Why Member States must rebalance the EU drug strategy – before it’s too late

On Thursday 4th December, the European Commission presented its new EU Drug Strategy at a press conference in Brussels. For now, this document is only a ‘Commission communication’ and in the next months Member States will have the opportunity to adopt a final text.

While the EU Drug Strategy is not legally binding to Member States, it serves as an important blueprint for national drug policies and strategies. As such, the promotion of a balanced, rights-oriented and health-focused Strategy can help to ensure a focus (and resource allocation) on harm reduction and evidence-based treatment and care. Conversely, a Drug Strategy that is skewed towards securitisation would run the risk of reinforcing the tough-on-drugs, abusive drug policies that have already been observed in some EU countries, with devastating impacts on affected communities.

As the Strategy is set to be discussed with EU Member States this week, below is a brief analysis of the document to inform the discussions.

We urge EU Member States to only adopt the Strategy once it has been reviewed to ensure that it is balanced and preserves the central role of health and harm reduction in the European approach to drugs.

The alarmist drug ‘threat’ narrative is back

The EU Drug Strategy’s introduction sets the tone for the entire document – ‘Europe faces significant security, health and social challenges linked to the trafficking and use of illicit drugs. This profoundly impacts the safety and security of our towns, cities and communities’. The introduction goes on to describe a growing global criminal business, increasingly sophisticated and violent European markets, the flows of cocaine to the continent, and drug use-related health challenges, with fatalities totalling nearly 7,500 in 2023.

This alarmist tone runs throughout the document, with the term ‘threat’ being mentioned no less than 35 times, and a message clearly geared towards the urgent need to ‘combat’ organised crime and drug trafficking.

Back in 2021, civil society had welcomed the 2021-2025 Drug Strategy’s unprecedented focus on harm reduction, with a new strategic pillar entitled ‘Addressing drug-related harm’, alongside supply reduction, demand reduction, international cooperation, research, and coordination and implementation. This time around, the Commission decided to structure the new Strategy under new headings of ‘preparedness’ (a likely consequence of the ‘threat’ narrative), ‘health’, ‘security’, ‘harm’, ‘international cooperation’, and ‘EU coordination and partnerships’.

Problematically, instead of giving equal visibility to each of these strategic pillars, the Commission chose to complement the Strategy with an Action Plan solely focusing on combatting ‘drug trafficking’. This is a major departure from tradition, as the EU has historically ensured that both its strategies and action plans covered all aspects of drug policy. This deeply problematic approach will very likely result in a complete imbalance towards supply reduction going forward.

This trend towards prioritising drug law enforcement over health in drug policy is not new for the Commission. The drafting process of the previous Strategy by the Commission had already been heavily criticised by civil society for its exclusive focus on drug law enforcement and supply reduction, eventually leading the German and Portuguese Presidencies to set aside the Commission’s draft and develop an entirely new Strategy and Action Plan for 2021-2025 - one that was much more balanced and human rights-oriented.

In its communications with civil society as the new Strategy was being developed, the Commission explained its intent to make the text more operational – in an effort to mitigate the fact that the Action Plan would cover only one aspect. And indeed, each section of the Strategy ends with ‘key priorities’ for the Commission, the EUDA and Member States to undertake. But there again, the vast majority of these priorities are centred on tackling organised crime and trafficking. Emblematic of this is the ‘Harm’ section, in which only two of the seven priorities focus on health issues (and none of which are directed at the Commission itself).

Harm reduction: One step forward, two steps backwards

The Commission should be praised for highlighting the importance of the continuum of care for people who use drugs, explicitly mentioning key harm reduction interventions such as supervised drug consumption rooms, naloxone distribution, needle and syringe programmes, and drug checking, promoting close collaboration with civil society and peer groups, highlighting the need for funding, and underscoring the necessity of tailoring services to specific groups, including people in custodial settings, LGBTQI+ people, migrants and young people. The ‘Harm’ section also highlights the importance of a gendered approach to drug use and other aspects of drug policy.

Complementing this, the ‘Health’ strategic pillar promotes a number of welcome elements, including a focus on the quality of services, the voluntary nature of treatment services, the need to better link drug treatment with other health and social services such as for mental illness, housing, employment and poverty alleviation, and importantly the need to ensure better use of alternatives to coercive sanctions and to reduce stigma.

Nonetheless, even in relation to health, the Strategy remains highly problematic. While underscoring the importance of the continuum of care, the Commission chose to place harm reduction into the new ‘Harm’ pillar instead of including it in the ‘Health’ one alongside prevention and treatment. In this new configuration, harm reduction sits in a strategic pillar that also includes a bizarre list of topics ranging from drug driving (for which zero tolerance is promoted), the recruitment of minors in drug trafficking, and the environmental harms of drug cultivation and production.

One of the major wins of the last Drug Strategy was the creation of a new harm reduction pillar. Moving harm reduction away from the ‘Health’ pillar and placing it into a section conflating different types of ‘harms’ is a conceptual error which risks deprioritising this critical aspect of drug policy (now recognised as a key component of the right to health), and may have serious consequences down the line in terms of programmes and funding.

A securitised EU drug policy, both at home and abroad

A major part of the new Strategy – and the entirety of the Action Plan – are dedicated to tackling drug trafficking and organised crime. There, the actions focus on border control, disruptions of trafficking routes on land, air, sea, post and online via drug law enforcement and increased cooperation, the increased use of AI and new technologies, and tackling money laundering by ‘chasing the money’.

At no point does the Strategy acknowledge that this law enforcement-led, punitive supply reduction approach has, for decades, been wholly unsuccessful at curbing the illegal market or reducing violence – in Europe and elsewhere. In fact, research commissioned by the European Commission has shown that efforts aimed at disrupting cocaine operations in ports in Belgium and the Netherlands have directly resulted in increases in drug trafficking and violence in other corners of the EU.

Equally worrying is the fact that the Commission seems to direct most international cooperation with third countries, candidate countries and at the UN towards tackling drug trafficking, instead of the ‘balanced and multidisciplinary’ approach centred on ‘international human rights obligations’ and addressing the ‘fields of public health, development, safety and security’ it had aimed to promote under the previous Strategy (see point 9.4). While the new Strategy does mention its ‘balanced approach’, its strategic pillar on international cooperation does not put this into action – mentioning health only once.

A selective application of human rights

The previous Drug Strategy had made significant strides in putting human rights at the centre, specifically mentioning UN human rights guidance such as the International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy, the UN System Common Position on drugs, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

While stating the importance of international human rights law, the UN Charter and the Sustainable Development Goals, the new Strategy does not mention any of these critical documents. Very problematically, human rights is not mentioned once in the strategic pillar on ‘Security’ – even though evidence now abounds on the devastating human rights impacts of many supply reduction strategies both within the EU and globally.

Human rights are also removed from the actual content of the document. To give two examples, alternatives to coercive sanctions and the equivalence and continuity of care for people who use drugs in prisons – both of which were strategic priorities of the previous Strategy – are either deprioritised (in the former case) or entirely removed (in the latter case).

Civil society acknowledged but not empowered

To finish our analysis on a more positive note, the new Strategy welcomes the role played by civil society in relation to health and harm reduction, and includes a whole section under Strategic priority 10 on ‘meaningful engagement with civil society’.

At a time of worrying shrinking civil society space, this addition is welcome. The Strategy states that ‘Civil society is essential in developing drug policies’, specifically highlighting the role played by ‘those directly affected by drug-related issues’ (while the role of ‘peers’ is underscored in various instances), and specifically mentions the Civil Society Forum on Drugs – the expert group of the Commission on drug-related issues.

Disappointingly, the Strategy falls short of urging Member States to meaningfully engage with civil society beyond the EU’s own Civil Society Forum on Drugs (CSFD), nor does it include any action for either the Commission or Member States to adequately and sustainably fund their vital work.

What’s next?

With the draft Drug Strategy now released, attention turns to the 27 EU Member States and whether they will show the necessary leadership to make the substantive changes needed for a Strategy that is genuinely balanced, and prioritises health and human rights over punishment and policing. This should include the following actions:

1. Strengthen the human rights dimension of the Strategy by re-incorporating key references to the international human rights guidance that was included in the previous EU Drug Strategy 2021-2025, and ensuring that all pillars of the new Strategy - including the ‘Security’ pillar - include clear guidance on human rights protection.
2. Ensure that the Strategy promotes innovative approaches to drug policy - opening the door for Member States to move away from punitive approaches and experiment instead with alternative strategies that may prove more effective in protecting health, human rights, care and safety.
3. Move the harm reduction section into the ‘Health’ pillar of the Strategy to better demonstrate its role as part of a continuum of care, as its current location may very well prove counter-productive.
4. Ensure that the final Strategy adopted by Member States includes clear commitments and concrete actions for them to undertake, in particular in the area of health and civil society involvement and funding.
5. Reject the Plan of Action proposed by the Commission, and adopt instead a new Plan of Action that covers the entirety of drug policy issues, accompanied with indicators grounded in human rights, social cohesion, health and safety, aligned with UN human rights guidance and the Sustainable Development Goals, and with a clear timeline for an evaluation and review of the new Strategy.