DPA is a leading organisation in the USA promoting new drug policies based on science, compassion, health and human rights and a just society in which the fears, prejudices and punitive prohibitions of today are no more.

La DPA es una organización estadounidense clave que promueve el establecimiento de políticas de drogas centradas en la ciencia, la compasión, la salud, los derechos humanos, y una sociedad justa en la que el miedo, los prejuicios y las prohibiciones punitivas actuales ya no existirán.

La DPA est une organisation américaine qui promeut la mise en place de politiques des drogues basées sur la science, la compassion, la santé, les droits humains, et une société juste dans laquelle la peur, les préjudices et les condamnations actuelles n’auront plus leur place.

Drug Policy Alliance (DPA)

End The Drug War. Build a New World. #Reform2023

The International Drug Policy Reform Conference is back. Join us October 18-21, 2023, in Phoenix, Arizona. Save the date!

The Reform Conference is the world’s premier gathering of drug policy reformers to learn about drug policy and to strategize about ending the drug war and to mobilize reform to begin building a new world where health, equity, and human rights are front and center, not punishment.

Attendees will spend three days building community with people committed to finding alternatives to the war on drugs while participating in sessions given by leading experts from around the world. More than 1,200 attendees representing over 50 countries joined us in St. Louis, MO in 2019. We are excited to bring the conference to Phoenix, Arizona in 2023!

Since the last Reform Conference in 2019, the Drug Policy Alliance has released our 

. We are excited to share our vision and to strategize and mobilize reform with you in 2023!

Join us to strategize, build community, and organize around:

Decriminalizing Drugs and Building Health-Based Alternatives

Ensuring Our Systems Help, Not Hurt by Uprooting the Drug War from Our Daily Lives

Reinvesting Resources into Communities and Divesting from Punitive Police Responses

Rethinking and Reducing Punishment of People in the Drug Trade

Legalizing and Regulating Drugs the Right Way

International Drug Policy Reform Conference 2023

From K2 and bath salts to crack pipes to rainbow fentanyl, drug policy reformers are continually combating drug panics. While the particular subject of drug scares change, key features remain the same from panic to panic: exaggerated fears about a new substance or drug use modality, disregard for research, and association of the subject with a particular (often marginalised) group. Dr. Craig Reinarman will explain how, historically, drug panics have been deployed to both individualise structural problems and increase stigma towards and criminalisation of people who use drugs. Tana Geneva will discuss the media’s role in amplifying drug scares and the media’s potential to correct misinformation. We will also discuss the role of drug researchers in responding to drug panics.

D﻿r. Craig Reinarman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is the co-author of 

Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice

Tana Ganeva is a reporter covering criminal justice, drug policy, immigration, and politics. She's written for the Washington Post, RollingStone.com, Glamour, Gothamist, Vice, the Appeal, Teen Vogue, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

The role of researchers and media in responding to drug panics

In Spring 2022, Drug Policy Alliance, Urban Survivors Union, and the Network of Drug Researchers with Lived Experience co-hosted a four-part virtual series “Beyond participatory based research: Innovations in community driven drug policy research.” The sessions were designed to encourage drug researchers to think critically about their relationships with people who use drugs and people impacted by the drug war. They were intended to provide drug researchers with tools to conduct community driven research (CDR) and authentically co-lead research with impacted people through every phase of the research process. CDR not only makes research better by strengthening research questions, methods, analyses, and dissemination; it can also serve as an organizing tool, helping to galvanize people to change policies and practices.

CDR’s success necessitates creating a space where people do not feel bound to the traditional binary of the “researcher” and “researched” (

). The following recommendations aim to support you in creating an environment where all people are empowered; feel belonging in the research process; and can explore and own their positionalities, identities, and lived experiences:

Recommendations for community driven drug policy research 

The war on drugs is a U.S.-made human rights disaster that has deliberately targeted Black communities and other communities of color and ethnic minorities around the world. To this day, the drug war is a tool of authoritarianism and social control, discharged through targeted policing and mass incarceration. As the creator and main funder of the war on drugs, the United States has a responsibility to promote reparations for harmed communities, both at home and across the globe.

In the United States, the legalization of cannabis and other positive drug policy reforms has been accompanied by a substantial push for reparations for the Black and Indigenous communities most negatively affected by the drug war. In the U.S. and other countries with emerging cannabis markets, however, activists are fighting white-led and often foreign corporations to prevent revenue being diverted away from reparations into corporate coffers.

In recognition of June 26—the Support Don’t Punish Global Day of Action—panelists from the U.S., Brazil, and the Philippines discuss the consequences of drug policy enforcement, work to dismantle the drug war within their own communities, and how reparations are critical to creating a more just post-prohibitionist future.

Speakers: Queen Adesuyi, Cathy Alvarez, Andrea Ritchie, Nathália Oliveira.

Repairing the harms of the drug war

By Drug Policy Alliance and co-sponsored by Upturn and the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work.


This conference will bring together leading thinkers to map the more invisibilized forms of drug war surveillance within civil systems.

Join us for this convening happening over two days, hosted by Drug Policy Alliance and co-sponsored by Upturn and the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work. This conference will focus on drug war surveillance within people's everyday lives - from housing and employment to public benefits and the family regulation system and immigration - and how we can uproot the drug war in all its forms.

In recent years, we have seen a growth in robust, deep analysis of surveillance in the U.S. particularly of Black and Brown people, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people, unhoused people, and people experiencing poverty. We have also seen organizing against police and state surveillance tactics and technologies, like facial recognition technology, automatic license plate readers, drones, predictive policing technologies, high-definition cameras, and sharing of data across police jurisdictions. Less examined are the ways that people who use drugs or people suspected of using and/or selling drugs are subject to surveillance within civil systems, such as housing, employment, public benefits, and others. In the opening plenary, we’ll unpack what we mean by drug war surveillance. Why are we seeing these types of surveillance technologies and mechanisms now?

This keynote will be a conversation with Dr. Dorothy Roberts, author of 

Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families - and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

; and Kassandra Frederique, Executive Director of Drug Policy Alliance.

What is the range of surveillance technologies deployed within civil systems to monitor people who use drugs or people suspected of using and/or selling drugs? What technologies are on the horizon? Are there spaces that are particularly subject to surveillance? In this panel, we will discuss technologies such as algorithms and predictive risk models, digital health and criminal legal data sharing, background checks, and drug testing. We’ll explore the incentives driving the proliferation of these technologies, who they impact, and how.

Panelists: J Khadijah Abdurahman, We Be Imagining; Kelly Knight, University of California, San Francisco; Puck Lo, Community Justice Exchange; Andrea Lopez, University of Maryland; David McElhattan, Purdue University

How is policing happening outside of the criminal legal system? What people and workers have been enlisted to carry out drug war surveillance of people? How has drug war surveillance been used to dictate which people can participate fully in society? How has surveillance dictated expectations of how people get to live their lives? In this panel, we will discuss the actors, policies, and practices that govern people’s lives outside of the purview of the criminal legal system, including mandatory reporting laws, nuisance laws, behavioral modification interventions, and collaborations between police and civil systems.

Panelists: Lesly-Marie Buer, Choice Health Network Harm Reduction; Sarah Carthen Watson, Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center; Maria Fernandez, Advancement Project; Vivianne Guevara, The Federal Defenders of New York - Eastern District; Anjana Samant, The American Civil Liberties Union

What are the impacts of surveillance? In this panel, we will discuss impacts, like family separation, loss of benefits and resources, erosion of trust, worse care, poorer physical and emotional health, economic disenfranchisement, violation of autonomy and self-determination, and more. Then we will ask, what are the levers of change? What are solutions and intervention at the policy, programmatic, and individual levels?

Panelists: Jacinta Gonzalez, Mijente; Joyce McMillan, JMacforFamilies; Emily Paul, Upturn; Roberta "Toni" Meyers-Douglas, Legal Action Center; Kim Smith, VOCAL-Rochester

ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided. This conference is virtual and open to the public. If you have other access needs or questions, please contact Aliza Cohen at acohen@drugpolicy.org.

Drug war dragnet: surveillance, criminalization & freedom from the drug War

As COVID-19 continues to rage, another health crisis persists — one that is decades long. In the first year of the pandemic, the United States hit the devastating milestone of 100,000 overdose deaths, a nearly 28.5 percent surge from the record numbers we saw the previous year. Now, fentanyl is the leading cause of death in Americans ages 18-45. The reaction from many of our leaders has been to call for more arrests and criminalization, but this response is rooted in fear, not science. We have spent the last 50 years trying to treat a public health issue with a criminalization response, yet people are dying of overdose at record rates. This response is clearly not working.

The evidence is clear: Criminalization worsens public health outcomes. From making the drug supply more dangerous, to deterring people from getting help out of fear and stigma, to denial of economic opportunities and supports for people with drug arrests, the associated consequences have been dire. Besides, sending someone to jail or prison doesn’t keep people from using drugs. In fact, deaths due to drug and alcohol intoxication have increased more than 600 percent in state prisons between 2001 and 2018.

It’s time for a new approach. Oregon has taken the bold step that we should adopt across the U.S.: Decriminalize drug possession and increase access to health services. In the year since the state decriminalized drugs through a ballot initiative (Measure 110), and with only about 10 percent of the allotted funding distributed to 70 community-based organizations so far, Oregon has already been able to provide peer support, harm reduction, evidence-based treatment, housing and job assistance to more than 16,000 people.

Drug decriminalisation is working in Oregon. Other states should follow.

Reflections on a webinar on drug policies and Indigenous rights

For decades, drug policy has been a vehicle of oppression violating Indigenous rights. From forced crop eradication to the ban on traditional uses of psychoactive plants, repressive drug policy has taken away lives and livelihoods, while ripping Indigenous peoples away from their ancestral identities and ways of living.

It was primarily for this reason that Indigenous rights’ advocates gathered online last month, on this year’s International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, to debate how we shall move forward and repair these harms in the webinar ‘The War on Drugs and the Denial of Indigenous Rights’.

Taking its cruellest form in the imperialist 'war on drugs', drug prohibition operates alongside other systems of oppression and exploitation, from corporate and state-funded land grabs or extractivism, to mass incarceration and globalised police power.

Such oppressive structures have disproportionately harmed Indigenous peoples and other communities of colour. For example, Tuari Potiki - Director of Maori Development at University of Otago – noted during the webinar that Indigenous Māori people make up only 16 percent of the population of Aotearoa/New Zealand, but nearly 60 percent of the country’s prison population is comprised of Māori people. The situation is similar, if not worse, for Indigenous peoples elsewhere – exacerbated by numerous systemic factors like poor access to healthcare and housing.

Lest we forget, these colonially rooted forms of oppression are not as old as humanity’s long and complex history with consciousness altering experiences, such as the medicinal and spiritual uses of psychoactive substances (either from plants, fungi, or even animals) and practices like trance-inducing dance, healing and other rituals core to a number of Indigenous traditions. Indigenous peoples, rights activists, and the drug reform movement must come together to ensure that Indigenous practices outlive prohibition.

There have been signs of progress when it comes to the UN system and its various mechanisms to support Indigenous rights. Note the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (despite it being ratified by only 24 states), and the importance of documents like the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted by unanimity at the UN General Assembly, and later cited briefly in the Outcome Document of the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on drugs.

Still, the contradictions and obstacles within the UN system are most starkly illustrated by the tensions between drug control and Indigenous rights. The foundational treaty of the UN drug control system, the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, is inherently colonial and racist. It aims to eliminate the non-medical (including traditional and Indigenous) uses of substances grown and used by racialised communities, namely the coca leaf, cannabis, and opium.

During the webinar, the intervention of Bolivia’s Vice-President, David Choquehuanca (read by Ambassador Roberto Calzadilla) highlighted Bolivia’s 2009 request to amend the 1961 Convention to reclaim the cultural significance of the coca leaf. This move was blocked by a group of countries led by the United States. Bolivia then withdrew from the 1961 Convention and later signed it again with a reservation to coca prohibition. Though this reservation applies to Bolivia alone, a group of rich countries once again joined forces to attempt to thwart this gracious effort to repair this undemocratic system. Vice-President, David Choquehuanca concluded his intervention with a call on all countries that protested against Bolivia’s reservation to formally remove their objection, directing this in particular to Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The growing recognition that drug policies must be compliant with human rights provisions has started to encompass more seriously the need to ensure cultural, traditional, and Indigenous rights are not violated in the name of drug control. As Natalia Rebollo – a human rights lawyer working at the International Centre for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service (ICEERS) – explained in the webinar, in Europe these dynamics have also helped advocates challenge the criminalisation of Andean and other migrants who use the coca leaf as part of their cultural practices.

Nevertheless, these efforts are not enough. To truly support Indigenous rights, we need to pay attention to the bigger picture and look beyond drug prohibition.

The commodification of and value extraction from nature has been central to a wide array of imperial and colonial projects. This has included psychoactive plants like coca, cannabis, opium (in addition to other crops like tea and entire ecosystems like forests). Such projects not only brought immense wealth for the privileged few, but they also disrupted peoples’ relationship with nature, as for example shown in the transformation of cannabis culture in the Rif (Morocco) between 1912 and 1956.

These processes of empire-building through extraction and dispossession long preceded the global drug prohibition era (part of which was even shaped by the economic interests of pharmaceutical companies from the global north). In fact, these processes continue until today, affecting Indigenous communities albeit in more subtle ways.

Thus, we need to make visible (and seek to dismantle) unjust forms of value extraction and profit maximisation done on the backs of the oppressed, especially those happening in tandem with the global drug control regime. These include, but are not limited to, the growing power of corporations and investors (many of whom notorious for violating Indigenous rights) in psychedelic therapy, in legal cannabis, in the security-industrial complex, as well as in medicine and healthcare.

Though well beyond the scope of this piece, other related forms of dispossession should also be factored in, such as land grabs and forced displacement for the sake of agribusiness, ‘conservation’, and infrastructure projects. All these factors undermine the rights of Indigenous peoples as a whole, especially their right to self-determination as upheld by international human rights law. Such destructive forces have also worsened our climate crisis, while undermining Indigenous communities who have long served as the guardians of our planet (and whose sustainable practices might as well be the key to ensuring our future on Earth).

Beyond recognition: Indigenous liberation through a radically decolonial lens

As the global drug prohibition discourse slowly crumbles, so too does the taboo surrounding ancestral and Indigenous traditions involving psychoactive substances. In recognition of the medicinal potential of substances like psilocybin, researchers and companies are seeking funds and patents in the name of scientific and medical breakthroughs.

But we need so much more than recognition. Supporting Indigenous rights and liberation requires us to take a radically decolonial approach to systematically address the trans-sectoral and transnational nature of oppressive structures, which, though significantly influenced by European colonialism, extend well beyond it. Thirteenth century Egypt, for example, adopted anti-cannabis policies to suppress a movement deemed subversive by the elite. These policies were rarely enforced and did little to undermine cannabis’ medicinal importance, but the motives behind them were not far different from those of colonisers who banned peyote in Mexico in 1620, and surely of (neo)colonial and imperial powers in the 20th and 21st century.

More importantly, supporting Indigenous rights and self-determination means rallying around a 

‘communal approach, in which we are all in this together, no one is left behind, and everything is shared’, 

as highlighted in the webinar by Freddy Condo Riveros, Member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. In the case of drugs, we need to challenge neoliberal developments in psychedelic research that use intellectual property to privatise and commodify – rather than respect and honour – Indigenous cultures. We also need to support Indigenous growers in fighting neocolonial cannabis policies anchored in accumulation, as we have witnessed in many Latin American and African countries (especially those with fertile soil and abundant resources long coveted by global north elites). As voiced by Greek Zweni (traditional health practitioner and spokesperson for Umzimvubu Farmers Support Network), Indigenous growers in Mpondoland might lose their income and/or be subject to further criminalisation due to South Africa’s new cannabis bill. Though praised by some, the bill neglects the fact that only the rich few are privileged enough to grow cannabis solely for their own consumption, while much of South Africa’s rural poor grow cannabis to make ends meet.

In line with this collective spirit of Indigenous critique of modern society, we also need to abolish structures of exploitation to restore the communal uses of land, the rivers, and the seas. We need to fight for biodiversity, epistemic justice, reparations, and so much more. The struggle for epistemic justice is a controversial but crucial one – for decolonial struggles in general, and Indigenous liberation in particular. This requires taking a critical (albeit constructive) stance towards the international human rights corpus and Western biomedicine, whose practices should integrate Indigenous epistemologies.

Needless to say, Indigenous leaders and communities around the globe have no other option but to reclaim their space. Tuari Potiki, in his rationale behind the International Indigenous Drug Policy Network, underlines:

‘As Indigenous peoples, we need to get together ourselves… put our own motions and recommendations forward… rather than constantly having to knock on their door, rather than continuing being a subgroup or a subset of another group, or having to try to convince people who have shown through history to be unwilling to change their mind – that there’s a different way of doing things…’

As noted by Freddy Condo Riveros, Indigenous cultures ‘

respect life, harmony, reciprocity, and complementarity.

’ Like them, we need to stop operating in silos and acknowledge the interconnectedness of today’s crises, from drug-related imprisonment to forest fires. Fulfilling Indigenous rights in drug policy is an important step. But in the long run, in order to achieve Indigenous liberation, we need to go beyond drugs – for this is key to ending all the interdependent systems of oppression that have torn us apart.

Beyond drugs and drug policy: Towards transformative Indigenous liberation

Today, ahead of the 50th anniversary of when President Richard Nixon declared the “war on drugs,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) released a Bully Pulpit Interactive (BPI) poll showing strong support for eliminating criminal penalties for drug possession and replacing it with a new approach centered in public health.

June 17th marks 50 years since President Nixon famously declared drugs “public enemy number one.” This proclamation waged a full out offensive that has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into law enforcement, leading to the over-surveillance and incarceration of millions of people, disproportionately Black, Latinx and Indigenous people.

The new poll shows the vast majority of American voters believe the policy has been a failure that has only increased drug-related harms and contributed to overcrowding the nation’s jails and prisons.

United States: On 50th anniversary of “war on drugs,” new poll shows majority of voters support ending criminal penalties for drug possession, think drug war is a failure

On June 17, 1971, President Nixon declared the war on drugs. Fifty years later, the devastating harms of the war on drugs -- ranging from mass criminalization and police violence to soaring rates of overdose -- have been well documented. Less well documented are the ways in which the drug war has been a barrier to research and science. The Controlled Substances Act, a centerpiece of Nixon’s drug war, enshrined a drug scheduling regime that has made it nearly impossible to research the potential therapeutic and pleasurable benefits of substances. But perhaps even more damaging to our collective understanding about drugs and their effects has been the prohibitionist framework that constrains our research funding, our research priorities, the kinds of questions we ask, and who becomes the object of study. As a result, there are systemic gaps in our knowledge about who uses drugs and why, the positive and pleasurable effects of drugs, which drugs are studied, the social contexts in which people choose to use and to stop using drugs -- just to name a few. Moreover, the moralism, stigma, and propensity to blame people who use drugs inherent in drug war logic has led to an overemphasis on individual-level research (e.g., brain disease model of addiction) and the neglect of more structural research that might help elucidate root causes and systemic solutions. This webinar will explore these issues, asking “what research and knowledge has been delayed or lost to the war on drugs?” and “how can researchers and academics generate solutions?”


 Jules Netherland, Drug Policy Alliance



 Ismail Ali, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies; Ricky Bluthenthal, Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California; Nancy Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Chinazo Cunningham, Montefiore Medical Center; Ingrid Walker, University of Washington Tacoma

Jun 24, 2021 04:30 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Drug Policy Alliance (DPA)

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