2016 World Drug Report - Resources for Advocacy and Communications Efforts

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2016 World Drug Report - Resources for Advocacy and Communications Efforts

23 June 2016
Open Society Foundations (OSF)

Today, the UNODC released the 2016 World Drug Report. While the report flags a number of important drug policy issues, it does little to acknowledge the need for new approaches in dealing with drug policy issues through the lens of human rights and public health. It reinforces prohibitionist and law enforcement-based strategies that continue to perpetuate violence, instability, and health crises across the world.

We wanted to call your attention to a few specific areas where the report fell short and direct you to further resources that support a different perspective:

  • Violence and Corruption: The report recognizes that prohibition increases the price of illicit drugs and assumes that it deters use, but does not recognize that this often pushes the market underground, causing further violence and corruption. It puts the drugs and drug market into the hands of criminals, increasing safety and security concerns, and limits government control. The analysis of drug-related violence fails to acknowledge the role of the criminal justice system and the international funding dedicated to militarization efforts, ultimately fueling state-driven violence.
  • Economics: It fails to recognize the importance of coca and opium economies for some of the poorest people of the world to secure a stable livelihood. While we commend the report’s recognition that “poverty, economic disadvantage and unemployment are some of the enabling factors of illicit crop cultivation and drug production,” it lacks an operational recommendation on increasing socio-economic inclusion and sustainability.
  • Gender: It recognizes that drug policies disproportionately affect women and structural violence against women further marginalizes, victimizes and disempowers women. We agree that structural changes are necessary to adequately support and treatment women but there are few recommendations outlined to take that forward.
  • Environment: It fails to acknowledge that forced eradication is the driver of deforestation, displacing coca cultivation to more remote areas broadens the agricultural frontier and negatively impacts the environment.
  • Prevention: It does not acknowledge overwhelming failures of many prevention programs and does not indicate that prevention must be evidence-based and include much broader messaging than abstinence of drug use. There is little mention of harm reduction principles or acknowledgement that in addition to abstinence, drug users can reduce their risk through practices such as testing drugs for purity and moving away from injection towards other forms of administration.
  • Death penalty: The report blatantly omits any mention of the death penalty for drugs and does not call for its abolition. UN human rights and drug control bodies now recognize that the death penalty for drugs violates international law, but as we see in this report and the UNGASS outcome document, the UNODC continues to fund states carrying out this practice and remains silent on this topic.


The report focuses on seizures and hectares of eradicated drugs but fails to document the true costs of the war on drugs on people and communities. Despite expenditures of billions of dollars, the global marketplace for drugs has remained largely stable, particularly with the growing synthetic market and access to drugs online. This report, however, fails to significantly document the impact of such policies on the health and well-being of people, including the impacts of incarceration, forced treatment, harm to the environment, and the unaccounted for funds spent on the war that are diverted from education, public health, and infrastructure.

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