The War on Drugs Is Failing - Decriminalization Is the Only Way Forward

By Amanda Feilding, Guardian UK

23 June 16

Discontent is growing internationally with prohibitionist drug policies. The UN must heed NGOs, experts and agencies advocating alternative approaches

t is generally accepted that the international “war on drugs” has had devastating and far-reaching consequences. These include public health crises, mass incarceration, corruption, and black market–fuelled violence. Even the United Nations Office on Drug Control (UNODC), responsible for monitoring and managing the international drug control conventions, acknowledges failure resulting from the creation of “a criminal black market of staggering proportions” that is a fundamental threat to global security.

On Sunday, the UN will promote the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, otherwise known as the International Anti-Drugs Day. Each year, the 26 June becomes an expression of global solidarity and determination to combat and eradicate drug abuse, and champion the “war on drugs”.

This year’s theme is benignly titled Listen First, and attempts to encourage listening to children and youth in order to prevent drug use and protect their health and safety. It is a particularly apt theme, given the news this week of the three 12-year-old girls who were taken to hospital in Salford after having taken ecstasy pills marketed as “teddy” pills.

This recent incident highlights the flaws in prohibitionist drug policies, enshrined in the UN conventions. It is an example of how criminalising drug use can cause more harm than good. Drugs sold on the black market have no age restrictions, no labelling, no instructions for use, and for the most part you can’t be sure what you are buying.

Many of the health risks associated with drug use result from the fact that drug production and drug use is unregulated and controlled by black market forces. People take too much, don’t get help quickly enough, take adulterated substances, and are poorly educated on the substances they are taking. Additionally, new psychoactive substances (“legal highs”) pose problems because health agencies have no idea what is in them, or how to deal with them when something goes wrong.

The theme of listening to children is commendable, and will help to move the focus from the production and supply of drugs to the demand. Of equal if not more importance, is listening to the evidence that demonstrates how the war on drugs is failing: failing to curb or eliminate drug use, failing to eliminate the production and supply of drugs, failing to protect public health, and failing to uphold the “three pillars” of the UN’s work – peace and security, development, and human rights.

The UN advocates “listening” but seems to have selective hearing. Advice on alternative approaches from the United Nations Development Programme, UNAids, UN Women and the World Health Organisation, and even members of the UNODC themselves, together with pressure from Latin American countries such as Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala, seem to fall on closed ears. At the latest general assembly held in April, prohibitionist policies held sway and only token changes in the direction of harm reduction were made.

However, international discontent with the “war on drugs” is growing, with an increasing number of countries experimenting with liberalised drug laws, especially in relation to cannabis. Liberalised policies have not caused drug use to soar, as critics predicted. In Portugal, where they decriminalised all drug use 15 years ago, they have made significant financial savings, reduced incarceration, benefited from improvements in public health, controlled an explosive, injection-linked HIV epidemic, and seen no significant increase in drug use.

Alongside these more progressive policies, 33 countries retain the death penalty for drug offences. Some of these countries, such as China and Indonesia, use International Anti-Drugs Day to promote harsh penalties, unveiling executions or long prison sentences in the run-up to the event. Although UNODC formally opposes the death penalty, the regimes responsible for them have often been commended for their anti-drug efforts.

The discrepancies in the application of the conventions, and the growing critique with the UN orthodoxy have produced cracks in the armour of this “war”. The UN must take the opportunity to heed its own words, and “listen first”, to the people on the ground, to the NGOs working in the field, to the countries experimenting with alternative approaches, and to the experts and agencies informing them.

At the Beckley Foundation, a thinktank investigating the creation of balanced drug policies, we advocate the following steps: first to decriminalise all drugs. Next, to reschedule currently illegal drugs such as cannabis, MDMA and certain psychedelics from the USA’s schedule I to schedule II, so scientific research can more easily be undertaken and doctors can prescribe them. If harm reduces after decriminalisation, despite the doom-mongering of cynics, we could carefully move towards the third step of a strictly regulated and taxed market for those substances with low risk that the public most desire.