Ten years after UNGASS, a resurgent global drug war

A decade ago, the United Nations General Assembly held a Special Session on drugs (UNGASS) that was hailed in some quarters as a turning point for international drug policy. Community organizations and people who use drugs were part of the process, and the outcome document finally brought human rights and public health narratives to the conversation. Yet that same document still clung to the objective of a “society free from drug abuse.”

On February 3, the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), a global network of almost 200 NGOs, published a report—The UNGASS Decade in Review: Gaps, Achievements and Paths for Reform—documenting how any promise of UNGASS remains largely unfulfilled. The global response to drugs remains rooted in repression and prohibition. And where real reform has been accomplished and advances observed, that’s been “despite the drug control system, not because of it,” writes former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in the foreword to the report.

Despite the health and human rights framing of UNGASS, global drug control has inflicted catastrophic harms on individuals and communities in the decade since. During that period, the report notes, more than 2.6 million people have lost their lives to causes related to unregulated drugs, and mass incarceration has increased. Marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted and targeted.

IDPC’s report calls for a drastic overhaul of global drug policies, which, it says, must be genuinely “oriented towards human rights, health and development.” Yet the community groups capable of leading such change “continue to be sidelined, underfunded, and increasingly exposed to threats and attacks.”