Prelims

Half Title Page

Collapse of The Global Order on Drugs

Title Page

Collapse of The Global Order on Drugs: From UNGASS 2016 to Review 2019

Edited by

Axel Klein

Global Drug Policy Observatory, UK

Blaine Stothard

Independent Consultant, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2018

Copyright © Axel Klein and Blaine Stothard. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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ISBN: 978-1-78756-488-6 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-487-9 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-489-3 (Epub)

Contents

Abbreviations

About the Editors

Axel Klein is a Researcher and Project Consultant with a long-standing commitment to drug policy reform. Axel has headed the research and international units at DrugScope and been a trustee for Transform, two UK NGOs. His publications include The Khat Controversy: Stimulating the Debate on Drugs (2007), Caribbean Drugs: From Criminalization to Harm Reduction (2004), and Drugs and the World (2009). More recently, Axel has published on cannabis cultivation and the anthropology of drugs. He has been the editor of journal Drugs and Alcohol Today since 2007.

Blaine Stothard is an Educationalist and Prevention Specialist who came to drug policy through an advisory role in a London LEA at the time of the UK’s first national drug policy. He was active in the Healthy Schools programmes from 1998 to 2010 as an independent consultant, has worked on related policy development and implementation in the UK and Eastern Europe and was the external consultant for the Moscow-based schools drug education programme run by Project HOPE from 1998 to 2006. He has been the co-editor of Drugs and Alcohol Today since 2014.

About the Authors

Maria-Goretti Ane is a private Legal Practitioner based in Ghana and a renowned expert on drug policy, having been involved in high-level engagements and advocacy on drug use and the law both locally and internationally. She is also an author of a number of articles on drug use and drug policy reform in Africa.

Danilo Ballotta (MSc) has been working for the last 20 years in the field of international drug policy. He joined the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) in 1997 where he has worked on national and European legislation, policy and anti-drug coordination systems and has contributed to the agency’s work on international drug policy. Since 2005, he has been the EMCDDA’s Principal Policy Analyst coordinating relations with the European Institutions. In this capacity, he represents the agency at the horizontal working group on drugs. Prior to joining the EMCDDA, he worked at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and at the European Commission’s Task Force ‘Justice and Home Affairs’. Most recent publications include articles on European observations on cannabis legalisation with Brendan Hughes; on the United Nations General Assembly Special Session 2016 ‘The Turning Point in International Drug Policy?’ with Tim Pfeiffer-Gerschel and Alexis Goosdeel (SUCHT (2016), 62, 59–60); and a review of regional drug strategies across the world: ‘How is prevention perceived and addressed?’ with Marica Ferri and Giuseppe Carrà (Drugs: Education Prevention and Policy (2015), 22(5)).

Leandre Banon is the Capacity Development Programme Officer for the West Africa Civil Society Institute. Prior to that he was the lead person at the West Africa Drug Policy Reform Project from 2015 to 2017 and led regional consultations that gave birth to the West Africa Common Position towards the United Nations General Assembly Special Session 2016.

Isabela Barbosa joined the Office of the UN Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in 2014. Her work is mainly focussed on migration in Central Asia. Previously, she worked in the private sector and non-governmental organisations in her native Brazil, and most recently for the Global Commission on Drug Policy and the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Her research interests focus on the connection between migration, development and public health. She studied Law (Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro) and International Relations (University of Geneva) and is currently pursuing Migration studies (Georgetown University) and a Master’s of Science in Global Health (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine).

David R. Bewley-Taylor is a Professor of International Relations and Public Policy and founding Director of the Global Drug Policy Observatory (GDPO) at Swansea University. He has been researching aspects of drug policy for over 20 years, his main areas of interest being US drug policy and the United Nations and international drug control. David is the author of two major research monographs – The United States and International Drug Control, 1909−1997 (Continuum, 2001) and International Drug Control: Consensus Fractured (Cambridge University Press, 2012) − several book chapters and has published in a wide range of academic journals. He has collaborated with and produced policy reports for a number of drug policy organisations beyond academia. He is currently an Associate of the International Drug Policy Consortium and an Associate Fellow of the Transnational Institute’s Drugs and Democracy Programme. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Drug Policy and Editor-in-Chief of GDPO Policy Reports, Policy Briefs and Situation Analyses.

Tom Blickman is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Transnational Institute, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has been working in the drug policy field for the last 20 years, specializing in international drug control policy and the UN conventions, drug markets, alternative development, money laundering and organised crime. He is a regular Speaker at international policy conferences and advises on developments in the drugs field. Mayor recent publication include The Rise and Decline of Cannabis Prohibition (2014), Cannabis Policy Reform in Europe: Bottom Up Rather Than Top Down (2014) and Morocco and Cannabis: Reduction, Containment or Acceptance (2016).

Caroline Chatwin is a Reader in Criminology at the University of Kent, where she runs Masters and Undergraduate courses on drugs, culture and control. Her research focusses on European drug policy, drug policy reform and new psychoactive substances. She is the author of Drug Policy Harmonization in the European Union (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and has recently published articles on the lessons Europe can provide for an increasingly harmonised global drug policy, the European approach to new psychoactive substances and the added value of European-level interventions in national drug policy.

Ann Fordham directs the work of IDPC, leading on the coordination and development of the network. Ann was appointed as Executive Director in 2011. She joined IDPC in 2008 as the first coordinator of the network and in that time has grown the network from 32 to more than 170 organisations. Ann leads on international advocacy efforts on drug policy and human rights, specifically calling for reform of laws and policies that have proven ineffective in reducing the scale of the drug market and have negatively impacted vulnerable population groups such as people who use drugs and growers of illicit crops. Ann is the Chair of the Strategic Advisory Group to the UN on HIV and Drug Use and is regularly invited to comment on global drug policy issues in the media. She has a Masters Degree in Human Rights from Sussex University where she specialised in human rights and harm reduction.

Maziyar Ghiabi is a Lecturer at the University of Oxford and Titular Fellow at Wadham College. Prior to this position, he was a a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paris School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) and a member of the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire des Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS). Maziyar obtained his Doctorate in Politics at the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College) where he was a Wellcome Trust Scholar in Society and Ethics (2013–2017). He edited a Special Issue on ‘Drugs, Politics and Society in the Global South’ published by Third World Quarterly. His first monograph book is under contract by Cambridge University Press and will be in press in Spring 2019. Beside working on drug policy, Maziyar has published on urban ethnography and history.

Mikhail Golichenko is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, leading research and advocacy work in Russian-speaking countries, with a particular focus on drug policy issues. Previously, Mikhail was a Legal Officer with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Country Office for the Russian Federation in Moscow. He has also worked for the UN Peacekeeping in West Africa and the Russian police service in different positions, including as an Instructor. Mikhail holds a Candidate of Sciences degree (PhD equivalent) in Russian Civil Law from Saratov State Academy of Law and an LLM in Canadian Common Law from Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. He has been a Member of the Russian Bar Association since 2007.

Ricky Gunawan is a Human Rights Lawyer and the Director of Community Legal Aid Institute (LBH Masyarakat), based in Jakarta. LBH Masyarakat provides free legal services for marginalised groups and victims of human rights abuses, including people who use drugs. Ricky earned his Law degree from the University of Indonesia and MA degree in Theory and Practice of Human Rights from University of Essex (UK).

Heather Haase has served as the IDPC members’ link to UN Headquarters on drug policy issues since 2013, most notably during the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) and its aftermath. Her work includes interfacing with key missions and UN agencies on drug policy issues, following UN activities and processes around drugs, and disseminating information to IDPC membership, with the goal of maximizing the involvement of civil society in UN processes around drugs. Heather also chairs the New York NGO Committee on Drugs, a Substantive Committee organized under the Conference of NGOs in Consultative Status with the UN (CoNGO), which promotes global NGO participation in UN processes around drugs. Through the NYNGOC she helped lead efforts to form the Civil Society Task Force for UNGASS 2016, which gave a voice in the UNGASS process to drug policy NGOs from all over the world.

Heather holds a law degree from the Wake Forest University School of Law in North Carolina, and is currently earning an LL.M degree at Columbia Law School, concentrating on international law & diplomacy, human rights, and drug policy.

Jonas von Hoffmann is a DPhil Candidate at the University of Oxford, UK. His chapter is part of a larger project that examines the variation of recent cannabis policy reforms in Latin America. Jonas holds a BA degree in Politics, Psychology and Sociology from the University of Cambridge (2013) and an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford (2015). He has been an Amelia Jackson Scholar at Exeter College and won the Crowley Price for his Master’s dissertation on Cannabis Legalisation in Uruguay. Currently, his research is funded by the ESRC.

Brendan Hughes has been working at European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction since 2001 in the field of national drug legislation, after gaining a Master’s degree in International Criminal Law (LLM) specialising in narcotics law. He manages the European Legal Database on Drugs, which holds various comparative overviews and analyses on different topics relevant to drug laws; not only use, possession and trafficking laws but also issues such as drug classifications, threshold quantities, alternatives to punishment, drug driving and control systems for new psychoactive substances. He published the first European quantitative comparison of drug law sentencing and outcome statistics in 2009, followed by a qualitative comparison of trafficking scenarios in 2016. He has advised ministers and parliamentary committees on issues such as decriminalisation and legalisation and has authored several articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Brendan Hughes is a British national.

Michel Kazatchkine has over 30 years of experience in the fight against AIDS as a leading physician, researcher, administrator, advocate, policy-maker, and diplomat. He attended medical school in Paris and has completed postdoctoral fellowships at St. Mary’s hospital in London and Harvard Medical School. He is Professor of Immunology at Université René Descartes in Paris and has authored or co-authored over 500 publications. Professor Kazatchkine has played key roles in various organizations, serving as director of the national Agency for Research on AIDS in France (1998-2005), and as French ambassador on HIV/AIDS and communicable diseases (2005-2007). In 2007, Professor Kazatchkine was elected Executive Director of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a position in which he served until March 2012. Between 2012 and 2017, Professor Kazatchkine served as the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Since 2018, he is the Special Advisor to the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) for Eastern Europe and Central Asia. He is also Senior Fellow with the Global Health Centre of the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

Gloria Lai is the Regional Director for Asia for the International Drug Policy Consortium, based in Bangkok, Thailand. She previously worked as a Senior Policy Advisor on Law Enforcement and Drugs, and as a Lawyer, for the Australian Government. Gloria holds a double Master’s degree in Public Policy (Central European University) and International Development (Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University) and Undergraduate degrees in Law and Asian Studies (Chinese) from the Australian National University.

Rick Lines is Associate Professor of Criminology and Human Rights at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University, Wales. He has been called ‘a key figure in the emerging field of human rights and drug policy’, and is known for his leading research and teaching on subjects including international drug control law, prisoners’ rights, capital punishment and harm reduction. Rick is the author of ‘Drug Control and Human Rights in International Law’ (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Larissa Maier is a psychologist and postdoctoral addiction researcher at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Prior to this, she was appointed as a consultant in Drug Use Epidemiology at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna. In March 2015, she completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Zurich in 2015, while working at the Swiss Research Institute for Public Health and Addiction (ISGF). Larissa is part of the Core Research Team of Global Drug Survey (GDS) aiming to make drug use safer, regardless of the legal status of the drug. She is also a member of the European Society of Prevention Research (EUSPR) and the related Early Career Forum as well as a member of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSDP) and the College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD).

Marie Nougier has been responsible for the communications and publications work stream of International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) since 2008 and also engages in networking, civil society capacity building activities and policy advocacy engagement, in particular at the United Nations. Marie supports IDPC’s activities in Latin America, where she helps coordinate a project to reduce the incarceration rate of women for drug offences. Marie is also a Member of the Core Group of the EU Civil Society Forum on Drugs. Marie has a Masters’ degree in International Law, Human Rights and the Law of Armed Conflicts. Before working at IDPC, she worked on issues related to compulsory drug detention in South East Asia at the World Health Organisation, as well as immigration, racism and police brutality in Western Europe at Amnesty International.

Katherine Irene Pettus is Advocacy Officer at the International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care, a global charitable organisation based in the United States. She holds a PhD in Political Theory from Columbia University and a Master’s degree in Health Policy and Law from the University of California, San Diego. She is a trained hospice Volunteer and a Graduate of the Metta Institute for End of Life Care. As IAHPC Advocacy Officer, Katherine advocates at the UN organisations, and at regional and national palliative care meetings, for improved access to internationally controlled essential medicines such as oral morphine as a component of the internationally recognised rights to health for children, adults and persons with disabilities, and to the right to be free from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Palliative care and controlled medicines are essential components of Universal Health Coverage under Target 3.8 of the Sustainable Development Goals, or Agenda 2030.

Gen Sander is a Human Rights Analyst at Harm Reduction International (HRI) in London, UK, where she leads on human rights and prison-related research. Prior to working at HRI, she was a Senior Researcher at the Essex Human Rights Centre, where she worked with Prof. Paul Hunt, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, on issues relating to health and human rights and taught a module on international human rights law. She has worked with various human rights non-governmental organisations in Canada, Europe and the Middle East and has also been a Consultant for the World Health Organisation and the Independent Expert Review Group on right to health issues.

Anya Sarang is the President of Andrey Rylkov Foundation for Health and Social Justice (ARF) – the main activist group fighting for the rights and health of people who use drugs in Russia. While focussing on human rights activism, she has carried out a number of research projects focussing on qualitative studies on health and rights of people who use drugs and gender issues. Anya received an MSc in Alcohol and Drugs: Policy and Interventions from the University of London in 2009 and MSc in Medical Anthropology and Sociology from the University of Amsterdam in 2016. She has been recognised as a courageous human rights and public health advocate and awarded with the International Rolleston Award for outstanding contributions to Harm Reduction by Harm Reduction International; the Crystal of Hope Award for ARF’s HIV advocacy and the Human Rights Watch-Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network Award for Action in HIV and Human Rights.

Zara Snapp is the Co-Founder of Instituto RIA, a member of the Drugs, Politics and Culture Collective, board member of ReverdeSer Colectivo (all in Mexico) and the International Advisor for Acción Técnica Social (Colombia). From 2014−2017, Zara formed part of the Secretariat of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, where she focused on the Latin American strategy and UNGASS 2016. She often writes and gives presentations on innovative public policies related to the regulation of psychoactive substances, from a human rights and social justice based framework. Zara is the author of Drugs Dictionary, published in 2015 by Ediciones B. She has a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Colorado at Denver, where she was awarded a National Truman Scholarship and a master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard where she was a Public Service Fellow.

Khalid Tinasti, is an Honorary Research Associate at Swansea University, a guest researcher at the University of Geneva, and the Executive Secretary of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Before joining the Global Commission’s Secretariat as a Policy Analyst in 2013, he worked as an Independent Consultant for United Nations Program on AIDS, World Health Organisation, the Graduate Institute and others. Prior to that, Khalid worked as a Press and Communications Officer in the Office of the Minister of Urban Cohesion in France and as an Administrative Officer in Gabon. Khalid holds a PhD in Political Science and held Research Fellowships at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Switzerland). He is the author of scientific papers and policy research reports with a focus on public policies, democracy and the role of elections and international drug control mechanisms.

Mike Trace is a former UK Drug Czar, who has held senior drug policy responsibilities at the European Union and the United Nations. He founded and, until 2016, chaired the Board of the International Drug Policy Consortium. Through all of these roles, he has promoted drug policies that are rational, effective and based on principles of human rights and the promotion of positive public and mental health. His reflections in the Epilogue are based on 20 years of close involvement in international diplomacy around drug control and are the author’s own views.

Jorge Herrera Valderrábano is a Policy Analyst and Co-Founder within the RIA Institute, based in Mexico City, Mexico. During the last five years, he has been working on human rights issues, specializing in drug policy reform, and sexual and reproductive rights. He is a founding member of the Ágora México civic movement, aiming to promote citizen engagement in political affairs among young people, and is currently co-presiding Dilo Escuelas Incluyentes, a Mexican organization fostering inclusive policies in educational environments.

Frank Zobel is a Sociologist and Public Health Researcher. He is Deputy Director at Addiction Switzerland, the largest centre for substance use epidemiology in the country. His former positions were with the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) in Lisbon, as Policy Analyst and Coordinator of the European Drug Report, and with the University Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) in Lausanne, as external evaluator of the Swiss drug strategy. Frank is a member of the national advisory board for addiction issues of Switzerland and of the scientific board of the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT).

Foreword

Drug policy is about good and bad governance and government at global, national and local levels. It is about striking the right balance in policies that would ensure both the equality and safety of all and the autonomy/freedom of every citizen, a debate that has been ongoing in our societies from the times of Plato’s Republic to contemporary politics. Few specific policy areas, however, have been as controversial in this respect as that of drug policy, since the endorsement of the International Drug Control Conventions by United Nations member states over 30 years ago and the subsequent implementation of prohibition-based law enforcement policies across the world.

I warmly welcome Axel Klein and Blaine Stothard’s initiative, together with a broad circle of experts, to review the current tensions in the field, ahead of the 2019 UN summit aimed at assessing the 10-year achievements of the 2009 political declaration and action plan on drugs.

The tensions are many, exemplified throughout this volume through the analysis of country contexts, issues relating to specific substances, access to controlled medicines, metrics and human rights.

The first and obvious tension resides in the contraposition between the steady increase in illicit drug availability and consumption documented in the last 10 years; and the original aim set up by the Political declaration to ‘eliminate or significantly reduce illicit drug supply and demand and the diversion and trafficking of precursors’. One may wonder for how long a number of governments will refuse to admit the simple reality that demand for psychoactive substances will always be there; that as long as prohibition will remain, supply will come from parallel criminal sources; and that prohibition-based policies have not only failed in their own objectives of decreasing illicit drug production and use but have actually proven harmful for the health and rights of people and fuelled a criminal economy.

Another tension of the current debate resides between governments and theorists who wish to stick to the outdated/unrealistic political orientation of 2009 and those who will promote a fresh and modernised look at drug policies based on evidence, building on the progressive language adopted at the 2016 UNGASS on drugs, the follow up of which is a mandate of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in the 2016–2019 interval.

The major tension – it seems to me – is more fundamental: whether the debate should be about the governance of substances or about the welfare of people. Clearly, there remains a huge gap between the original objective of the Conventions to ensure ‘the health and welfare of mankind’ and the reality that prohibition-based policies have generated for people on the ground: a ‘war on drugs’ that turned into a war against people who use drugs; an international black market that fuels corruption, spreads violence and insecurity for citizens; mass incarceration of people who use drugs; the spread of HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C; epidemics of overdose; stigmatisation and marginalisation of people who use drugs across the world, who continue to live under the threat of arrest and face often unsurmountable obstacles to access services and treatment.

The latter tension pertains to the interference of government and policies with human life and to ways by which political power, here based on enforcement of prohibition of certain substances, has regulated/prohibited conducts and behaviours, something that Michel Foucault referred to as ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’.

The 2019 debate on drug policy should, however, go beyond the question of regulating behaviours based on the pretext of regulating a substance. It should start from restoring the value of the lives of people who use drugs and their dignity. People who use drugs are criminalised and discriminated against on a daily basis in almost every country of the world, and repressive prohibition policies impact on their health, life expectancy and quality of life. The issue here is about how governments and policies at all levels address human lives and put different price tags on different lives; it is about policies that target certain groups of the population whose lives have less value to governments; it is about the fundamental tension between global ethics that promote the universal value of human life and the reality of political management of lives in the frame of repressive drug policies.

Mike Trace’s analysis in this volume rightly states that the lack of international consensus at the 2016 UNGASS should be seen as a positive development and the end of an era during which member states have worked hard to maintain unity behind a single global strategy of widespread punishment of consumers and suppliers. A consensus that was based on considering illicit drugs as ‘evil’ rather than focussing on people.

It is now time to shift the debate from substances to people; start the discussion on policies with a people’s perspective, people’s fundamental liberties and rights and people’s health. This will be the main challenge for debating the future of drug policy in Vienna next year and the next 10 years’ plan of action.

Michel Kazatchkine

Special Advisor to the Joint United Nations Program on AIDS (UNAIDS) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Acknowledgements

Putting together a book like this is a collective undertaking that could never have been realised without the support of many friends and colleagues. We would like to thank all the people with whom we have been talking about drug policy for longer than we care to remember. It is to the credit of all who continue to engage in this field in spite of setbacks, frustration and tedium. We are particularly indebted to David Bewley-Taylor, Khalid Tinasti and Chris Hallam for their generous support from the outset of this project, helping to give it shape and suggesting authors. The input from Vicky Hanson, Marcus Day, Isidor Obot, Bia Labate and Esbjörn Hörnberg was invaluable in moving the process forward. We also want to mention Mike Ashton, John Collins, Maik Dunnbier, Chris Ford, Willem Scholten, Alexander Soderholm and John Witton for taking a critical interest and sharing their ideas throughout the process. We were greatly encouraged by the support and inspiring leadership of Ruth Dreifuss and Michel Kazatchine from the Global Commission on Drug Policy, to whose work this volume will, we hope, contribute. Most of all, of course, we want to thank our authors, who in these straitened times have contributed their energy and genius in writing a remarkable collection of papers. Although we will get the printed credit as editors, we hope that this collection will also serve as a testament to professionalism, collegiality and co-operation.