Report launch: Tuesday, 5 December (14:00 - 15:00) at Conference Room 2 (2nd Floor, C-Building) of the Vienna International Centre (VIC) - Austria. 

The implementation of the 2019 Ministerial Declaration is off track

The 2019 Ministerial Declaration on drugs laid down the main objectives of the international community in addressing the world drug situation for a 10-year period. Drawing on a broad range of data and evidence, as well as on the experience of civil society and communities, this report shows that by 2023 there has been little, incomplete or no progress in achieving these goals.

There is scant evidence that policies aimed at the prohibition and eradication of drugs have been effective in reducing illegal drug markets, or in tackling their connection with human insecurity, violence, and organised crime. At the same time, there is widespread proof that the punitive paradigm promoted by the global drug control regime has undermined some of the key aims of the 2019 Ministerial Declaration itself and of the broader UN system, including the promotion of health, human rights, and sustainable development.

Review of the challenges identified in the 2019 Ministerial Declaration

Challenge: Tackling an ever-expanding and diversifying drug market. Status: Off track

Despite billions spent every year to curb illegal drug demand and supply, all available sources indicate that, in the 2019-2023 period, there has been an increase in scale in the illegal cultivation, production and trafficking of drugs. At the same time, the number of people who use drugs aged 15-64 is estimated to have increased from approximately 271 million to 296 million, with one in 17 people aged 15-64 using drugs in the past year. Synthetic drugs, precursors, and new psychoactive substances have proliferated, in part as an unintended consequence of the expansion of law enforcement efforts which have pushed producers into novel and more compact substances that pose a new, more diverse, and often unknown range of health risks for people who use drugs.

Challenge: Addressing organised crime, violence, and insecurity. Status: Off track

The international community has made little progress in developing evidence-based policies to effectively address the connection between illegal drug markets, organised crime, and human insecurity. In a number of countries, illegal drug economies continue to fuel acute violence and conflict, particularly in producing and transit countries in the Global South. The example of Mexico – where the homicide rate was 62.6% higher in 2022 than in 2015 – illustrates how militarised responses fuel, rather than curb, this trend. The perceived levels of violence associated with illegal drug markets have also risen across the world, including in consumer countries. illicit financial flows have a critical role in connecting drug trafficking, organised crime and corruption, but there is a dearth of updated and comprehensive data on the scale of the phenomenon. There is also no sign that it has been effectively tackled, including due to the lack of cooperation by jurisdictions that host major financial institutions and tax havens.

Challenge: Addressing the links between digital technologies and illegal drug markets. Status: Off track

Just as in the legal economy, in the last four years digital technologies have become increasingly important in illegal drug markets. This has happened throughout different segments of the supply chain and through many different technologies, including social media, messaging platforms and the dark web.The UNODC has highlighted that tools to measure the role of digital technologies in illegal drug markets are ‘complex’ and ‘challenging’, and reliable data is lacking.Market volatility, exit scams and successful law enforcement might have slowed the growth of darknet markets in 2021 and 2022, but drug transactions appear to have moved to, and expanded in, other digital avenues which are opaquer, and where harm reduction and educational messaging is harder to disseminate.

Challenge: Protecting the health of people who use drugs. Status: Off track

There has been no global data on drug-related deaths since 2019, when 494,000 deaths were reported worldwide. However, available regional and national indicators point to an alarming evolution, in particular in relation to the increased use in synthetic opioids, mostly in North America, in spite of huge investment in interdiction and drug control. In the USA, overdose deaths have increased from 70,630 in 2019 to an estimated 109,940 in the year ending in February 2023. People who use drugs continue to face heightened risks of contracting blood-borne diseases compared to the general population. 12% of people who inject drugs are living with HIV, and 6.6 million people who use drugs live with Hepatitis C – an 18% increase from 2019. While the number of countries with some form of harm reduction intervention has increased slightly, coverage and availability remain very limited, particularly for oppressed and marginalised people. It is estimated that only one in five people who are drug dependent receive treatment, with large disparities across regions and within countries. Quality also remains a major issue, with widespread reports of ‘treatment’ not being based on evidence, and relying instead on practices that are tantamount to torture or ill-treatment.

Challenge: Ensuring improved access to controlled medicines for pain relief and palliative care. Status: Off track

Shocking disparity in access to controlled medicines worldwide continues. Over 82% of the global population has access to less than 17% of the world’s morphine-based medicines, and there is a 40-fold difference in the availability of opioids for pain management and palliative care between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, in part due to the strict controls introduced by the UN drug conventions. On a more positive note, since 2019 at least 18 countries have adopted laws or policies facilitating access to cannabis-based medicines, while in 2020 cannabis was removed from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single convention on drugs, thus recognising its therapeutic value. In addition, there are over 450 clinical medical trials worldwide on the use of psychedelics to treat mental illnesses.

Challenge: Reforming drug policies that violate human rights. Status: Off track

The last four years have witnessed an unprecedented acceleration in the recognition of the human rights impacts of drug control, with a growing body of commitments, findings and recommendations emerging from UN human rights bodies. However, the alignment of national drug policies with these recommendations has been unequal and insufficient. The documented number of people executed for drug offences rose from 91 in 2019 to 285 in 2022. Militarisation and ‘war on drugs’ campaigns drive serious and systematic human rights abuses – including hundreds of extrajudicial killings every year. The stigmatisation of people who use drugs remains a central element of government policies across the world, with downstream impacts on the enjoyment of all human rights, including a whole range of economic, social, and cultural rights. Many governments continue to criminalise traditional and Indigenous uses of drugs. People marginalised on the basis of their race, gender, class or age are disproportionately impacted by these violations across all contexts, in all countries. Whilst UN human rights bodies have grown more vocal these abuses, the UNODC still refuses to condemn the most flagrant human rights violations connected to drug control.

Challenge: Reducing the overuse of prison and punishment. Status: Off track

The total number of people deprived of liberty worldwide has continued to grow over the past four years, from an estimated 10.74 million in 2018 to 11.5 million in 2023. Over one in five people currently in prison are incarcerated for a drug offence, with no clear improvement since 2019. Furthermore, between 440,000 and 500,000 people are estimated to be subjected to compulsory drug detention, and thousands more are detained against their will in private ‘rehabilitation’ centres. In addition, the vast majority of countries continue to impose criminal and other sanctions on people who use drugs. Nonetheless, since 2019 six countries and 9 federal jurisdictions have adopted some form of decriminalisation of drug use and possession for personal use, bringing the total number of decriminalised jurisdictions to 66, in 40 countries. Countries such as Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica and Kenya have reformed their drug laws to introduce some elements of proportionality and alternatives to incarceration, and many other proposals are being debated in parliaments.

Challenge. The legal regulation of substances under international control. Status: Off track

Today, Canada, Jamaica, Luxemburg, Malta, Thailand, Uruguay, as well as 23 US States, three US territories and Washington D.C. have adopted regulations concerning the cultivation, possession, use and sale of cannabis for non-medical use – in addition to Bolivia which established regulated markets for coca in 2011. Two other countries – Mexico and South Africa – are yet to implement court mandates to create regulated frameworks. The number of people living in jurisdictions with some form of legal regulation has increased from approximately 123 million to 294 million between 2019 and 2023. This figure is poised to grow, as governments and political parties continue to introduce new proposals. Pilots for the legal regulation of other substances, particularly psychedelics and cocaine, are also starting to emerge. In September 2023, the OHCHR became the first UN agency to break the taboo on legal regulation by encouraging Member States to consider it as part of a human rights-based approach to drugs. However, legal regulation has become one of the centres of division at the CND, with the INCB and several Member States taking a vociferous – and often politically motivated – position against it.

Challenge: Addressing the development dimension of illegal drug markets and drug policy. Status: Off track

Traditionally, development considerations in drug policy have been restricted to the narrow concept of ‘alternative development’, with the end goal being eradication rather than a commitment to ensuring sustainable development. This is a major concern because illegal crop cultivation remains concentrated in some of the most impoverished, remote, and conflict-torn areas in the world. The yearly CND resolution on alternative development has tried to push beyond this eradication-focused approach, but progress on the ground remains very limited, and the principle of ‘adequate sequencing’ – namely, that alternative livelihoods should be secured before eradicating crops – is rarely followed. The situation is particularly concerning for women involved in illegal crop cultivation. In a positive development, an increasing number of countries and donorsare trying to leverage the legal cultivation of internationally controlled plants to secure livelihoods for rural communities, including through the cultivation of cannabis for medical and industrial purposes.

Challenge: Ensuring meaningful civil society participation. Status: Some progress made

Civil society, including affected communities such as people who use drugs, play a key role in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of drug policies and programmes. At UN level, recent years have witnessed significant progress in ensuring civil society participation in drug debates; the 2023 decision to start screening the proceedings of the CND in UN Web TV constitutes a positive example. However, the role of civil society remains a point of contention in CND resolutions, including in the negotiations for the mid-term review of the 2019 Ministerial Declaration. At national level the picture is concerning, with the space for civil society shrinking due to authoritarian regimes, highly punitive drug policies, foreign agent laws, funding restrictions and more, resulting in civil society harassment and high levels of stigma against people working on drug policy reform.

Challenge: Improving data collection and analysis. Status: Off track

The lack of reliable, recent and comparable data remains a major obstacle to assessing the evolution and impacts of global drug policy. Traditionally, drug control bodies have measured progress in terms of market flows and scale, thus rendering invisible the health, human rights, and development dimensions of the world drug situation. The Annual Report Questionnaire, which is used to prepare the World Drug Report, was reviewed in 2020 with some improvements in terms of data disaggregation, but the final version failed to reconsider the overall objectives of drug control. Stepping into this void, civil society organisations have ramped up their efforts to collate and systematise data on key aspects of drug policy such as gender and incarceration, the availability of harm reduction services, or the alignment of national drug polices with UN human rights guidance.

Blind spots of the 2019 Ministerial Declaration

In this report, IDPC has identified seven ‘blind spots’, or topics that were not reflected in the ‘challenges’ identified in the 2019 Ministerial Declaration. While some of these topics are new, others were simply omitted in 2019. The urgency of these blind spots – and the need to better align drug policies with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and human rights – requires that the international community recognises them as priority drug policy areas for the years to come:

 Recognising the potential of legal regulation as a tool to break the linkage between drug markets and organised crime

 Acknowledging the growing role of surveillance technologies in drug responses, and the need for international standards based on evidence and human rights

Breaking the taboo on harm reduction amidst a global public health crisis

Placing racial justice and the principles of equality and non-discrimination at the centre of drug policy-making

Decolonising the drug control regime by addressing the tensions between the drug conventions and Indigenous Peoples’ rights

Remedying the lack of UN guidance and recommendations on the legal regulation of drugs in line with health, human rights, and development

 Recognising the environmental damage associated with drug policy.

Recommendations for the 2024 mid-term review

The Shadow Report concludes with a range of recommendations that seek the leverage the mid-term review of the 2019 Ministerial Declaration on drugs as an opportunity for transformative change for the UN drug control regime:

The debates and outcome document of the 2024 mid-term review should integrate the normative developments that have taken place at the CND, the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council since 2019, including explicit support for harm reduction, the rescheduling of cannabis, new language on racial discrimination in drug control, and the principle of adequate sequencing in alternative development.

Following the recommendations of the OHCHR, the outcome document of the mid-term review should recognise the protection of health, human rights, equality and non-discrimination as overarching objectives for the system, and not reiterate the drug eradication goals.

The outcome document should update the list of challenges included in the ‘Stocktaking’ section of the 2019 Ministerial Declaration to incorporate the new developments that have emerged since 2019, listed in the ‘blind spot’ section above. The workplan of intersessional meetings during the 2024-2029 period should also reflect these new challenges.

During the mid-term review, we encourage Member States to acknowledge the existence of legally regulated markets for the non-medical use of internationally controlled drugs, and to call for monitoring, reporting and guidance on such markets by UN entities.

While Member States should aim for an outcome document adopted by consensus, they should not shy away from calling for a vote on the final text to ensure the adoption of an outcome document that truly calls for transformative change, rather than being a simple ticking-the-box exercise.

Recommendations for a structural reform of the global drug control regime

Member States and UN actors that seek to move away from the punitive paradigm that has characterised the international drug control regime, and transform it into a system genuinely grounded on health, human rights and development, should consider the following longer-term recommendations:

Member States should establish a multi-stakeholder mechanism with participation from civil society, academia and relevant UN entities responsible for exploring options to review the UN drug conventions in order to update and rebalance the text. This should include: (a) enshrining the centrality of a health, development and human rights in drug policy; (b) allowing countries to consider the legal regulation of drugs under international control; and (c) repealing existing commitments banning traditional uses of scheduled plants.

UN bodies with relevant mandates including the WHO, the United Nations Development Programme and the OHCHR, should elaborate evidence-based guidance and recommendations on how to implement the legal regulation of drugs in line with existing standards and best practices on health, human rights, and development.

Relevant UN agencies and academia, in partnership with civil society, should update international standards on human rights and drug policy to reflect the latest evidence and guidance from the UN system, as well as include guidance on the legal regulation of drugs.

Off track: Shadow report for the mid-term review of the 2019 Ministerial Declaration on drugs

Global drug policy is denying climate justice

The so called ‘war on drugs’ is not only destroying our planet through harmful attempts to eradicate illicit drugs – it is a barrier to climate mitigation and adaptation strategies in the very places they are needed most.

To find out more, watch this film we created with partners from around the world.

The majority of the multi-billion dollar profits from the illicit drugs trade are held by organized crime groups. These powerful, entrenched state and non-state actors are corrupting and rendering entire governments dysfunctional.

Many of the countries most weakened by the illicit drugs trade are those who host ecosystems that have the greatest potential for capturing carbon. These forests follow the same equatorial line of the main producing and trafficking routes of the illicit drugs trade.

The ability of these governments to act on climate mitigation strategies, such as protect and restore forests, and deliver climate resilient development are undermined because they do not control these jurisdictions. Drug cartels do. Through violence, bribery and corruption these groups infiltrate and manipulate governments to ensure their profits are protected.

We urgently need to legally regulate the illicit drugs trade, to prevent ecological harms of the trade and to take the power away from organised crime, so that the trade does not continue to intensify the climate crisis.

In the Amazon right now every day counts.

We need to accept that this trade will never go away, and instead regulate it in a way that works for people and the planet – not against.

Health Poverty Action is committed to campaigning on the root causes of poverty and inequality and removing the barriers to the health of people and the planet.

To read more about this see this article

Climate justice & drug policy

Across the world, the state of environmental stress is unprecedented. This includes major threats to the lands, soils, waters, forests, and oceans that make up our ecosystems and biodiverse nature. Cutting across all of this are the unfolding effects of climate change and global heating. All of these developments will continue to have dramatic impacts on both people and planet. These impacts are however not evenly distributed. As scholarship and activism on ‘environmental justice’ points out, poorer and marginalised communities, often differentiated along class, gender and racial lines, face particular exposure to environmental harms. This holds particularly true for populations in the global South.

The role of illicit drugs in relation to these environmental stresses is an underexplored terrain. Yet, as this report will argue, drugs, as well as the policy responses to them, are an environmental issue. This disconnect between drug and environmental policy is the result largely of the institutional compartmentalisation of the issue of drugs into the domain of crime and law enforcement with little outreach to other spheres related to the environment or sustainable development. References to the environment within drug policy have as such remained sparse and limited in scope.

This is slowly changing. A resolution on alternative development adopted by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) - the central drug policy-making body within the UN system - in March this year gave special attention to environmental protection, encouraging “Member States to examine and address, within the efforts of alternative development, the harmful impact of the illicit cultivation of crops used for the production of narcotic drugs on the environment, which may lead to deforestation and the pollution of soil and water, and to seize the opportunities offered by alternative development with regard to the conservation and sustainable use of the environment and the protection of biodiversity”.6 And for the first time this year, the 2022 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report will include a special booklet on the connection between illicit drugs and the environment. This follows on from an increasing number of official side-events that have been organised in recent years at the CND in Vienna on the issue of drugs and the environment.

This report, which draws on TNI’s original research, fieldwork, interviews and a broad literature review, aims to add to this burgeoning debate in the following ways:

By examining the drugs-environment nexus in relation to trajectories of agrarian change and the implications for rural working people, especially in the global South. This is in recognition of the fact that what are currently deemed to be illicit crops under the international drug control regime often have a long history of traditional cultivation and use by rural communities and indigenous peoples across the world. In addition to longstanding traditional uses, many more rely on the cultivation of illicit crops for both their economic production and social reproduction activities. At the same time, these rural people are often most at risk of poverty, marginalisation, discrimination, and criminalisation while being least represented in policymaking spaces and in decisions that affect them. Elevating the voices and perspectives of these growers of illicit crops (or producers of prohibited plants) and the communities in which they are embedded is therefore a key aim of this report.

By critically interrogating both drug policy and development responses in relation to the drugs-environment nexus. From toxic eradication campaigns that spray the ground with chemicals, to interdiction efforts which push illicit cultivation into ever more fragile ecosystems, drug control policy has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for a number of grievous environmental harms. Additionally, crop-substitution programmes which ignore the fact that for millions of peasants, small farmers, landless, and migrant labour populations, drug crops are the alternative development to trade and investment regimes from which they are either excluded or adversely incorporated into will ultimately fail.

By bringing in scholarship and literature from, inter alia, the field of political ecology and critical agrarian studies and applying this to the issue of drugs and the environment, it is hoped that further exchange between these two hitherto quite separate spheres of enquiry can be stimulated. Drugs are an environmental issue. By making this case, it is hoped that policymakers, researchers, civil society organisations and social movements from both fields can be encouraged to engage in a process of mutual learning and knowledge exchange. Through this bridge-work, new forms of solidarity, scholar-activism, and policy change can coalesce around, for example, movements for climate justice, agroecology, or peasants’ and indigenous’ rights.

Prohibited plants: Environmental justice in drug policy

More than half a century after the advent of a global drug prohibition regime and the launch of the U.S. “war on drugs,” the results have been disastrous for Latin America and the Caribbean, and for the United States itself. Even worse, prohibition’s consequences are exacerbating other grave problems—corruption and organized crime, violence perpetrated with impunity, forest loss and climate change, and displacement and migration—making solutions to these challenges even more difficult to achieve. The Biden administration’s historic embrace of harm reduction represents an enormous, lifesaving advance for U.S. drug policy. But even with harm reduction services, moves to decriminalize drug possession, and shifts underway to legally regulate recreational cannabis, the brunt of drug prohibition remains intact and the drug war rages on in the Americas. The principal victims of government repression in the name of drug control and of the predations of organized crime have always been and continue to be the most impoverished and marginalized communities. At the same time, the illegal drug trade constitutes an economic survival strategy for millions of people in Latin America and around the world—a de facto social safety net of the sort that national elites and governments themselves have proven unwilling or incapable of providing.

Having put down deep roots over the decades—ideologically, politically, bureaucratically and even culturally—prohibition can seem impervious to reform. However, the current regime was not inevitable but rather the product of a certain historical moment, and need not endure forever. Recognizing that prohibition is in fact a policy choice, not an immutable condition, should encourage civil society and lawmakers to undertake the serious deliberations, debates and analyses that will be required to transition to better drug policy choices oriented toward legal regulation, harm reduction, and decriminalization. The rationale for transitioning to regulation is not that drugs are safe, but that drug use poses a range of risks and that governments should apply their regulatory tools to manage those risks to protect public health and safety. Regulatory models must prioritize the interests and inclusion of those communities most harmed by the punitive enforcement of drug prohibition. Such regulatory frameworks will be far better suited than prohibition to protecting human rights and promoting health, gender and racial equality, security and environmental sustainability.

Loosening drug prohibition’s lethal grip on the Americas: The U.S. finally embraces harm reduction but the drug war still rages 

Across the world, the state of environmental stress is unprecedented. As scholarship and activism on ‘environmental justice’ point out, poorer and marginalised communities face particular exposure to environmental harms.

This holds especially true for populations in the Global South, including Myanmar. The role of opium cultivation in relation to these environmental stresses is an underexplored terrain. Yet, as this new TNI report argues, drugs, as well as the policy responses to them, are an environmental crisis in Myanmar as well as other countries where opium poppy, coca bush and cannabis plants are cultivated.

Across the world, the state of environmental stress is unprecedented. This includes major threats to the lands, soils, waters, forests, and oceans that make up our ecosystems and biodiverse nature. Cutting across all of this are the unfolding effects of climate change and global heating. All of these developments will continue to have dramatic impacts on both people and planet. These impacts are however not evenly distributed. As scholarship and activism on ‘environmental justice’ points out, poorer and marginalised communities, often differentiated along class, gender and racial lines, face particular exposure to environmental harms. This holds particularly true for populations in the Global South.

The role of illicit drugs in relation to these environmental stresses is an underexplored terrain. Yet, as this report will argue, drugs, as well as the policy responses to them, are an environmental issue. This disconnect between drug and environmental policy is the result largely of the institutional compartmentalisation of the issue of drugs into the domain of crime and law enforcement with little outreach to other spheres related to the environment or sustainable development. References to the environment within drug policy have as such remained sparse and limited in scope.

This is slowly changing. A resolution on alternative development adopted by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) - the central drug policy-making body within the UN system - in March this year gave special attention to environmental protection, encouraging “Member States to examine and address, within the efforts of alternative development, the harmful impact of the illicit cultivation of crops used for the production of narcotic drugs on the environment, which may lead to deforestation and the pollution of soil and water, and to seize the opportunities offered by alternative development with regard to the conservation and sustainable use of the environment and the protection of biodiversity”. And for the first time this year, the 2022 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report will include a special booklet on the connection between illicit drugs and the environment. This follows on from an increasing number of official side-events that have been organised in recent years at the CND in Vienna on the issue of drugs and the environment.

TNI’s latest report ‘Prohibited Plants. Environmental Justice in Drug Policy’ explores, among other things, the environmental dynamics associated with opium poppy cultivation in the two regions with which it is most associated: Myanmar (as part of the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’ along with Thailand and Laos) and Afghanistan. The two cases make for an interesting contrast. While in the case of Myanmar, more traditional forms of cultivation practised by upland populations and ethnic minority groups as part of mobile agricultural systems are examined, in Afghanistan the environmental implications of the introduction of new ‘green’ technologies in the form of solar-powered deepwater wells for long-term sustainability are discussed. In both cases, opium cultivation has continued, if not dramatically increased, against the backdrop of a series of bans and, with few exceptions, failed crop-substitution and alternative development (AD) programmes.

Opium cultivation and environmental justice in Myanmar

The Australian government recently donated $40 million to assist with alleviating the food security and economic crises unfolding in Afghanistan, while reiterating its condemnation of the Taliban’s repression and exclusion of women and girls from education and work. Many nations have withheld donations because of these violations of human rights—as well as the revenge executions and disappearances of ‘traitors’ who worked with US-led forces and the US-backed Afghan government or criticised Taliban policies—to avoid legitimising the Taliban’s rule.

The commitment to oppressing women is, however, evidently still more important to the Taliban leadership than basic food security, despite their having a front-row seat to watch the humanitarian crisis play out and affect all Afghan society, not just women.

Surely the international community knows this calculus by now. The most significant difference between the Taliban of the 2020s and 1990s seems to be that instead of banning the internet as part of their strategy to control the population, they are savvy about the potential for a curated social-media presence to affect international perceptions and promote disinformation domestically for political and security purposes.

Australia did the right thing in making its decision based on the immediate food security needs of Afghans. This is a hugely complex situation, and the Afghan people stand to suffer even more if the international community applies too much pressure on particular issues at particular times. Intersecting security issues also make it impossible for the international community to get it right—if that’s defined as finding an option that causes no harm.

Afghanistan’s opium problem requires a humanitarian solution

By the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC)

Africa and the Global Illicit Economy brings you stories and investigations based on the extensive research networks at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. We'll be looking at corruption, illicit financial flows, gangs, the role of foreign corporations, the political economy of crime, and the enabling environment that has made Africa vulnerable to the growth of organized crime. Drawing on the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime's civil society observatories for North, South, East and West Africa to get a feel for how organized crime is impacting some of the world and the continent’s emergency trends and contemporary events.

The Drugs and Development Hub is an initiative that brings together researchers, academics, policymakers and people affected by drug economies to discuss new approaches to drug policy. The ultimate goal is to shift mindsets towards more socially conscious and public-health oriented approach. This is the second episode covering the DDH. In this podcast Lindy sits down with a range of regional experts to discuss the issues. Presenter:

Deborah Alimi, Independent Researcher on Drug Policy at Sorbonne University;

Chinwike Okerere, the Founder and CEO of the African Law Foundation in Nigeria

Maria-Goretti Ane, International Drug Policy Consortium in Accra, Ghana.

Monique Marks, the Head of the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology, South Africa.

Africa and the global illicit economy - Drugs and Development Hub regional conversation

Afghanistan is the world's biggest producer of poppies, the source of sap that is refined into heroin, and in recent years production and exports have only boomed.

"All Afghans are informed that from now on cultivation of poppy has been strictly prohibited across the country," said a decree issued by Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.

The order was read out by government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid at a gathering of reporters, foreign diplomats and Taliban officials.

"If anyone violates the decree the crop will be destroyed immediately and the violator will be treated according to the sharia law," it added.

It is not the first time the fundamentalist group has vowed to outlaw the trade. Production was banned in 2000, just before the group was overthrown by US-led forces in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

During their 20-year insurgency against foreign forces, the Taliban heavily taxed farmers cultivating the crop in areas under their control, experts have said.

It became a key resource for the group to generate funds.

Poppy farmer Abdul Rahman told AFP that Sunday's ban was a blow to his livelihood.

"We have taken loans to cultivate this... If these crops are destroyed our income will be gone," said Rahman, who is from the southern province of Kandahar -- the Taliban's de facto power centre.

Taliban chief orders ban on poppy cultivation in Afghanistan

What’s the role and position of women in opium cultivation areas in Myanmar? What is life like for women who use drugs in Myanmar? This primer maps out the gendered dynamics of drug policy in Myanmar, drawing from on-the-ground conversations with women involved in the drugs market.

When it comes to drugs and related policies, women and their experiences are often rendered invisible, or presented merely as an afterthought even though in many cases women tend to face harsher effects of punitive policies. This primer emphasises the need for a rights-based approach for these specific populations of women – women using drugs, women dealing drugs or couriering (sometimes to support personal use), and women engaging in the drugs market through opium cultivation.

But women’s positions are not limited to being the receiving end of repressive policies and practices. In most contexts, despite their lack of visibility, women play a wide variety of active roles within the drugs market, and more importantly within their families and communities, as we will show in this primer. Having said that, there is clearly a need to situate (drug) policy discussions within a broader look at women’s roles in leadership and decision-making processes, as opposed to only spelling out the impacts of drug policy and drug markets on women in Myanmar.

This primer aims to map out the gendered dynamics of drug policy in Myanmar, drawing from on-the-ground conversations (conducted between 2018 and 2021) with women who use drugs, women who grow opium, as well as women engaging in sex work and/or involved in the drugs market. These women must work to survive both in rural and urban areas. They come from various age groups (between 19 and 72 at the time of interviews) and ethnic backgrounds, residing in different areas in (Southern) Shan State, Kachin State, and Mon State.

Women and drugs in Myanmar

By Colette Fogarty and Matvej Dubianskij, Master's students at the Graduate Institute Geneva

For decades, the global approach to the drugs-war nexus has been defined by heavily securitised policies, encompassing everything from forced crop eradication to militarised confrontations with drug cultivators and traffickers. In this podcast, Colette and Matvej seek to address the question of whether counter-narcotic policies, under the mantle of the War on Drugs, have been conducive to sustainable and inclusive peace-building efforts and processes in conflict contexts, specifically in the cases of Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar.

Colette Fogarty & Matvej Dubianskij · “The Cure Has Been Worse Than the Disease”: Punitive Drug Policies and Peacebuilding

'The cure has been worse than the disease': Punitive drug policies and peacebuilding

Rights groups and politicians in Colombia have welcomed a decision by the country’s Constitutional Court, which ruled this week that the government failed to consult local communities over its plan to restart aerial fumigation of coca crops.

In a decision on Wednesday, the court said the government of President Ivan Duque could not at this stage move forward with plans to carry out aerial spraying with herbicide glyphosate. It said Bogota must first adequately consult with communities that could be affected.

Earlier that year, the World Health Organization (WHO) linked glyphosate – marketed under the brand name RoundUp in the US – as a probable human carcinogenic.

Colombia can’t resume coca aerial spraying for now, court rules

• Most Latin American states have generated some drone capabilities for military or security purposes, as well as scientific and environmental purposes, but their approaches have varied widely. This is also the case in terms of the policy aims that they seek to achieve. These vary between acute counterinsurgency or counter-narcotics problems and more diffuse longer-term foreign policy aims.

• The defence industrial approaches of the different countries range from the utilisation of already existing capacities to elaborate international co-development and co-production schemes. The deployment of drones, however, has contributed to the long-term process of blurring the lines between state activities (counter-narcotics, counterinsurgency, and border patrol).

• Drones have permitted governments in the region to expand their surveillance and ‘remote’ control over populations in both urban centres and (more) marginalised rural communities.

• Despite a few voices calling for weaponisation, drones remain unarmed and no Latin American government has carried out a kinetic operation. Drones, however, have participated in more indirect forms of violence (e.g. crop spraying) and the intelligence provided by drones has aided governments in kill/capture operations against drug traffickers, guerrilla members, and (illegal) border crossers.

Development & environment