All well with world drug control system – just give us more money

Axel Klein (Centre for Health Services Studies, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK)
Blaine Stothard (Independent Prevention Specialist, Blaine Stothard Consultancy, London, UK)

Drugs and Alcohol Today

ISSN: 1745-9265

Article publication date: 6 June 2016

330

Citation

Klein, A. and Stothard, B. (2016), "All well with world drug control system – just give us more money", Drugs and Alcohol Today, Vol. 16 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/DAT-04-2016-0013

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited


All well with world drug control system – just give us more money

Article Type: Editorial From: Drugs and Alcohol Today, Volume 16, Issue 2.

First review of the Draft Resolution by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs

The United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs (19-24 April 2016) was intended as an opportunity for the assembled nations to reflect on failures, successes and mounting costs of the drug control regime. Countries in Latin America have long been concerned with mounting homicide rates related to illicit drug markets, the proliferation of urban gangs distributing drugs, and the descent of entire provinces in Mexico or Guatemala into civil war. In Europe, where drug consumption remains stubbornly high, the criminalisation of large sections of the population has become a structural problem. Several US states have sought to resolve the tensions between high demand and black market supply by simply legalising the production, distribution and consumption of cannabis, the most popular illicit drug. At the other end of the spectrum, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and a clutch of other countries are executing rising numbers of drug offenders. Clearly, much has happened since 1998 when the nations last met to declare "a drug free world, we can do it".

In preparation for this important event, the Commission on Narcotic Drugs met in Vienna 9-17th of March to draft proposals for the General Assembly. According to the request from the General Assembly it was to be "short, substantive, concise and action-oriented". It was an opportunity for a detailed examination of the linkages between prohibition, violence and organised crime; the corrosive impact of corruption on many developing countries; to explore new distribution systems; and re-visit the question of "addiction". Proposals had also been tabled to ensure that drug control measures were in harmony with treaties safeguarding human rights and to push back against countries applying the death penalty for drug offences.

Sadly little of this was included in the final outcome statement. The preamble to the, allegedly consensual, "outcome statement" that emerged from a week of deliberation effectively "reaffirms" and "underlines" the three drug control conventions with no decisive acknowledgement of flaw, fault or contradiction. CND veterans insist that only via compromise can agreement be reached. Such consensus is needed because the document recognises that "the world drug problem remains a common and shared responsibility".

But why? In the nineteenth century China could only control internal opium distribution by reaching an accord with British traders shipping Patna and Malwa opium in from India. Today, however, import substitution has made most countries self-sufficient in cannabis and spawned cottage industries that supply chemical alternatives to natural narcotics and stimulants. Opiate use is contracting and cocaine is being displaced by methamphetamine. The need for a global consensus is clearly an anachronism that owes more to the preferences of international diplomacy than the needs of drug control.

In addition, each member state’s room for manoeuvre is tightly constrained by the treaties. For a centralised state like the UK, experimentation with Colorado style cannabis cultivation is strictly out of the question. Time then, for a Conventions-Brexit? Possibly alongside countries with kindred values around public health, proportionate legal responses – criminal alongside administrative – and individual liberty. The advantage of fragmenting the current system is to better adjust the mechanisms available to the particular needs of each country.

In reality, however, the variations between countries in the patterns of use, practices and preferences are buried by the phraseology ringing in the special session on the "world drug problem". What is that exactly: drugs are too expensive, poor quality and often hard to find? Punishments are draconian? Are we really expected to believe that heroin injectors in the ruins of Kabul face comparable problems to a West London professional on a morphine script? It is well understood, though not so well accepted, that we are mainly dealing with complex situations where multiple stressors intersect, as in poverty, marginalisation and drugs. Or where individuals with mental conditions compound these by excessive drug use, a condition known as "dual diagnosis". In short, there are many social and medical problems in which drugs are just one facet among many.

Attributing primary causality to drugs, however, allows authorities to de-prioritise and distract from more intractable problems. Drugs can provide an alibi for incompetent or exploitative government and project the blame onto structurally disadvantaged groups. These are valuable benefits to governments everywhere, whose support in turn ensures the enshrinement of the lowest common denominator: "the world drug problem". The laudable pursuit of inclusiveness results, therefore, in dulling down the analysis of underlying issues. A counter might be expressed here: beware of mono-causal explanations. The symptom has become confused with the causes – and the more up-stream and developmental analyses of the majority of UN, and other, bodies which have commented on the global trade in and impacts of currently illegal drugs have been brushed aside in the final outcome statement, possibly because the real "problems" and their solutions require too much thinking, reflection and re-assessment on the part of the bodies whose responsibility it has been to respond to the problems but whose practice seems to have become, by default, to aggravate the problems. It might be argued that this response, still resistant to evidence and alternatives, is a feature of the neo-liberal misuse of the term "advocacy": governments and institutions turn more and more to "independent" think-tanks and organisations to investigate socio-economic problems and, consequently, are offered "solutions", based on ideology rather than reality, and to add, in this case, to the influences which represent a consolidation of the status quo – of situation and solution. Aside from its ineffectiveness, this approach also represents a retreat by government and other institutions from their responsibility for dealing responsibly and decisively with socio-economic and health needs and problems. "Give us more money" writ large – to "discover" the problems and then to offer the solution.

Having set the stage with the vigorous affirmation of policies that have failed spectacularly in reaching their objectives, the authors set to work with pages of detailed operational recommendations ending with a resolution to: "implement the operational recommendation in close partnership with the United Nations and other intergovernmental organisations and civil society and to share with the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, as the policymaking body of the United Nations". This roll-call of international agencies omits others which express different analyses and responses, starting from human rights and development and developmental perspectives – the UN Development Programme, the UN Food Programme, UNAIDS, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, WHO, not to mention the European Union and the Organisation of American States. Although present in Vienna, insiders report that the EU and South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Social Development were at one point asked to leave the debating chamber. The circle that opens in the run-up to the UNGASS closes with a commitment to the body tasked with the preparations. It is a social system at work, effectively detached from the problematic external reality, to ensure its own continuation and expansion. How this is to be done and who has to be involved is spelt out over a couple of dozen pages, with three net beneficiaries.

We have argued before that drug control presents a social system where the interests of three professional groupings intertwine. The first are policy makers and bureaucrats who can translate the lofty principle of "fighting evil" into governance instruments for consolidating their power. Unsurprisingly the paper is replete with calls to "strengthen cooperation between UNODC and other UN entities within their respective mandates in their efforts to support Member States in the implementation of international drug control". To expand the role of the key agencies the authors take several distinct approaches. First, they call for closer cooperation with and coordination of the UN agencies, which are principally the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the International Narcotics Control Board and the World Health Organisation, as a matter of political expediency. And second, they identify concrete tasks in which these agencies provide guidance, technical expertise and support, as centres of excellence. In the process they also insinuate functions for the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the body they belong to themselves, as the locus for assessing future risks, a forum for exchange of good practice and know how, to end on "reaffirming" its role as "the policymaking body of the United Nations with prime responsibility for drug control matters". While the statement "We reaffirm our determination to promote a society free of drug abuse" included in early drafts of the final document does not appear in the final document, the emphasis, as our title suggests, remains "more of the same". By acting in this self-reinforcing way, CND acts, as happens with many bureaucracies, not in a facilitating and authoritative way but in a self-perpetuating and authoritarian way.

To administer the system they have called into being the bureaucrats lean on two favoured constituencies. Since the purported intent of drug control is the "common good" it is only fitting for the recommendation to lead with demand reduction, prevention and treatment. It is the treatment community, however, who receive special favour. First, drug dependence is characterised "as a complex multi-factorial health disorder", and then national authorities are called upon to develop treatment facilities. Where know-how, political will or wherewithal are missing, international development cooperation can make up the shortfall – mediated, of course, by the international agencies. More detail is provided, "including psycho-social, behavioural and medication-assisted treatment" and different population groups highlighted, such as prisoners, young people and women. Little detailed space is given to the social costs of enforcement, be this the criminalisation of drug users or the environmental damage of crop spraying – developmental alternatives are to be "considered". Sensitive material may indeed rock the consensus and jeopardise unanimity. And new areas of work – and profit? – are opening up in anti money laundering, anti corruption, precursor control and cyber security.

For students of drug politics this is immensely disappointing, but cynics now argue that reform was never on the cards anyway. A handful of activists apart, no-one at CND is angry. The prevailing sentiment is one of frustration with the process, not concerns over the actual state of drug control and its consequences. For the employees of the organisations closely involved with backstopping, drafting, coordinating and organising, this is the stuff on which careers are built. The diplomats and national experts on the delegations can also look forward to work and travel for the foreseeable future.

When the UN General Assembly took the decision in 2012 to hold a special session on the wicked question of drugs many had hoped for an honest review of costs and failures. The preparatory document cobbled together by the CND is something quite different. It is a fundraiser for the perpetuation and expansion of the existing system. The financial and other costs of a dysfunctional system are exacted from the many to benefit a few. Michael Gossop’s pragmatic conclusion that "Drug taking is here to stay and one way or another we must all learn to live with drugs" seems to be unknown or unheeded at the CND. And the prescient statement by the Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie that "the most dangerous use of drugs is the political" has been reinforced once more. The world drug control problem is set to intensify after UNGASS 2016.

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