Guaranteeing the rights of young people and substance use in contexts of armed conflict in the Colombian Amazon - Submission to the UN CESCR on Colombia

This document seeks to contribute to Colombia's review at the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR) of the experiences and concerns of students, counsellors, teachers and rectors, civil servants and citizens in general regarding the guarantees of economic, social and cultural rights of young people, and the dynamics of consumption in the Colombian Amazon in school environments, a territory considered peripheral, a protagonist of the Colombian armed conflict and the transition to peace. It is a bid to make visible the impact of the consumption of psychoactive substances and the management of these substances by different actors in the guarantee of fundamental rights - health, education, culture, economy and child protection - in the context of post-conflict and peace-building.

In Colombia, the management of psychoactive substances has historically been marked by a predominantly prohibitionist and repressive approach. However, in 1994, the Constitutional Court introduced a significant exception by decriminalising the personal dose. By Ruling C-221, adults were allowed to carry, without being criminalised, up to 1 gram of cocaine and 20 grams of marijuana for personal use. This decision, based on the principles of free development of personality and autonomy, declared unconstitutional the restrictions of Law 30 of 1986, which should have eliminated criminal sanctions, fines or treatment obligations for those who carry these quantities.

The 2016 Peace Agreement marked another important milestone in the management of psychoactive substance use by proposing that national policy on illicit drug use should be based on a public health and human rights approach. For its part, the Commission for the Clarification of the Truth (CEV) dedicated a section of its final report (2022) to examining the consequences of the prohibitionist anti-drugs policy on the conflict and, in particular, on drug users, proposing strict legal regulation of these substances in order to reduce the violence in the country, something that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights welcomed in his report in 2023. In line with these recommendations, the current Colombian government adopted the new National Drug Policy 2023-2033, whose official discourse has been celebrated for its orientation towards reducing vulnerabilities. Since 2007 and 2009, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Protection designed the School Orientation Zones (ZOE) as innovative community-based devices created to address substance use but have not been rigorously implemented.

Despite normative and discursive advances, a deep gap persists between the formulation of these policies and their effective implementation in territories such as the Amazon, where young people affected by the armed conflict continue to face stigmatisation, criminalisation and the absence of real guarantees for the exercise of their rights. In the context of the transitional period, the CEV found that the persecution of drug consumption contributed to the degradation and persistence of the internal armed conflict, mainly impacting young people. For its part, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights commented in 2001 that drug trafficking in Colombia has exacerbated the armed conflict, preventing access to guaranteed rights for the population, and in 2010 it expressed its concern about the high rate of drug use, particularly among adolescents, and its negative effects on health, recommending incorporating economic, social and cultural rights in the strategy to combat drug trafficking, such as the transparency of the anti-narcotics strategy, the strengthening of alternative and sustainable development programmes, anti-corruption programmes and changes in local police and justice institutions.

In particular, a critical omission is evident in the educational sphere: there is no harm or vulnerability reduction approach implemented in schools in post-conflict territories. Although the plan may be included in the current national drug policy, it has not been grounded either institutionally or territorially, leaving children and adolescents exposed to punitive or moralising interventions, without access to evidence-based information or safe environments for dialogue about substance use.