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What have the Russians done for us in the international drug policy field? A timely reminder to take back control

Axel Klein, GDPO Senior Research Associate.
April 24, 2019.

At the 62nd meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in March this year the tensions between states with widely diverging drug policies finally came to the surface. On the floor of the plenary meeting the Russian delegation took Canada to task for ‘violating international law [by] legalising cannabis.’ (http://cndblog.org/2019/03/plenary-item-9-implementation-of-the-international-drug-control-treaties-cont-2/)

The Russia delegate also took issue with the Expert Commission on Drug Dependence of the World Health Organisation for recommending that cannabis be moved from schedule 4 of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and placed in the less strict schedule 1. Interestingly, the objection had nothing to do with either the new assessment of the harms posed by cannabis or its medical potential. What had given cause to offence was that the ‘perception of the world of the community would be that legalisation is fine and dandy. Probably the experts don’t have to go through the turmoil of thinking through the repercussions of their decisions. They are technical experts. Nothing more’ (emphasis added).

Technical issues, say of patient benefit, the need to address discrimination and stigma, or pre-empt trafficking were not touched upon. The Russian Federation’s statement also glossed over the fact that the placement was not designed to be permanently fixed. The original founders of the system expected that substances would move across the schedules as more scientific evidence became available. Important to recall here is that at the time that cannabis was slotted into schedule 4, tetrahydrocannabinol, the most important psychoactive substance, had not even been discovered.

The point of Russia’s attack on countries like Canada, Uruguay and several US states– though only Canada was singled out – was the risks that legalisation was having consequences.

Consequentialism has not been a driving force in the history of international drug control, given the ontological foundation of the treaties on the ‘welfare of mankind’. The system architects recruited ‘mankind’ to labour in the construction and then retire. Hence the object of Russian concern were not people in their totality or diverse sub-populations – patients, drug consumers, communities – but the ‘international drug control system’ itself.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, we then understand that adhering to the provisions of the three drug control conventions and the various associated agreements and protocols is only indirectly to do with problems of addiction and substance misuse. Their overriding purpose lies in protecting the functionaries and officials who work in it.

Such proposals tend to resonate particularly with representatives of countries with natural resource-based economies and authoritarian regimes. If the recent focus on human rights has already opened a divide between countries, the question of accountability is likely to push them even further apart. Justifying costly layers of administration to tax-paying electorates (though not to universities), is difficult at the best of times, but particularly when they fail to have a positive purpose.

And yet this is what the international system has long been lacking, at least according to Antonio Maria Costa, the former head of UNODC. In a seminal address to the CND in 2008 he stated with counter-intuitive perspicacity, that the ‘system was no longer fit for purpose’ and unable to contain a number of displacements.(Costa, Antonia Maria, Making drug control ‘fit for purpose’ Building on the UNGASS decade, Report by the Executive Director of the UNODC, 2008) The first he mentioned was the ‘huge criminal black market that now thrives in order to get prohibited substances from producers to consumers.’ Along with these markets comes the full spectrum of crime from large, police and policy corrupting syndicates to addiction fueled shoplifting. Such crime is the trade-off for containing the public health that is threatened by open drug markets. It is on this Faustian pact that the system is build.

Antonia Maria Costa

(Antonia Maria Costa, UNODC)

Picking up on the admonition by the Russian delegate to consider the repercussions of our actions we need to review the criminogenic effect of drug control. This has to be done repeatedly and publicly precisely because it runs counter to the popular assumptions. In popular folklore, police and paramilitaries are believed to be breaking down doors and shooting up laboratories in ‘response’ to drug criminals. In effect, the causal effect runs the other way. The harder police and magistrates squeeze drug supply, the more devious and brutal the industry becomes when meeting the demand.

The fact that drug control generates crime needs to be repeated to policy makers at every level and may even hold sway with an audience that is otherwise immune to arguments about human rights, patient needs or stigmatization.

At the CND in Vienna most national delegations are comprised of and led by senior law enforcement officers or officials of the Ministry of Interior. If the realisation that vigorous enforcement is resulting in ever more vigorous criminality has not so far had much effect comes down to one of two possible sets of explanation. First, it could be that they are (i) simply not listening, (ii) the causal chain has not been understood, or (iii) is simply not believed. But the second explanation is that the criminal justice sector agencies and public have different objectives. The former are interested in expanding and increasing means and powers to enforce the law. And if public safety is one of the outcomes, so much the better.

In accordance with key tenets of institutional economics we hold that drug control and law enforcement are driven by motives of any social organism – self perpetuation. Hence the need for continuous checks and assessments of policy purpose and outcomes. Since all institutions also include well intentioned and dedicated professionals the need for restating the arguments of criminogenic consequence has to be repeated over and over.

Naturally it is much more difficult to achieve results in thematic areas where key policy decisions have been abstracted by remote and unaccountable international bodies. As the Russian delegate reminds of the importance of repercussions, it is high time to take back control.

Measuring Drug Policy Outcomes: Intersections with Human Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The following blog was first posted by Nazlee Maghsoudi, ICSDP, 07/05/2018
Original link; http://www.icsdp.org/measuring_drug_policy_outcomes_intersections_with_human_rights_and_the_sustainable_development_goals_sdgs

For the sixth consecutive year, a side event was held at the 61st Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) to continue the global discussion on reprioritizing the objectives and indicators used to evaluate drug policies.

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Pic 1Recent years have seen a growing appreciation for the intersections between drug policy and the sustainable development agenda, particularly in relation to human rights. Against this backdrop, and as preparations for the High-Level Ministerial Segment of the CND in 2019 continue, the Government of Switzerland, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), Centro De Estudios Legales Y Sociales, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Global Drug Policy Observatory, and the ICSDP held a side event to examine how the sustainable development agenda might offer opportunities for more effectively measuring the impact of drugs and drug policies, including on human rights.

With the event expertly moderated by Mr. Adrian Franco, National Institute of Statistics and Geography, Mexico, Ms. Cleia Noia, Programme Manager for the Drugs, Security and Democracy Programme at SSRC, began the session by sharing recommendations from a new publication by the International Expert Group on Drug Policy Metrics. Titled, “Aligning Agendas: Drugs, Sustainable Development, and the Drive for Policy Coherence,” the discussion paper argues that aligning the way we measure and evaluate drug policies with the 2030 sustainable development agenda would have two clear benefits; first, such harmonization would help to overcome many of the limitations of drug policies resulting from suboptimal metrics for measuring their impact, and second, help to ensure drug policies enhance, rather than hinder, efforts to achieve the SDGs. Ms. Noia stressed that drug policies must be designed in coordination with other relevant policy agendas to guarantee that achievements in one are not undermined by those in another. A recognition of the interconnectedness of policy agendas is reflected in SDG 17, specifically target 17.14 to “enhance policy coherence for sustainable development.” A key recommendation from the International Expert Group on Drug Policy Metrics is therefore for the UN Deputy Secretary-General to establish a process for developing adequate indicators for target 17.14, including a framework for coherence between drug policy and sustainable development. System-wide coherence would be further reinforced by another recommendation shared by Ms. Noia, which called for the UN Statistical Commission to consider the addition of further SDG indicators related to drugs and drug policies. While only SDG 3 on health and wellbeing includes an explicit indicator in this area, there are at least four other SDGs, as outlined in the discussion paper, that are well positioned for the addition of indicators related to drugs and drug policies. Noting that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing, Ms. Noia concluded by asking Member States to consider how the procedures in place for the sustainable development agenda could be expanded to include their interactions with drug policies, in order to avoid embedding blind spots that would undermine achievement of the SDGs.

Offering concrete examples of drug policy indicators that could be incorporated into the SDG framework, Ms. Marie Nougier, Head of Research and Communications at IDPC, focused on the interactions between drug policy and SDG 5 on gender equality. Pic_2_croppedBeginning with target 5.1 for the end of all forms of discrimination against women, Ms. Nougier stressed that this could be supported through the addition of an indicator measuring cases of discrimination faced by women who use drugs accessing health and social services, given the heightened stigma experienced by this key population. For target 5.2 on the elimination of violence against women, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation, Ms. Nougier emphasized that the SDG indicators framework must track the number of women coerced into the illegal drug market, but also cases of violence by law enforcement officials against women who use drugs, as well as measuring rates of impunity for such cases.

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Beyond SDG 5, many other goals and targets could be used to address the issues affecting women and drugs, including Target 1.4 on equal rights to economic resources, or Target 3.3 on ending AIDS by 2030. These represent just a few examples of the many indicators that could be incorporated into the SDG indicator framework, as well as into other international and national evaluation mechanisms on drug policy impacts, such as the Annual Report Questionnaire (ARQ) – the principal mechanism through which Member States report on the impacts of their drug policies to the UN. Ms. Nougier cautioned that without deliberate efforts to apply a gender perspective to the evaluation of drug policies, this will remain a blind spot and certainly hinder the achievement of SDG 5. This will also require that key aspects of the UNGASS Outcome Document be incorporated into the ARQ to ensure that more opportunities are offered for Member States to report back on gender-disaggregated data.

Christian Schneider, Drug Markets and Drug Policy Analyst at the Swiss Federal Office of Police, built upon the discussion by noting that even if indicators are in place, the limitations of the mechanisms used to gather data must also be taken into account. As a contributor to the ARQ, Mr. Schneider has seen firsthand the limitations and challenges posed by self-reported data. Mr. Schneider suggested that the sustainable development agenda and the UNGASS Outcome Document provide an impetus to address gaps in drug policy evaluation by supplementing self-reported ARQs with data sources from other actors, such as civil society organizations. The UNGASS Outcome Document presents several opportunities for improving the evaluation of drug policies, including paragraph 4(h), which suggestspic3_cropped.png the inclusion of human rights information in Member States’ reporting on the implementation of the three drug control conventions, and paragraph 7(g) on improving impact assessments by employing relevant human development indicators and other measurements in line with the SDGs. Mr. Zaved Mahmood, Human Rights Officer at the OHCHR, further emphasized that these can serve as entry points for human rights data collection. Mr. Mahmood shared a recent publication from the OHCHR, titled, “Human Rights Indicators: A Guide to Measurement and Implementation,” which contains relevant guidance for the incorporation of human rights indicators into the evaluations of drug policies. As the review process for the consideration of improvements to the quality and effectiveness of the ARQ continues, Mr. Mahmood encouraged Member States to use this opportunity to consider a more holistic approach to the evaluation of drug policies and ensure the inclusion of indicators pertaining to human rights.

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Referring to CND Resolution 60/1 (paragraph 6), Mr. Mahmood also urged Member States to explore possibilities to strengthen existing data collection and analysis tools at the national level by using human rights indicators.

Click here to visit the CND Blog’s live reporting from this side event.

Written by: Nazlee Maghsoudi, Knowledge Translation Manager at the ICSDP