Another decade of the Global War on Drugs?

In Vienna this week a United Nations conference is deliberating global drug strategy for the next decade. What will they decide?

To speak of a war on drugs, like a war on terror or a war on cancer, is to use a metaphor; but to extend the metaphor to ask if we are winning the war on drugs, the answer is no. What should we be doing instead and why aren't we? In Vienna this week a United Nations conference is deliberating global drug strategy for the next decade. What will they decide?

Afghanistan is the world's largest opium producer. Should military action by NATO and associated forces in Afghanistan stamp out opium poppy cultivation? Australian troops have found that the choice is between developing the support of the local people, or cracking down on poppies, destroying livelihoods and pushing them into the arms of the Taliban. (During Taliban rule, poppy cultivation was prohibited but now the Taliban encourage it.)

On March 5, The Economist came out with a blistering lead editorial, "How to stop the drug wars. Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution". It was accompanied by a report on burgeoning drug-related crime in Mexico, which mentioned an assessment by the United States' Joint Forces Command that Mexico is at serious risk of becoming a failed state. Mexico is a major distribution conduit for South American cocaine; more than 750 tonnes of the drug are reported to be shipped annually from Andean states.

Illegal drug policy is embedded in the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This has been adopted by some 97 countries, including Australia. The Convention established the International Narcotics Control Board, which licenses a very limited amount of legal narcotic production (Tasmania is a leading legal producer of opium) and coordinates the increasingly futile war against all other production and distribution.

This week at a meeting in Vienna hosted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, international policy is being reviewed. A number of countries including most EU nations, Australia, New Zealand and some in Latin America favour switching to a harm reduction strategy. They are opposed by the United States and Russia, which are promoting continuation of zero tolerance. (There is a particular irony in Russia's opposition as, according to a recent report, the country is suffering from a heroin addiction epidemic.)

Australia has tested the limits of the UN convention with implementation of harm reduction strategies and penalties that are modest by international standards for possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use. There is still a strand of conservatives that that believes that penalties should be greater and that initiatives such as the successful Kings Cross injecting room in Sydney should be shut down.

It is worth following this strand. After all there has never in Western society been a strong ideological push against tobacco. That growing clamp-down has been driven largely by the health profession. Yet, although there may be consequences for failing to pay one's supplier, one is pressed to find a single incident of violence mediated by ingestion of marijuana. In contrast there are violent acts mediated by ingestion of alcohol almost every Saturday night.

Why?

The lobby against alcohol was traditionally religious: strong in Islam, variable in Christianity. In 1917 US Congress passed a law to establish prohibition of alcohol. It was repealed in 1933 and John D Rockefeller stated at the time (sourced quotation from Wikipedia):

When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, […] respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.

While the ideological movement against alcohol has not succeeded, the movement against marijuana has. But it had a different origin. According to Pete Guither's description: it was driven by xenophobia, racism, fear and yellow journalism. In the early 1900s there was substantial influx of Mexicans into the United States and many smoked marijuana:

When Montana outlawed marijuana in 1927, the Butte Montana Standard reported a legislator's comment: "When some beet field peon takes a few traces of this stuff… he thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies." […]

… newspapers in 1934 editorialized: "Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice."

The tabloid press of the time represented marijuana as a deadly threat to society in a way that alcohol was never painted. That same fear campaign extended to cocaine, opium and subsequent similar drugs.

Lynn Zimmer gives a more complex analysis of drug prohibition here, noting that impetus for international prohibition began in 1909 at a conference in Shanghai to discuss controlling import of opium into China.

So, where are we today? Australia is coming to grips with tobacco damage, has taken useful harm minimisation steps in respect of addictive, illegal drugs, (and has exhibited award-winning spinelessness in dealing with damage from alcohol abuse), while there are still many who believe that the solution to the heroin problem is to douse Afghan fields with herbicide. That hasn't worked to stem the flow of cocaine from South America and it won't work in Afghanistan, as Army personnel deployed there can attest.

Meanwhile, at the UN conference in Vienna, according to a report early on March 12 local time:

United Nations member states are set to paper over their differences today and sign up to 10 more years of the much-criticised "war on drugs" at a drugs summit in Vienna. A draft policy declaration tabled at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs last night did not mention the innovation that campaigners had hoped for: "harm reduction" strategies such as needle exchange programmes to prevent the spread of HIV, or even legalisation and regulation to help erode the power of traffickers and drug lords.

You don't need to be Einstein to think: