National police patrol outside a court in Amatitlan, Guatemala. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd
According to the Real Academia Española dictionary, opportunity is understood as the existence of "appropriate circumstances" while opportunism refers to taking advantage of such circumstances to obtain "the greatest possible benefit". The recent (April 19-21) third United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs (UNGASS) promised to be a propicious opportunity to rethink and reorientate the issue of illicit psychoactive substances, towards a different track from the current prohibitionist approach. However, a preliminary assessment shows that this was an opportunist summit in which defenders of the status quo were able to abort aspirations of an effective transformation of the field.
Prior to the conference, a combination of factors had called into question the international regime of illicit drugs (IRID). In 1990 and 1998 the first and second United Nations General Assembly Special Sessions on drugs were held. The first UNGASS took place in the final days of the Cold War - with the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe - and the deepening of the "war on drugs" - especially in terms of the US anti-narcotics policy with respect to Latin America.
