With One Vote, the UN Entrenches an Illegal Global Drug Trade Worth Billions of Dollars Sir Ronald Sanders - Antillean
go to original April 23, 2016

"UNGASS is a missed opportunity." Richard Branson attacks the UN's new global drug policy and looks for a way forward. (FORA.tv)

For a brief moment, it appeared that good sense would prevail, and the international community would ditch the failed ‘war on drugs’ policy. But all hopes were dashed at the United Nations General Assembly special session on drugs (UNGASS) between April 19 and 21 in New York.

Sadly, the UN maintained prohibitionist policies banning narcotics use, and, by doing so, left producers and traffickers delighted with an illegal trade worth billions of dollars.

The retained policy also continues the criminalisation of users of small quantities; deploys security and police forces into costly exercises that deflects them from tackling serious criminal activity; fills prisons with young people; frightens addicts from seeking medical attention lest they be imprisoned; and perpetuates a system that allows the unfair branding of countries as complicit in drug trafficking.

This reactionary stance was adopted by too many states to allow a more progressive approach to be adopted. Yet, the countries in the forefront of the drive for reform were ones that have been most affected by the traffic in narcotics. Among them were Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala. Not surprisingly, Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos, has described the UN posture as “insane”.

...The three Latin American countries that courageously proposed the UN meeting were emboldened in their decision by a voluminous Report commissioned by the Organisation of American States (OAS) in 2013 on a mandate from Heads of Government of its 34 member-states.

A telling paragraph in the Report, entitled ‘The Drug Problem in the Americas’ observed that:

“Public policies devised over the past several decades to address the drug issue in the Hemisphere have not proved sufficiently flexible to draw in the new evidence needed to make them more effective, to detect unintended costs and damages, and to embrace recent economic and cultural changes.

We need to develop and generate additional methods, evidence, analysis, and evaluation, to learn from both successes and failures, to adapt standards to the needs and characteristics of each specific environment, and to take into account the net impact in terms of costs and benefits of applying particular policies in a given country and society as well as for all our countries and societies”.

...The dialogue on the issue should be kept alive, and many governments would give their support to another round of OAS analysis.

Read the rest at Antillean

Related: Richard Branson Says UN Should Drop Drug Policy of ‘Keep Hitting Yourself’ (Wonkette)

Related: Musuem of Drug Policy Pops Up in New York For U.N. Special Session on "World Drug Problem" (Reason)

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