United Nations Vienna. Andrés Rodríguez Seijo / Flickr. Some rights reserved.This April, the UN General Assembly Special Session on drugs will convene in New York – seen by many as a possible breaking point for the global drug control system, and the first session to be held on this theme for two decades. The UNGASS is actually happening two years early, because the governments of Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala have called for it in advance. This time, the UNGASS is expected to be a crucial moment in which dissenting countries could break the UN consensus over the ‘war on drugs’ and the model of prohibition, proposing alternative approaches towards harm reduction and decriminalisation instead.
The UNGASS is now perilously close to representing a serious systemic failure of the UN system.
