Poppy field, Kandahar, Afghanistan, 2016. Allauddin Khan/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The ‘war on drugs’ is not a policy, but an ideology – a dogma insensitive to the facts, and uncaring of the consequences. On the evidence, no global initiative has failed as emphatically: prohibitionist measures have not reduced the drug supply, but created instead a lucrative industry in the provision of narcotics by gangs and cartels. (In 2016, illegal drugs are literally worth more than their weight in gold). The drug war has punished the most vulnerable in society: the poor; racial and ethnic minorities; and, increasingly, women. It is a world war – from the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the streets of Chicago – with a terrible human toll: in Latin America alone, deaths from the drug war exceed that of the conflict in Syria.
At the request of three Latin American nations – Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala – the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the world drug problem was brought forward from 2019 to 2016. But this sense of urgency was not reflected in the preparatory meeting in Vienna in March, where the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) published an ‘outcome document’ that broadly maintains the status quo – a position “almost entirely disconnected from reality”, according to Ann Fordham of the International Drug Policy Consortium. Negotiations in Vienna followed a pattern familiar to even casual observers of the UN: tense final hours of dispute resolution, followed by a sense of anticlimax upon publication, with a statement of consensus that sacrifices reform in the name of unity. Statements that challenged the failings of the current system were either vetoed or watered down.
