Guardian UK: Never mind the evidence - a drug-free world is nigh

[marmar]

Never mind the evidence - a drug-free world is nigh
The harm caused by prohibition is staggering, yet still politicians cling to the blinkered ambition of a global 'war on drugs'


Libby Brooks
The Guardian, Thursday 5 March 2009


This year marks the 100th anniversary of global drug prohibition, and what an inglorious centenary it is when we consider the millions of lives that have been blighted as a consequence of the war on drugs. And yet the majority of governments have supported a worldwide ban on the cultivation, distribution and use of psychoactive substances ever since the signing of the Shanghai convention, which aimed to target opium use, in 1909.

Next week, political leaders gather in Vienna to contemplate the state of international drug policy and sign up to new accords. It is a decade on from the last UN General Assembly special session (UNGASS) on narcotics in New York, which took as its ridiculously gauche slogan "A drug-free world - we can do it". The reality of the past 10 years - from the poppy fields of Afghanistan to Manchester street stabbings - could not have been more different.

UNGASS is accused by some of being little more than a talking shop - its recommendations are, after all, non-binding. But this meeting is a crucial barometer and, for better or worse, will codify the consensus around global drug policy for the next decade. As the International Drug Policy consortium notes in a recent briefing, it's hard to overestimate the devastation caused to individuals and societies across the world by this strict prohibitionist stance.

Excluding Africa, one in three HIV infections results from the use of contaminated injecting equipment. But, while countless studies have concluded that provision of sterile equipment reduces needle-sharing but does not promote drug use, in many countries drug control continues to trump public health. In Russia, which has the fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world, users don't even have the option of weaning themselves off illegal drugs using a substitute such as methadone, because it is itself illegal.

Despite a global trend towards the abolition of capital punishment, the number of regimes applying the death penalty to drug offences is increasing, in contravention of international human rights law. More broadly, punishing drug users doesn't work; it costs the taxpayer billions and keeps prisons dangerously overcrowded. Mike Trace, the former deputy UK drugs tsar, says successive studies show minimal correlation between the severity of law enforcement and demand for illegal drugs. Some of the toughest countries, such as the US, still have the highest rates of use. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/05/war-on-drugs-prohibition