La UNGASS brinda una oportunidad para replantear las medidas adoptadas por Ghana durante los últimos 24 años en el ámbito de las políticas de drogas. Más información, en inglés, está disponible abajo.

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In April 2016, the member states of the United Nations will gather in New York for the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the World Drug Problem. This will be close to 18 years since the last UNGASS on drugs took place in 1998.

For over 50 years, we have never had this much momentum being created by governments who express utter displeasure in the current approach to addressing the global drug problem. These current approaches – often referred to as the “war in drugs” – havenot only stigmatized people who use drugs, but have also led to misguided and bad policy making in Africa and around the world.The UNGASS provides an opportunity to rethink what Ghana, as a nation, has been doing for the past 24 years. Contemporary global circumstances have changed, and the world drug policy also has to change to address current and newly emerging issues. As a result, the UNGASS has been described by Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General, as “an excellent opportunity for a wide range of open debate that considers all options”.In the last UNGASS on drugs in 1998, world leaders pledged to have a drug free world by 2009: a goal that is, to put it politelty, unrealistic, but one that has also contributed enormously to the criminalization of people who use drugs. This has contributed to HIV and hepatitis epidemics and the gross violations of fundamental human rights.The prohibition-led regime has not only a marginalized the majority of our citizens, but it has also left many without access to essential pain relief medications such as morphine and other opiates which have been tagged as harmful drugs.Today, countries must regard the UNGASS as an opportunity to have an open debate to extensively discuss policy issues as they pertain to the current drug problems we face in the world. We need to acknowledge and make visible the negative economic and social consequences of the “war on drugs”.

UNGASS offers us an opportunity to discuss whether it is still relevant to tackle the global drug problem from one perspective – punishment and the punitive approach –rather than from a comprehensive approach that takes into account development, public health, justice, human rights and all other relevant human and social factors.

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La UNGASS y su importancia en el debate sobre la reforma de las políticas de drogas en Ghana

El cannabis tiene sus peligros, pero cabe discutir cómo minimizar los daños. Sin embargo, el uso excesivo de la ley penal constituye un enfoque fallido que se ha estado intentando durante un período suficientemente largo. Más información, en inglés, está disponible abajo.

It is impossible to know how many people have been deterred from using cannabis out of deference to the law. Decades of prohibition have not prevented the drug from establishing itself as a part of the repertoire of psychoactive substances that British people use for leisure and, for a few, non-recreational medication. Despite the theoretical threat of prosecution, cannabis use has become sufficiently uncontroversial for stories about David Cameron dabbling in his youth to have surfaced without measurable impact on his standing as prime minister.

That is not to say the drug is harmless. It appears to put young users at a heightened risk of developing serious mental illness, although only a small minority will be afflicted. Heavy, long-term use is associated with a number of unhappy social and physical conditions, although cause and effect are always hard to disentangle. And, of course, smoking is a dangerous habit with or without cannabis thrown in. The challenge for policymakers is to draft laws that deal with some citizens’ proven appetite for drugs while maximising safety for all, in accordance with the best available evidence. British governments have routinely failed that test. So the publication this week of a report by an expert panel, outlining a potential model of cannabis decriminalisation, is welcome as a step towards rational debate. The report, commissioned by the Liberal Democrats ahead of their spring conference this weekend, envisages a regulated system of legal sale and small-scale production, with a pricing mechanism that steers users towards milder forms of the drug.

Such a document is always vulnerable to criticism from all sides. For libertarians, it looks like another futile effort by the state to manage pent-up market forces. For prohibitionists it is another slip down the slope towards unbridled, licentious mass intoxication. The whole exercise is academic in any case, since the current government has no interest in such a scheme. Its recent effort at legislation in this area, the psychoactive substances bill, created an unenforceable blanket ban on pretty much any chemical compound that might be ingested for kicks. This demonstrated lazy, wilful ignorance of the practical realities of drug use and how best to police it. The Home Office is interested in neither scientific evidence nor lessons from overseas in this field.

There is no perfect template for reform. Different countries have had vastly different experiences. Culture, fashion, demographics and economics all play a part – arguably a bigger part – than state enforcement. But the international trend is moving away from the crudest form of ban-and-punish regime. Most cannabis users do little harm to themselves or others, except by funding organised crime, a function of illegality. Many who might otherwise dabble unscathed end up harmed by the consequences of prohibition: street products of unpredictable strength; career-ending convictions for minor offences; retail contact with gangsters.

Decriminalisation would not fix all the problems with cannabis, and – even if that path were pursued – it is not guaranteed that the model advocated this week would be the best variant. But it is obvious that the existing regime is failing and that a rational, evidence-led review is overdue. Anything that steers the debate a little in that direction must count as progress.

La opinión de The Guardian sobre las leyes de drogas en el Reino Unido: es hora de cuestionar una prohibición fracasada

En Brasil, febrero es sinónimo de Carnaval, pero detrás de la alegría se esconde un sorprendente ejemplo del racismo estructural endémico de Brasil. Más información, en inglés, está disponible abajo.

In Brazil’s old colonial capital of Salvador de Bahia, February means Carnaval, a six-day Dionysian celebration often called the biggest street party in the world. But behind the merriment hides a striking example of Brazil’s endemic structural racism.

Though Salvador’s population is 80 percent black, the 

 dancing down the cordoned-off avenues are mostly white, protected from the masses by largely black, rope-holding sentinels. Bleachers packed with white spectators are defended by still more black security guards. Police patrol the crowds, demonstrating radically different attitudes toward the carousers depending on the color of their skin. It’s black Brazilians’ unequal status made manifest in a week-long party—a reality all the more maddening given the Afro-Brazilian origins of both Carnaval and Salvador.

That’s why my fellow activists and I chose Carnaval season to speak out about the racism that permeates our society. Specifically, we’re setting our sights on the so-called war on drugs, which might be more accurately seen as Brazil’s war on black communities. In its official launch, the Black Initiative for a New Drug Policy took to the streets of Salvador during Carnaval with a group whose samba theme urged spectators, “Tire seu racismo do caminho que eu quero passar com a minha co

(Get your racism out of my way, I want to pass by with my color).

The mission of the Black Initiative, launched in partnership with Brazil’s Collective of Black Entities and the Latin American Network of People Who Use Drugs, is to build a movement of black organizations and activists advocating a new approach to drug policy.

Our aim is to highlight the disproportionately negative impacts of current drug policies on Afro-Brazilian communities in advance of April’s UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the “world drug problem.” This event, and the preparatory meetings leading up to it, offer an historic occasion for communities negatively impacted by drug policies—not just communities of color, but indigenous populations, women, youth, and people who use drugs. In the presence of some of the same people who originally launched the war on drugs so many years ago, it’s our chance to present and assess possibilities for purging our world of such harmful paradigms.

Punitive drug laws—and enforcement of those laws—have had disastrous results for Afro-Brazilians. Approximately 53 percent of Brazilian society identifies as black (

). Yet black and brown people represent eight of every ten homeless people, 77 percent of homicide victims, and a large majority of those incarcerated in the country’s overcrowded prisons, where half a million people survive in subhuman conditions.

Brasil: cómo la guerra contra las drogas se convirtió en una cruzada contra las personas de color

En un momento en que Occidente está mitigando la guerra contra las drogas, que ya ha cumplido 45 años, otro bloque de países se está preparando para poner en práctica las mismas políticas fallidas. Más información, en inglés, está disponible abajo.

As the West throttles down on its 45-year-old war on drugs, acknowledging that the trillion-dollar price tag has only fuelled civil conflict in Latin America, crowded the prisons at home, and harmed more addicts than it has healed, another bloc of nations is gearing up to implement the self-same failed policies. So guess who’s with China, Indonesia, Russia and the Middle East on this? Yup, South Africa, under the inspired guidance of the Hawks.

“Home page of the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation”. That’s what it says above the URL address bar where the announcement that forms the backbone — or, more accurately, the central bone of contention — of this article appears. As per the announcement, there is a new acronym in the global war on drugs, which at first glance seems as bland and inoffensive as any other acronym that occasionally gets beamed down to us from the Starship Geopolitics: RAADD, short for Russia-Africa Anti-Drugs Dialogue. But before we tell you exactly who the Hawks (aka the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation) have chosen to “dialogue” with in the Russians, and before we explain why calling this an “Africa”-wide partnership is wishful thinking at best, let us lay out the principles upon which RAADD has been set up.

“The contemporary global drug phenomenon is unprecedented in its scale and implications,” we read in the announcement, “as it threatens security, stability, undermines sustainable economic development and adversely affects the health and well-being of human beings. The global illicit drug trade has assumed macroeconomic proportions and is rapidly diversifying to new markets (the so-called balloon effect). Africa’s drug landscape is constantly evolving. In the past Africa predominantly produced and abused cannabis, but more recently there is greater availability of harder drugs such as cocaine, heroin and synthetic drugs. Africa is in the spotlight as it has emerged as a corridor for large-scale transshipment of Latin American cocaine and Afghani heroin to the drug markets. South Africa is also directly and indirectly affected by these mega-drug flows.”

Nope, if we’re to believe our own beloved Hawks, the 45-year-old global “war on drugs” has 

 and top officials in President Barack Obama’s White House have told us it’s been. According to the tenor of RAADD’s proclamation, we should ignore the statistics out of the Drug Policy Alliance that puts the number of people killed in Mexico’s drug war since 2006 at upwards of 100,000, the number of US fatalities from drug overdoses in 2014 at upwards of 47,000, and the number of US tax dollars spent in the last four decades to fight the war on drugs at upwards of $1-trillion.

What’s happening here, all too clearly, is another species-wide parting of the ways, a fracture in the notion of what constitutes success in the battle against our common penchant for self-destruction, and it’s just as 

 noted in May 2015: “[As] one drug war begins to wind down, another is cranking up across Asia, Russia and the Middle East.”

In making this simple yet momentous statement, the magazine was referring to the evidence that was there for all to see. China’s president calling for “forceful measures to wipe drugs out”; Indonesia’s state leader deeming drugs a “national emergency” and giving the green light for a string of firing-squad executions of traffickers; Russia lobbying for a) Afghanistan’s opium-poppy fields to be sprayed out of existence, and b) its neighbours to institute the same ban on methadone, the heroin substitute for recovering addicts, that it had proudly promulgated a few years before.

Compañeros de armas: Sudáfrica, Rusia y la nueva guerra global contra las drogas

La misión del Grupo de Trabajo de la Sociedad Civil (CSTF) consiste en actuar como enlace oficial entre las Naciones Unidas y la sociedad civil en el proceso preparatorio de la UNGASS y durante la propia sesión. Más información, en inglés, está disponible abajo.

Building on the success of the Beyond 2008 initiative and after reviewing best practices of civil society involvement in other recent high-level United Nations General Assembly meetings, the Vienna NGO Committee on Drugs (VNGOC) and the New York NGO Committee on Drugs (NYNGOC) collaborated on setting up the Civil Society Task Force (CSTF) for the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the world drug problem in 2016.

The mission of the CSTF is to serve as the official liaison between the United Nations and civil society in the preparatory process of and at the UNGASS, with the aim of ensuring a comprehensive, structured, meaningful and balanced participation of civil society during this process.

In fulfilling its role of offering grassroots NGOs the possibility to share their valuable on-the-ground experience in the preparatory process of and at the UNGASS, the CSTF is organizing a Civil Society Forum on 18 April 2016 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in conference room 12 (UNHQ, New York).

To apply for a civil society speaker role at the Civil Society Forum, please fill out this form below until 1 April 2016.

Also, please make sure to register here, to participate in the UNGASS by 28 March 2016.

Kindly note, however, that the CSTF will not be in a position to cover any related travel and accommodation costs. Applicants also need to make their own visa arrangements, if applicable. For this purpose, the CSTF will provide invitation letters.

Further information on the work of the CSTF is available here and on the Special Session of the General Assembly on the world drug problem here.

Noticias

La UNGASS y su importancia en el debate sobre la reforma de las políticas de drogas en Ghana

La opinión de The Guardian sobre las leyes de drogas en el Reino Unido: es hora de cuestionar una prohibición fracasada

Brasil: cómo la guerra contra las drogas se convirtió en una cruzada contra las personas de color

Compañeros de armas: Sudáfrica, Rusia y la nueva guerra global contra las drogas

Impreso de solicitud: ponentes para el Foro de la Sociedad Civil en la UNGASS 2016