their punches and can at times feel obliged to follow the path of retrograde policies, even as the countries which authored them distance themselves from those laws.

“Policy innovation in this area doesn’t come easily or naturally in Africa,” Nadelmann told IPS. “I think the old moralistic notions have yet to really be challenged.”

But Nadelmann says Annan’s evolution on the issue is vital for the region and carries significant symbolic weight. In 1998, Annan oversaw a special session of the General Assembly that focused exclusively on eradication, much to the chagrin of activists. But by 2011, Annan had joined other members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy in encouraging “experimentation with models of legal regulation of drugs.”

“What’s most significant in many ways is the fact that Kofi Annan was willing to identify so publicly and boldly with the cause of drug policy reform. He’s been on the global commission since its inception, but it’s only in the last year that he’s begun to step out of it more,” said Nadelmann. “In recent months he’s decided to make a deeper commitment on the issue.”

In May, the Organisation of American States released a report that raised the prospect – long advocated by harm reduction activists – of decriminalisation, elevating the easing of interdiction policies that since the 1970s were accepted as gospel by countries when confronting drug use.

Though Colombia had successfully reined in its once seemingly-untouchable cartels, Santos said increased production elsewhere, particularly in Central America, was an example of the “balloon” effect, where eradication only displaces, rather than eliminates production and does nothing to reduce demand.

While the U.S. relaxes federal enforcement domestically, militarisation continues in Central America, where DEA agents silently accompany local forces on often violent missions in rural areas.

Perry’s Socratic responses seemed to at times befuddle other panelists, particularly when he attempted to draw links to the fight against Al Qaeda. “How long have we been in the War on Terror?” asked the governor to the bemusement of the crowd.

Dunagan said it was important that reform not forget those already incarcerated. In the U.S., half a million prisoners are currently serving terms for drug offences.

“There are declines in prosecutions in Colorado and Washington but people aren’t being led out of jail in those states,” said Dunagan.

“There’s certainly a willingness for world leaders to challenge that orthodoxy that is U.S.-driven, and is enforced by the U.S. via the U.N. The trend is clear but I don’t know if we are at a critical mass.”

"Is this fair?" one of the images of Brazil's drug decriminalisation campaign. Credit: "Lei de drogas: É preciso mudar" campaign

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 12 2012 (IPS)

A host of academic, legal, health, political and social figures are joining together to back a campaign to decriminalise drug use in Brazil, as tens of thousands of consumers uninvolved in the drug trade are currently jailed.

The “Drug Law: It’s Time to Change” campaign is an initiative launched by the Brazilian Commission on Drugs and Democracy, which aims to gather one million signatures in support of a bill that will be introduced in congress during the second half of 2013.

Many movie and television celebrities, along with major political personalities, including former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), have rallied behind this campaign that seeks to amend the country’s anti-drug policy act (Law 11,343/2006), which makes no distinction between users and dealers.

“I bought half a gramme of marijuana for my own use and I got caught. Because I live in a favela (shantytown), they threw me in jail like a drug dealer… In Brazil you can’t go out on bail while you wait for your trial, so I was in jail for months,” popular TV star Felipe Camargo says in one of the campaign spots aired since Monday, Jul. 9. While Camargo is playing a part, he’s conveying an actual case experienced by a young worker.

“Is that fair?” the actor asks. Other true stories are portrayed: a prostitute who went to jail because a client left traces of drugs in her room; a man who was arrested when the police found powder in his house that later proved to be yeast.

Since the current law came into force the number of people arrested in the country for possession of drugs doubled.

Drug use “cannot be linked to repression, prison and policing… it has to be linked to education, health and solidarity,” legislator Paulo Teixeira, of the governing leftist Workers Party (PT), stressed at the campaign launch. Teixeira will be introducing the amendment initiative in congress.

“The main aim is to decriminalise drug possession and use,” he said.

The changes proposed by the initiative include removing drug policy from the realm of law enforcement and turning it into a health and social assistance concern; decriminalising drug use by establishing a clear distinction between consumers and dealers; and providing quality treatment for drug addicts, incorporating support networks and families into a comprehensive substance abuse treatment system.

Pedro Abramovay, an attorney and law professor with the Getulio Vargas Foundation and president Dilma Rousseff’s former justice secretary, told IPS that 60 percent of the people jailed on drug charges in Brazil had no prior record and were arrested with small amounts of drug and unarmed.

“They fit the definition of a user more than of a dealer, but they’re jailed like drug traffickers because the law is unclear,” said Abramovay, who was removed from his position in the government, among other reasons, because of his defence of alternative penalties for small drug dealers.

A quarter of Brazil’s inmate population – the fourth largest in the world, behind the United States, Russia and China – is serving a drug-related sentence or awaiting trial on drug charges. This Latin American giant of 192 million people has 258 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants.

According to violence expert Julita Lemgruber, director of the Centre for Safety and Citizenship Studies of the Cándido Mendes University, while the total number of inmates tripled in the last 15 years, the number of people arrested for drug dealing grew threefold in only a third of that time.

Brazil’s “insane” drug laws are also putting a greater number of women in jail, contributing to prison overcrowding and causing “huge” problems due to the poor conditions in women’s correctional facilities, Lemgruber said.

She notes that women represent six percent of Brazil’s prison population, but 14 percent of all inmates jailed for drug trafficking.

José da Silva, former national secretary of public safety and a colonel with the military police reserve corps, supports the proposed amendment, based on his experience in repression.

“Experience shows you that repression only aggravates the problem. More people die: drug users, police officers, dealers and people who have nothing to do with this whole business,” Da Silva told IPS.

And “it doesn’t lead to people consuming less,” said the police chief, who believes that resorting to repression to combat drugs is a battle that has been “lost”.

The campaign is not yet considering bolder measures, such as legalising the drug market, but da Silva thinks that that is also necessary.

“The model implemented in the United States when it decided to legalise alcohol is the model we should adopt for drugs…, legalise and control everything, from production to distribution and use, so control is in the hands of the state and not of drug dealers,” he said.

A similar system, but limited only to marijuana, was proposed just last month by Brazil’s neighbour, Uruguay.

Brazil’s amendment initiative is based in part on the decriminalisation model adopted by Portugal. According to Abramovay, drug decriminalisation in this European country led to more effective organised crime control and a dramatic reduction in the number of drug-related deaths. And not only did drug use not increase after it was decriminalised in Portugal, it dropped among the youngest segments, he told IPS.

The campaign is supported by the Rio de Janeiro organisation Viva Rio, which promotes a culture of peace, the National Association of Public Defenders, the Oswaldo Cruz Science Foundation, the Rio de Janeiro State Health Department, the Global Commission on Drug Policy and Avaaz, a global online campaigning community.

One of the celebrities involved in the campaign, actress Isabel Fillardis, said she was initially taken aback when she was approached by the organisers, as she had never used illicit drugs. But she decided to support the initiative when she heard the moving true cases presented in the spots, and, above all, because she realised that “it’s important to promote a debate” on an issue that is considered taboo in Brazil.

In the last few months, a number of popular Brazilian stars have spoken openly about their experiences with drugs. One of these personalities was musician and former culture minister Gilberto Gil, who spoke of his marijuana use.

Carlos Minc, current environmental secretary of the state of Rio de Janeiro, recalled how while serving as minister under president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) he was “admonished” for participating in a march in favour of decriminalising marijuana. Other government officials saw his behaviour as “advocating” drugs, he said.

“We need to end all this hypocrisy and repression,” Minc stressed.

In the governing PT, opinions are divided. “I spent eight years in the government, and I still support this government that has transformed Brazil, but we’ve reached a point in which it’s civil society’s turn to act,” Abramovay said.