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.

Scanning the horizon: Drones and counter-narcotics in Latin America

 The opium harvest in Afghanistan increased by eight per cent in 2021 compared to last year, to 6,800 tons, which could lead to markets around the globe being flooded with around 320 tons of pure heroin trafficked from the country, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said today.

According to UNODC’s research brief on “The drug situation in Afghanistan 2021 – latest findings and emerging threats”, Afghan opiates supply eight out of ten users worldwide, while Afghanistan accounted for 85 per cent of global opium production in 2020.

“UNODC’s new research brief on the 2021 opium harvest, completed in July, and the overall drug situation in Afghanistan highlights the urgent need for international assistance to promote sustainable reductions in illicit drug cultivation, production and demand , as part of overall UN support to the people of Afghanistan,” said UNODC Executive Director Ghada Waly.

The brief was launched at a policy meeting of the Paris Pact Initiative, which brings together 58 countries and 23 organizations to combat illicit trafficking in Afghan opiates. The meeting is expected to endorse recommendations for action in four areas: cross-border cooperation, detecting and blocking illicit financial flows, preventing diversion of precursor chemicals, and drug prevention and treatment.
According to UNODC research findings, income from Afghan opiates amounted to US$ 1.8 to 2.7 billion in 2021 inside Afghanistan, but much larger profits are made in the illicit drug supply chains outside the country. Increased political uncertainty in Afghanistan since August 2021 is driving up opium prices, which almost doubled in August compared to May.

Higher prices may provide an incentive for farmers sowing opium poppy this winter to cultivate more, increasing next year’s harvest.

The UNODC brief also warns that alongside rising opium and heroin production, methamphetamine manufacture in Afghanistan, using the wild ephedra plant as a precursor, has sharply increased in recent years. High regional and global demand for methamphetamine, coupled with a saturated global market for opiates, could push further expansion of methamphetamine manufacturing, as well as that of other synthetic drugs.

Development & environment