One year after the executions carried out by Indonesia on 29 April 2015, PKNI and LBH Masyarakat examined the drug situation in Indonesia. The executions were undertaken in the name of a “drug emergency” to achieve the so-called “drug-free Indonesia.” The executions were also carried out to deter and reduce the rate of drug-related crime. Is this justification plausible? After examining the data collected from the National Narcotic Board (BNN) and the Directorate General for Correctional Facilities, Ministry of Law and Human Rights, it can be seen that executions are not proven to decrease drug crimes.

In 2008, Indonesia executed two drug convicts from Nigeria. Since 2008, however, drug crimes have not fallen. The number of people convicted of drug offences throughout 2015 increased. Likewise, the number of people who use drugs has increased since 2011 until 2015. In 2011, there were 3.6 million people who use drugs and in 2015, the number rose to 5.9 million (representing a 64% increase) As the data shows, executing people has failed to curb drug offences. It is time for Indonesia's drug policies to be guided by evidence and science, instead of ideology or moral judgment.

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Does the death penalty reduce drug use and drug related crime? Data from Indonesia

last week received some unexpected news about a major shift in the attitude of the United Nations towards the decriminalization of cannabis. According to the paper, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) was set to announce a more tolerant approach at a major meeting in New York City. But although the meeting was real, the policy shift was not. The announcement was a hoax, and pointedly timed for 20 April (‘4/20’), a day on which cannabis users celebrate and promote their choice. The scam even included a well-constructed fake press release that quoted the (real) UNODC executive director Yury Fedotov as saying: “The science increasingly supports decriminalization and harm reduction over proscriptive, fear-based approaches.”

For those who advocate drug-law reform — a group that includes a sizeable number of scientists — the truth was a lot less encouraging. The comments that Fedotov made at last week’s UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) were certainly less quotable. In a tweet he noted: “#UNGASS outcome doc reaffirms joint responses to world drug problem based on agreed frameworks, #sharedresponsibility, intl cooperation”.

Despite hopes ahead of the meeting that nations would step back from the ‘war on drugs’ rhetoric that has defined international policy — and science — for decades, instead the UN blandly reformatted the existing status quo. Essentially, the message is still: ‘drugs are bad’.

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On a downer

Negotiating the political minefield of global drug policy has left civil society and many progressive-thinking countries disappointed by the outcomes of last week’s United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the World Drug Problem, and frustrated by the UNGASS process.

The 19-21 April meeting of world leaders, non-governmental organisations and members of civil society in New York was the first special session on drugs in nearly 20 years. It offered a momentous opportunity to debate global drug policy, discuss successes and failures, and endorse a new Outcome Document as the way forward.

In the three-year run-up, there were strong calls from many member states and civil society organisations to move away from criminalisation and punitive approaches in place since the 1998 UNGASS on drugs, which vowed to reduce the ever increasing supply and demand of drugs through punitive measures, including the criminalisation of drug users.

However, the UNGASS process and last week’s meeting itself were seen by many to have side-lined calls to adopt a health and human rights-based approach to drug policy that is both fair and evidence-informed.

Civil society left disappointed by UNGASS on drugs

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that mandatory minimum sentences for repeat drug traffickers are unconstitutional.

The decision, one of two released Friday morning, overturns a policy brought in under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper that forced judges to hand down a minimum of one year in jail to people who are convicted of more than one trafficking offense within a ten-year period.

A separate ruling also struck down a law that infringed on a judge's ability to give credit for time served prior to a conviction.

Civil liberties advocates argued the laws amount to "cruel and unusual punishment"—a Charter violation—that disproportionately affects drug addicts and marginalized people. They said that the laws also effectively tie a judge's hands when it comes to using discretion during sentencing.

Canada strikes down mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers

Since 2011–2012 Kenya has successfully introduced and implemented a comprehensive harm reduction programme to tackle a sub-epidemic of HIV among people who inject drugs (PWID).

People who use drugs are highly stigmatised in Kenya. Cultural, religious and social norms were against harm reduction, which was widely perceived as encouraging drug use.

To overcome this, advocacy work was done to place harm reduction within a public health context and emphasise the benefits for all society. On a government level, the Kenyan Ministry of Health established a policy framework for a national HIV and harm reduction response targeting PWID. The National AIDS and STI Control Program (NASCOP) developed standard operating guidelines for initiating harm reduction.

Thumbnail: CC Community Action On Harm Reduction

Achievements and challenges in bringing harm reduction services to Kenya

In 1998, a special session of the United Nations General Assembly agreed to set a 10-year deadline to make the world “drug free”. After an embarrassing failure to achieve this goal, the deadline was extended a further 10 years, setting the world up for another inevitable failure in 2019.

In the intervening years, the use, availability and variety of illicit drugs have escalated exponentially. It is estimated by the UK charity Transform Foundation that 300 million people worldwide used illegal drugs in 2012, contributing to a global market with a turnover of $US330 billion a year.

The vision of a drug-free world has faded. We are instead presented with a nightmare scenario, where a multi-billion dollar black market funds organised crime and terrorist organisations.

A drug-free world is an impossible dream

You are invited to submit information covering developments since 18 December 2014 relevant to the question of the moratorium on the use of the death penalty. Send (maximum 1500 words) by 15 May 2016 with subject [SG report - moratorium - death penalty] to: registry@ohchr.org.

OHCHR’s work on the death penalty issue

Moratorium on the death penalty: Call for inputs

After a long gestation, the UN drug reform experiment suffered a miscarriage. It seems the UN is not the catalyst of change but its mirror. Reformers can learn many lessons - but can also be proud of their achievements.

Those who hoped this would be a watershed event must be feeling disappointed, after the closure of the UN General Assembly Special Session. As we reported earlier, the UNGASS adopted a weak and vague outcome document on the first day, in the opening plenary, without a debate. So the plenary debates and round-table discussions, which were supposed to shed new light on the world’s efforts to control drugs, were essentially no more than lip-service, and had no real impact on the system.

I have always been among the sceptics who didn’t believe that the UNGASS would bring much change, so this was not a real disappointment for me. I think drug policy reform has never come from the UN, and it never will. The UN is only a mirror that reflects the power structure of the world and what is happening at a national level. Its systemic inertia does not permit it to be the catalyst for change.

That said, it doesn’t mean that all advocacy efforts targeting the UN are necessarily meaningless. The UN is an important forum for power-play among world powers, and provides a platform for interaction between civil society and member states. What is more, it is a stage which NGOs can use, in order to highlight the flaws of the system in front of the watching eyes of the public. That’s why we, the Rights Reporter Foundation, attended the event and produced a movie about it.

The UNGASS on drugs: reform aborted

On the final day on UNGASS 2016, the UK’s Transform Drug Policy Foundation brought their Anyone’s Child campaign to a packed conference room at the UN.

In stark contrast to an event they were due to be involved in earlier in the day – ‘Drug Policy, Dirty Money, and Development: Why the UNGASS should care about the Panama Papers’ – which had to be called off after only a handful of people (myself included) managed to get through the police barriers to attend, this deeply emotional event was so popular that many attendees ended up sat on the floor, or stood around the edges of the room.

The question being asked here was ‘How can the international drug control system provide a better tomorrow for today’s youth?’. Unsurprisingly, the resounding answer was that, given the abject failure of the UNGASS outcome document to address the important issues, it can’t. At least not without wholesale changes.

How can the international drug control system provide a better tomorrow for today’s youth?

At the urging of Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia, world leaders met at the United Nations in a special session last week to discuss saner ways to fight the drug trade. They did not get very far toward a shift in approach. Nonetheless, there was a consensus that investing in health care, addiction treatment and alternatives to incarceration would do more to end the drug trade than relying primarily on prohibition and criminalization.

“A war that has been fought for more than 40 years has not been won,” President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia said in an interview. “When you do something for 40 years and it doesn’t work, you need to change it.”

Mr. Santos and the presidents of Mexico and Guatemala argue that the war on drugs, which has been largely directed under terms set by the United States, has had devastating effects on their countries, which are hubs of the cocaine, marijuana and heroin trade. “When two elephants fight, the grass always suffers the most,” President Jimmy Morales of Guatemala said, referring to the drug cartels and American law enforcement agencies.

Thumbnail: Flickr Office of Public Affairs

Rethinking the global war on drugs

The excesses of the global war on drugs are often so brutal as to seem like parody: think of Singapore’s macabre antidrug illustrations for children, or the recent news that Iran had executed all the men in a single village in the name of drug control. Latest in the ominous, believe-it-or-not category was watching Russia host a side event on science at the UN General Assembly Special Session on the world drug problem in New York on April 20. To informed observers, this was akin to watching climate change denialists host a look at global warming.

Russia has been among the nations most committed to denying scientific evidence on effective drug dependence treatment. The country has banned methadone and buprenorphine, widely researched medicines that the World Health Organization deems essential in the treatment of dependence on heroin and other opiates. Russian “narcology” — the sub-discipline of psychiatry charged with treating drug dependence — has instead promoted such approaches as “coding,” where patients are hypnotized and told that they will fatally poison themselves if they use alcohol or drugs, or induction of comas in drug-dependent patients followed by administration of electroconvulsive shock. St. Petersburg scientists piloted an approach — adapted and practiced in China — that involves drilling holes in the skull and destroying portions of the brain thought to be associated with craving. This “neurosurgery” is irreversible, and has raised the same ethical questions as lobotomies performed on mentally ill patients in the Europe and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.

Russia, science, and the global war on drugs

The biggest United Nations summit on drugs in almost 20 years is over, and while there are signs many countries are stepping back from the destructive “war on drugs” approach to drugs, it’s hard not to conclude that overall the meeting was a missed opportunity.

Three years ago, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico called the meeting, arguing that the cost of the “War on Drugs” had become too high and a new approach was urgently needed. Unfortunately, the document the UN General Assembly approved on Tuesday does not represent a real break with the past but rather business-as-usual, with some shifts in emphasis.

The increased focus on health and human rights in the document is welcome, but as long as the dominantly courts-and-cops approach to fighting drugs continues, the toll from the fight will far outweigh the damage from the drugs themselves. There is little doubt that tens of thousands of people will continue to suffer from drug-related violence and human rights abuses in the coming years; that drug users and those involved in minor trafficking will continue to fill our jails; and that HIV and hepatitis C will continue to wreak havoc among people who inject drugs.

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