The World Drug Report 2009, the flagship annual publication of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), was published in Washington DC last week. Launched in the run up to World Drug Day on 26 June, the report provides detailed descriptions of trends in world drug markets.
Transform, an NGO with special consultative status with the UN, argues that it is the regime of global prohibition that has created and compounded what is generally thought of as the ‘drug problem’, but that we must reframe the debate in terms of promoting sustainable wellbeing if we are to bring an end the war on drugs.
For decades, drugs and drug policy have effectively been ghettoised with regards to wider social policy perspectives. This is fundamentally because global drug policy is unique, premised as it is upon the UN International Drug Conventions of 1961, 1971 and 1988, and translated into domestic drug prohibition throughout the world, that effectively criminalises at one stroke, fun and disadvantage.
Effective global policy formation ought to be based upon creating the best world that we can for its inhabitants. The pillars of the UN are organised to provide the best for humans predominantly: human development, human security and human rights. These three ‘humans’ make up what we refer to as ‘wellbeing’ and should form the foundation and be the perspectives from which we assess the effectiveness of policy.
The fact is that many countries involved in the drugs trade suffer from low levels of wellbeing; from fragile states involved in production and trafficking, such as Colombia, Afghanistan and Guinea Bissau through to industrialised, predominantly consumer nations like the US and UK. The annual Unicef study on child wellbeing in industrialised countries regularly places the US and the UK at the bottom (so cementing the special relationship), whilst the Scandinavians regularly sit at the top. According to Professor Richard Wilkinson, in his recent book ‘The Spirit Level’, why more equal societies almost always do better’, there is a clear correlation between income inequality and drug misuse at nation state level.
UNODC is officially at war with itself. The Executive Director, Antonio Maria Costa, has admitted repeatedly that the UNODC oversees the very system that gifts the vast illegal drug market to violent criminal profiteers, with disastrous consequences. The UNODC is effectively creating the problem it is claiming to eliminate. Costa has identified five major ‘unintended consequences’ of the drug control system. Is there a time limit on how long a consequence remains ‘unintended’? Aren’t they now just ‘consequences’?
Even the UNODC website admits:
‘Global drug control efforts have had a dramatic unintended consequence: a criminal black market of staggering proportions. Organised crime is a threat to security. Criminal organizations have the power to destabilise society and governments. The illicit drug business is worth billions of dollars a year, part of which is used to corrupt government officials and to poison economies.’
Should we legalise drugs? Should we treat addicts as patients rather criminals? These are the wrong questions to ask. The question we should be asking is this, Given that many humans suffer catastrophically from low levels of wellbeing and high levels of income inequality, what is the benefit of prosecuting an unwinnable war on drugs that serves only to further undermine their wellbeing? We cannot hope to promote sustainable wellbeing in a war zone.
Only by ending our politically driven war on drugs can we hope to address the underlying sickness of producer, transit and consumer countries alike. In the short term, the UN and its member states should be obliged to conduct transparent impact assessments of their continued commitment to the Conventions with a view to acting on the evidence that they garner. In the longer term, the conventions need to be adapted, specifically allowing the flexibility for states, should they democratically decide, to explore legal regulation of drug production and supply. Until then the war on drugs will continue to undermine development, security and human rights.