Category Archives: modernizing drug law enforcement

Trust in the Crypto-Drug Markets

By Juan Fernandez Ochoa
Team Assistant – IDPC

Despite perceived novelty, drugs have been online from the Internet’s very beginnings. Anecdotal as it may be, it is widely understood that the very first transaction on ARPANET involved a small amount of cannabis. Ever since, cyberspace has provided fertile ground for all sorts of drug-related exchanges.

The appeal of the Internet for people who use drugs is evident. Faced with criminalisation, misinformation and stigma “offline”, the world-wide web can offer people who use drugs a space to interact in [relative] anonymity and safety. Online forums, such as Erowid, have provided a platform for people to share experiences and advice related to their drug use; fostering a sense of community that remains difficult to replicate “in real life”.

Silk Road, however, was a game changer. Launched in February 2011, the site was the first “archetypical” crypto-drug marketⁱ. This “eBay for drugs” combined sophisticated encryption, communications and trust technologies to offer a broad range of [mostly illicit] products and services to users around the world. Cannabis, LSD, MDMA and other controlled substances were now just a click away… plus shipping & handling.

As it is often the case with drug-related developments in a context of prohibition, the initial response from public authorities ranged from cluelessness, to politically expedient outrage, to repression. Less than three years into the Silk Road experiment, and before the site’s impact on the market could be fully understood, the FBI shut it down. Its convicted mastermind, Ross Ulbricht, now serves a life sentence without parole in a federal prison in New York.

Mirroring the reality of “physical” markets, dismantling the Silk Road, and subsequent similar operations, have achieved anything but the intended effects. The original site might no longer exist, but dozens more have been created in its stead, with overall sales and reach continuing to grow at a gradual but unwavering pace.

Despite the available evidence, the role of public authorities in this evolving ecosystem continues to go unchecked. The UNGASS Outcome Document urges Member States to “strengthen law enforcement, criminal justice and legal responses, as well as international cooperation, to prevent and counter drug-related criminal activities using the Internet” (Art. 5 p). As if expecting different results from doing the same thing over and over again.

In stark contrast with a mainstream law enforcement discourse that perceives these online markets essentially as “a safe haven for criminals”, the burgeoning field of research on crypto-drug markets reveals a more nuanced landscape. An interdisciplinary research project on trust in these markets by the Global Drug Policy Observatory (GDPO)ⁱⁱ, for instance, can shed light on the short-sightedness of fundamentally repressive law enforcement interventions targeting crypto-drug markets.

Borrowing tools from linguistics, ethnography and computer science, the investigators have sifted through thousands of megabytes of messages from the now-defunct Silk Road[s] 1 and 2ⁱⁱⁱ. The careful analysis of “collocates”^iv has made it possible to produce a statistically meaningful snapshot of some of the prevailing discourses in these communications.

One strand of the project, led by Professor Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, revealed that trust among users was largely mediated by the exchange of personal experiences and other forms of knowledge, as well as the provision of advice on how to reduce potential harmful effects of drug use. User-based harm reduction strategies have been previously identified in crypto-drug markets and offline communities^v. However, by focusing on the issue of trust, the authors centre and highlight the social bonds underpinning this “indigenous harm reduction”. Public authorities should consider the opportuneness of law enforcement responses that might entail weakening these community strategies^vi, favouring interventions that support the life and health of people who use drugs instead^vii.

A second project strand, headed by Martin Horton-Eddison, provides further evidence on the unintended, although not unexpected, consequences of “hard” law enforcement interventions. Using the same methodology and sources, the study suggests the takedown of Silk Road by the FBI acted as a starting gun for technological innovation in crypto-drug markets – resulting in even more difficulties for law enforcement to target the dark net. Specifically, this research captures the emergence of collective concerns about the “escrow” system.

Escrow has been an essential trait of crypto-drug markets, mitigating some of the multiple risks associated to online transactions. A number of these risks are related to the non-abidance by one of the parties to the terms of the sale/purchase. In the absence of formal institutions to act as arbiters, crypto-drug markets stepped in to fill the gap, offering a service that holds the funds until the other parties (in this case the buyer and seller) both agree to release them. When Silk Road 1 was seized, the FBI expropriated $3.6million from the system. Immediately after Silk Road 2 came to exist, users began to discuss ways to offset these potential losses. Intensified by major “exit scams”, these anxieties in the community seem to have led to the development of better alternatives, such as decentralised and multi-signature escrow systems. Law enforcement action, in short, made crypto-drug markets more resilient and possibly sustainable.

The insights from these studies strongly mirror certain realities of offline drug markets. The global drug control regime has a conspicuous track record of futile interventions that are not motivated, and in fact come at the expense of the wellbeing of people who use drugs. Crypto-drug markets, which are often framed as a threat in international policy debates, might actually offer an opportunity to provide remedial action. Public authorities should rethink their engagement with these spaces, capitalising on the self-regulatory and harm reduction practices deployed by these communities to positively influence, support and empower people who use drugs on- and offline.

This blog post draws on material presented at the Roundtable on Cyber-Trust in Crypto-Drug Markets: Implications for Policy and Policing (London, 21 February 2017), organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and the Global Drug Policy Observatory (GDPO), with support from the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) and the Challenging Human Environments and Research Impact for a Sustainable and Healthy Digital Economy (CHERISH-DE) fund.

Notes

ⁱ Crypto-drug markets can be defined as “digital platforms that facilitate P2P trade of goods and services with the added features of recommendations systems and a reliance on cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. They utilize anonymizing Internet-routing technologies [….] to conceal the physical-[world] identity and location of users and create and open network for such interactions”.

ⁱⁱ Swansea University.

ⁱⁱⁱ February 2011 – October 2013 and Nov. 2013 – November 2014, respectively.

^iv Words that co-occur with statistical significance, denoting “features of the data that are both salient and peculiar”. Di Cristofaro, M. & Horton-Eddison, M. (2017) Corpus Linguistics on the Silk Road(s): The Escrow Example, GDPO Situation Analysis.

^v See, for instance: Bancroft, A., & Reid, P. S. (2016). Concepts of illicit drug quality among darknet market users: Purity, embodied experience, craft and chemical knowledge. International Journal of Drug Policy, 35, 42–49; and Friedman, S. R., de Jong, W., Rossi, D., Touzé, G., Rockwell, R., Des Jarlais, D. C., & Elovich, R. (2007). Harm reduction theory: Users’ culture, micro-social indigenous harm reduction, and the self-organization and outside organizing of users’ groups. International Journal of Drug Policy, 18(2), 107–117.

^vi For more on law enforcement and harm reduction, see, for instance: Monaghan, G., Bewley-Taylor, D., 2013. Modernising Drug Law Enforcement – Report 1 Police Support for Harm Reduction Policies and Practices Towards People Who Inject Drugs. International Drug Policy Consortium, London

^vii See, for instance: Caudevilla, F. The Emergence of Deep Web Marketplaces: A Health Perspective. The Internet and Drugs Market (European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction). Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg; 2016.

ICSDP (re)Blog: Scientific Experts Launch Open Letter on Need for New Metrics to Evaluate Drug Policy

Reblog from:

http://www.icsdp.org/scientific_experts_launch_open_letter_on_need_for_new_metrics_to_evaluate_drug_policy

On January 21, 2016, more than eighty representatives from Member States, UN agencies, and civil society organizations gathered for the launch of a scientific open letter on the path forward for drug policy evaluation.

Titled, “Identifying Common Ground for UNGASS 2016: Rethinking Metrics to Evaluate Drug Policy,” the event hosted by the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy (ICSDP) at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City provided valuable expertise and guidance to Member States and UN agencies in the lead up to the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) in April 2016.

The ICSDP’s open letter calls for a reprioritization of the metrics used to evaluate illicit drug policy. Co-authored by ten global scientific leaders, the open letter uses decades of scientific research to demonstrate that the small number of indicators currently prioritized by the vast majority of UN agencies and Member States – such as levels of illicit drug use and availability – fail to capture the complex ways that drug policy can impact communities. The open letter therefore argues for the adoption of indicators in the areas of health, peace and security, development, and human rights in order to provide a broader and more granular understanding of drug policy impacts. This, in turn, would equip policymakers with the data required to optimize outcomes and substantively control the world drug problem.

Screen_Shot_2016-02-23_at_5.03.55_PM.png Dr. Dan Werb, Director of the ICSDP, focused his presentation on the development challenges that have undermined the successful implementation of Mexico’s drug policy reform. In 2009, Mexico decriminalized the possession and use of small amounts of drugs and legislated a system of diversion that would see drug dependent individuals triaged into drug treatment rather than prison. Despite one of the most progressive drug policies on the books, research measuring the effectiveness of the policy reform in Tijuana – conducted by Dr. Werb and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego – indicates that implementation has fallen short of expectations, as the number of arrests for drug possession in Tijuana have continued to rise despite the policy of decriminalization. According to Dr. Werb, this can be at least partially attributed to the lack of capacity of the Mexican state to provide members of law enforcement with adequate levels of pay, as well as training in the basic tenets of the drug policy reform. Problematically, although a cornerstone of the drug policy reform relies on increased coverage and accessibility of evidence-based addiction treatment, such as methadone maintenance therapy (MMT), resource constraints have resulted in a lack of adequate treatment scale up. Dr. Werb concluded his presentation by emphasizing that, as the Mexican case study demonstrates, a lack of resource commitment by Member States can seriously undermine drug policy goals and development indicators must therefore be captured in drug policy evaluations.

According to Dr. Kanna Hayashi, Research Scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, evaluating levels of coverage for health services would be incomplete without also including indicators to assess quality, such as in the context of treatment for substance use disorders. Describing her research among people who inject drugs in Bangkok, Thailand, Dr. Kayashi noted that although Thailand added MMT to their universal health coverage in 2008, thereby increasing the accessibility of this health service, negative attitudes towards MMT by healthcare providers has led to suboptimal quality and rollout of this treatment modality. Research from 2011 found that the average dosage of methadone in Thailand was 30 milligrams, falling far below the 60-120 milligrams range recommended by the World Health Organization. As a result, 16% of those accessing MMT were also obtaining methadone illicitly and 19% reported syringe sharing. Dr. Hayashi stressed that if MMT were provided appropriately, these outcomes – which undermine efforts to reduce rates of drug dependence and to control the HIV epidemic – could have been avoided. The presence of compulsory drug detention centres is also an issue of suboptimal quality in treatments for substance use disorders. Research from 2011 indicates that, despite a lack of evidence that compulsory treatment for addiction is effective in treating drug dependence, 60% of people accessing drug treatment in Thailand were in compulsory treatment. Hence, as Dr. Hayashi’s presentation outlined, evaluations that do not include assessments of both treatment quality and availability will have limited utility in improving the health impacts of drugs and drug policy.

Dr. Daliah Heller, Clinical Professor at CUNY School of Public Health, provided concrete steps towards the adoption of health indicators by explaining how the majority of Member States could enhance existing data sets to evaluate the health impacts of their drug policies. For example, by collecting information on the presence of drug use as a contributor to death, existing death data in the United States could assess the impacts of dug use in a population. Dr. Heller also emphasized the importance of accompanying health indicators for drug policy with benchmarks for scaling up effective interventions. Monitoring and setting benchmarks for health interventions related to drug use, such as sterile syringe coverage, could help define government funding priorities and highlight disparities to ensure equity in the scale up of health services.

After explaining that the separation between the international drug control and human rights regimes has created an environment of systemic human rights risk in drug policy, Ms. Genevieve Sander, Human Rights Research Analyst at Harm Reduction International, described a series of steps that could be used to ensure the adoption of human rights indicators into drug policy evaluations. First, the specific human rights relevant to drug policy, such as the right to life, must be identified. Human rights standards should then be reviewed to determine the key characteristics of each right in the context of drug policy. A relevant key characteristic of the right to life, for example, would be the use of the death penalty for drug offences. Next, in order to design comprehensive human rights indicators for drug policy, structural, process, and outcome indicators must be included. Structural indicators can be used to shed light on the intent of a Member State. For the right to life , these may include the ratification of international human rights treaties relevant to protecting this human right. Process indicators indicate complicity in human rights violations, and in the example of the right to life, could include the number of convicted people facing the death penalty for drug offences. Finally, a relevant outcome indicator in the context of the right to life is the number of executions for drug offences in the last 12 months. Ms. Sander noted that incorporating all three types of indicators helps to reveal connections between actions and human rights outcomes, and thereby provides information on accountability. Ms. Sander concluded her presentation by emphasizing that all Member States are bound by their obligation in the UN Charter to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights. Adopting human rights indicators, targets, and benchmarks would allow Member States to better meet this obligation by reframing global priorities, focusing on more effective policies and interventions, and redirecting resources to where they are most needed.

Event attendees left with a greater understanding of the need to integrate scientific evidence into the development of a broader set of drug policy metrics, and were equipped with clear and demonstrable steps to better evaluate the multilayered impacts of drug policy on communities.

[WATCH A VIDEO RECORDING OF THE EVENT]

PRESENTATION SLIDES: [DR. WERB] [DR. HAYASHI] [DR. HELLER] [MS. SANDER]

View From the Ground: Bocas del Toro; Drugs in Paradise

By Alastair Smith, Panama

Following exploratory fieldwork in the rural coca growing fields of Colombia, GDPO followed the cocaine supply chain to Panama. Most recently, time spent on the Northern Caribbean coast soon revealed the permeation of drug trafficking into the already complex socioeconomic context that many perceive as paradise.

Paradise of Bocas del Toro (MandingA 2013)

First impressions of Bocas del Toro – the name of both the 7,000+ person settlement on Isla Colon, just off the north eastern seaboard of Panama, but also the wider surrounding Province – largely confirm its international reputation as an accessible tropical ‘paradise’. With sympathetic afternoon light, the final leg of the 1-hour flight from Panama City reveals aqua marine water lapping at golden sands backed by lush green forests. Once established in the area, other widely talked about attractions of Bocas quickly emerge. There is a wealth of outdoor activities. Many international tourists, largely backpackers, and domestic visitors come to enjoy the Caribbean Sea: to scuba dive and snorkel, surf the notorious waves of Playa Bluff, or to take things a little easier with sunbathing and guided tours to spot the charismatic wildlife.

Party goers in one of Bocas’ bars open late into the morning (Taken by Author 2015)

Another attraction of Bocas del Toro for many, and particularly backpackers, is undoubtedly the opportunity to mix Salsa and Reggaeton music, with low cost national beers and regional rum cocktails, as they enjoy the party life offer on Isla Colon (primarily in BocasTown) and the surround islands. Many of the bars and clubs in Bocas town are right on the water: making it very possible to ‘live the dream’ of enjoying beers in a hammock, dancing off the alcohol, and when things get a little too hot back-flipping off the dock into the cooling sea.

In this hedonistic environment, it is seemingly easy to forget the volumes of boat traffic and not think about the dubious quality of the sea water while enjoying a midnight swim. Another undercurrent in the town is the availability cocaine and cannabis. Sellers freely mix in the nightlife with various degrees of subtly in communicating their offerings. During the day, it is unusual to walk the length of town without being offered ‘weed’ – sometimes as a follow up to the initial list proposal of taking a boat tours to the beach – although there is little menacing about time spent in Bocas, and disinterest is well-accepted by opportunistic sellers.

Part of the reason for the level of supply is the demand of international tourists and more permanent life style migrants willing to pay higher prices than local consumers. However, Bocas del Toro is also well supplied with drugs as one of the recognized points of refuge for traffickers making the journey up the EasternCoast from Colombia to North America

Originally founded as a settlement of concentrated population by foreign banana producers, the region remained disconnected from administration in Panama City due to a lack of a reliable road connection: and therefore, the centralized government administration has lacked a presence in many respects. The archipelago is also composed of some highly remote islands that fall well beyond almost all government services and authority: and as in many cases across the world, the lack of state institutions supports the trafficking of drugs.

View of coastal geography from the air (Author 2015)

Despite limited resources, local law enforcement officers in Bocas confirm that they have been involved in interdiction operations in partnership with central authorities and the US Coast Guard: furthermore, these operations have yielded high powerboats used by the traffickers that are then repurposed for local counter narcotics operations. Discussions with the local police support existing knowledge that traffickers use the inland water ways of the Panamanian coast to evade the authorities during the day, and then make their staged journeys under the cover of night (UNODC 2012). In some cases it is believed that small shipments of drugs are consolidated in Panama before being moved on (UNODC 2012). Local testimony also identified that during chases, traffickers will jettison quantities of drugs in attempts to bribe the police.

It is through a combination of these mechanisms that trafficked drugs enter the Bocas economy. The availability of drugs then provides relatively easy returns for those willing to become involved. This option is especially attractive so some due to the poor quality of education, high levels of poverty and general limitations on livelihood opportunities in the Bocas region. Despite Panama’s average national economic growth of 7.2% between 2001 and 2013, of the mainly indigenous population of the Bocas del Toro province, 25% are classified as poor and 11% as extremely poor (Omar and Moreno 2014). Many of these people live on subsistence agriculture and fishing on outer islands. There is therefore a potentially strong pull incentive to become involved in the distribution of drugs. In this case, as was found in Colombia, rural development will likely be as important an anti-trafficing policy as strengthening governance capacity for interdiction operations.

In conclusion, while the vast majority of visitors to Bocas del Toro find their expectations of fulfilled, the reality is that the international trafficking of drugs is playing into a complex socioeconomic situation, which many of the ‘poor’ permanent residents might well not accept as ‘paradise’. Again, genuine investment in enhancing the life opportunities of those currently motivated to support drugs distribution will likely contribute to a reduction in the global trade in narcotic drugs.

Sources

Omar, A. and V. Moreno ( 2014). Pobreza e Indigencia. Panama, Ministerio de Economia y Finanzas.

UNODC (2012). Cocaine from South America to the United States. Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean A Threat Assessment. Vienna, United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime.

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Worrying proposals to discuss the international scheduling of Ketamine at the CND in March 2015

As noted in the 2014 TNI – IDPC report Scheduling in the international drug control system, although often viewed as an obscure technical issue, the problem of scheduling lies at the core of the functioning of the international drug control system. Scheduling – the classification of a substance within a graded system of controls and restrictions, or ‘schedules’ – must take place in order for a substance to be included in the international control framework, and determines the type and intensity of controls to be applied. For this reason, the topic is of central importance. Within this context, recent years have seen ketamine become an increasing point of contention. Concerned by ‘recreational use’, some states, China key among them, have been pushing for international control of the drug. This goes against repeated recommendations from the WHO, the body responsible for providing expert guidance on scheduling decisions within the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND). As the WHO points out, while some non-medical use certainly takes place within some parts of the world, international scheduling would likely have damaging consequences on medical access to the drug (a WHO listed essential medicine) in developing countries. Here it is the only available anaesthetic for essential surgery in most rural areas.

This Fact Sheet on the Proposal to Discuss International Scheduling of Ketamine at the 58^th CND – endorsed by a wide range of civil society organisations, including the GDPO – provides background on the issue and explains why international scheduling would go against all the scientific evidence on the issue, be procedurally unsound and generate considerable negative public health impacts in parts of the world where there is already an acute crisis in essential surgery.

Need Versus Greed: the Complex Nature of Opium Farming in the North East of India

This blog was written by Romesh Bhattacharji, former Narcotics Commissioner of India, founding member of the Institute of Narcotics Studies and Analysis (INSA) and GDPO Technical Advisor

During the shooting of the film Raw Opium in March 2009 I was interviewed in a poor man’s steep and low yielding opium field in Kadong village of Anjaw district in eastern Arunachal Pradesh, India. The village is a good three hours uphill march from a motorable mountain road. I was overwhelmed by the unrelenting misery that I saw amongst the poor who cultivate opium mainly for their own use and barter the small surplus for essentials like utensils and kerosene oil. Faced with such abysmal poverty and the continuing brutal living conditions, I was so sad and swamped by waves of ineffective empathy that I forgot to highlight the fact that there are both rich and poor cultivators. As soon as I saw the finished film a year later I realised that I ought to have distinguished between those that farm on account of need and those that are producing poppies commercially.

A poor man’s opium field on a steep hill side (photo: Romesh Bhattacharji)

Within a year of filming Raw Opium in Arunachal Pradesh, some ex-narcocrats got together to form a think tank – the Institute for Narcotics Studies and Analysis (INSA) – to analyse the drug laws and consequential problems in India. I helped plan a survey that would quantify as precisely as possible opium cultivation and its use in Anjaw and Lohit districts in Arunachal Pradesh, a border state in the North East of India.

The actual survey, carried out by young college students from opium cultivating families, found that a few rich farmers (less than 15%) produced the large majority of the opium. It was noted that the villages close to the road cultivated opium on a commercial scale, while those away from the road (especially in Anjaw district) did so only to provide marginal subsistence and support their addiction. The wealthier farmers have benefited the most from development programmes including financial subsidies for businesses and agriculture such as orange orchards and cardamom plantations, help with marketing their products, interest free loans, free school and college education and free electricity, as well as large-scale government investment in infrastructure projects such as dams, all weather roads, hospitals and schools, employment schemes and health care.

The rich farmers, who were once poor themselves, have properties all over the region and are now able to send their children away to be educated to become engineers, bureaucrats, businessmen, doctors, professors, politicians and so on. The poor opium cultivators now hope that one day roads will reach their villages so that they can also become rich by growing opium on a commercial scale. It should be noted however, that many villages reported that they are ready to give up opium cultivation if a viable agricultural alternative is available.

Approximately 95% of villages in Anjaw and 89% of villages in Lohit district had opium addicts: the total number of addicts was almost 11,000 in number in both the districts (largely males but also about a 1000 females). In both districts there were addicts as young as 15 years old. Very few addicts received treatment but a number of them – almost 1600 addicts – were interested in the possibility of treatment. Unfortunately most of the villages did not have any health care facilities nor were there any community efforts in this direction. It should be noted that whilst locally grown opium is sometimes used for medicinal and ritual purposes, it is increasingly used to support addiction.

A line has to be drawn between greed and need. Those in the former category are selling opium to neighbouring states, to new and old users, and for conversion to heroin. Such cultivators deserve the full brunt of efficient eradication and jail. Those that are poor often grow the opium for their own use and therefore deserve to be given access to opium via the now defunct Opium Registry. The Government of India set up the Opium Registry in 1971 whereby registered opium users received doctor-certified dosages of opium from government stores. At the beginning of the programme there were about 300,000 people enrolled on the programme. More than forty years later, less than a handful are alive to benefit from it and new users are not added to the programme. All over India there are at least 2 million opium users. They get their doses from illicit cultivation and from diversion from licit opium cultivation.

It is my belief that the Opium Registry should be revived on order to curb opium cultivation. If the opium user/cultivator is given opium by the government he or she will not need to cultivate it. Opium fields could then be eradicated without endangering any one’s health. In 1999, whilst Narcotics Commissioner, I recommended that the Government of India revive the system but the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) objected, and the idea was dropped. In 2004 the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre (NDDTC) of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi held a workshop where this topic was discussed further, but nothing came of it.

I have been monitoring the plight of the poor opium cultivators since my first visit to the region in January 1987. More than two score visits followed. Until 2003, as Narcotics Commissioner of India, I used to help eradicate illicit opium fields in these parts and elsewhere in India. In India it is still being done as tenderly as possible: no one is arrested and in the operations I participated in, a little would be left for personal use.

The local government administrators in the late 1980s and early 1990s thought that development and eradication would wean the cultivators away from opium cultivation. It did for a while and the opium available for sale decreased. By the end of the 1990s there were only small cultivators. There were a few large fields but these were collectively cultivated by entire villages. By the end of the 1990s opium cultivation was down to a few hectares in these two districts. However in recent years things have changed and now poppy cultivation is in the thousands of hectares.

The young were initially against opium cultivation but their elders would not listen as they required it for their own use. Development did improve the lives of some villages: electricity and computers have reached wherever the roads have gone, where people once had to walk for days to get to the district headquarters, there are now many buses and taxis and privately owned vehicles plying the roads round the clock; where earlier most people were poorly clothed, they are now dressed in jeans and warm jackets and the young now deliver opium on expensive motorbikes; previously everyone in the district lived off the land, many now have different occupations. In the past they were reluctant to leave their homes and families as they would have no news from their families for months but now they have mobile phones and computers which have helped them leave their homes for employment all over the country.

However despite these improvements in living standards for some, poverty is still rampant in the region and poppy growth is on the rise once again. As has been mentioned above, now those who have gained from the improvements in infrastructure have turned to farming opium for commercial use rather than in order to survive.

‘The Dilemmas of Drug Policy: Global to local’

On Wednesday 19^th February GDPO hosted a film screening of ‘Raw Opium: Pain, Pleasure, Profits’ followed by a panel discussion ‘The Dilemmas of Drug Policy: Global to local’.

The film itself follows the trade in opium/heroin from a poppy growing region of India, over the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border and on to Vancouver’s supervised injection site – Insite – to Portugal’s drug dissuasion committees. There are largely insightful interviews with poppy growers in Arunachal Pradesh, India, a UNDOC enforcement officer on the Tajik-Afghan border, a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officer, the former Indian Narcotics Commissioner Romesh Bhattacharji (and GDPO Technical Advisor) as well as members of the Insite team, Gabor Mate (a doctor who works in Vancouver with problematic drug users), and Portuguese street workers who offer support and food to drug users on the streets. It also talks to some of those that use the supervised injection site in Vancouver about why they started using drugs and what Insite means to them. The film is a powerful exploration of the local and global impacts of the trade.

Building upon many of the issues raised within the film, the accompanying panel discussion explored global nature of the illicit market in heroin and other controlled drugs as an area of public policy concern.

Panel members:

Julia Buxton (Chair) – GDPO Senior Research Officer and Professor of Comparative Politics, School of Public Policy at the Central European University, Budapest

Baroness Molly Meacher – Chair, All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Drug Policy Reform

Ifor Glyn – Chief Executive, SANDS Cymru

Mike Trace – Chief Executive, The Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust (RAPt), Chair, International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) steering group, former Deputy UK Anti-Drug Coordinator

David Bewley-Taylor – GDPO Director and Professor of International Relations and Public Policy, Swansea University

Kicking off the discussion, Professor Bewley-Taylor emphasised the global nature of the heroin/opium trade. In this regard, he noted that in 2012-13 there had been a 36% rise in opium production in Afghanistan and that poppies are now being grown in provinces that had previously been designated ‘poppy-free. He also pointed out that after full ‘Transition’ at the end of 2014, the security situation is likely to worsen with a consequence being that poppy production will continue to increase. Despite a range of complexities and uncertainties concerning the opium market, any increase in production in Afghanistan may well result in a decrease in price and an increase in purity of heroin on the streets of the UK.

This may have a direct impact upon the heroin markets in Swansea. On a local level, it was noted by Ifor Glyn that the city has a growing problem with heroin use. Twenty years ago there was very little heroin use in Swansea and the surrounding area. Today it is one of the main drugs used by clients at SANDS CYMRU. This seems to be part of a broader principality-wide situation, with an estimated 17,000 problematic drug users in Wales. In response, since devolution, the Welsh Assembly Government has become more innovative regarding drug policy and has invested £32 million into the issue area. The Advisory Panel on Substance Misuse – the Welsh version of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) – has recognised that there is a need for drug consumption rooms like the Insite facility shown in the film. They have also looked into heroin prescription similar to the model used in Switzerland. On this point, Baroness Meacher noted that the Swiss model provides a wide range of support services from heroin maintenance to counselling and housing support. She also pointed out that it is estimated that for every 1 Swiss Franc (CHF) spent on this programme, the tax payer is saved CHF2.

Whilst the Welsh government has not instituted drug consumption rooms or heroin maintenance as yet, they are considering new approaches to drug policy. Public Health Wales has set up a government-funded drug testing service – the Wedinos project – where people can have their ‘legal highs’ (or Novel Psychoactive Substances) tested to find out what substances they contain. It aims to give individual users rapid and accurate information to reduce harms associated with drug use.

On national level issues, Baroness Meacher highlighted that UK Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, has ‘come out’ in favour of a review of the UK Misuse of Drugs Act but that Labour and the Conservatives are still resistant to change. Panel members concurred that politicians often do not engage with drug policy reform because there is a fear that being supportive of decriminalisation or legalisation can be politically damaging. For example, at the 2002 Home Affairs Select Committee (of which David Cameron was a member) it was agreed that it was necessary to review the MDA. Cameron supported this but when he became Prime Minister, he jettisoned this proposal.

In response to a question from the audience asking why drug policy is not simply left to the ‘experts’, Baroness Meacher noted that in the UK policy is driven by the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act (MDA) and therefore the only people who can change this are politicians. Scientists, such as members of the ACMD, do their best but are often ignored. A recent example of this was UK Home Secretary Theresa May’s announcement that the drug khat would become a banned substance against the ACMD’s advice. You can read more about the ban on the khat trade in GDPO’s Situation Analysis – The UK khat ban: Likely adverse consequences.

On the international level, it seems that rhetorically at least, there has been a shift in emphasis from criminalisation to a more public health orientated approach. There has been a recognition in much of the world that punishment shouldn’t be a tool of demand reduction. The UN is holding a special session (UNGASS) on drug policy in 2016 and, as outlined by Mike Trace, diplomats are currently trying to agree on a Joint Ministerial Statement (JMS) that will set the scene for the UNGASS, as well as recording member states’ views of progress towards the goals set at the UN Political Declaration on drugs in 2009. It is becoming clear, however, that there is little consensus around the issue. According to Mike Trace states involved in the JMS process can be broadly divided into three camps:

Reformers – e.g. Latin American states such as Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala
Re-balancers – e.g. European nations who agree that drug policy should be health-based rather than criminal justice-based.
Defenders – usually authoritarian countries e.g. Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan. For these countries the War on Drugs is handy for pacifying citizens.

Member states will attend the annual Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) meeting in Vienna in March for a ‘High-Level Segment’ in order to finalise the Join Ministerial Statement. But, as yet, there is little agreement on what it should contain.

Another area of discussion centred on drug policy reform and the relationship between support at the government level and public opinion.

In many countries public opinion on drug policy is way ahead of the politicians. Mike Trace noted that in the US public support in favour of legalisation has shot up in recent years and now hovers around the 60% mark. As a result of this jump in public support, more and more US politicians are coming out in favour of cannabis reform particularly since the voter initiatives in Washington and Colorado in 2012.

A Gallup poll produced last October shows how support for legalisation has changed over time.

The situation is somewhat different in the UK where there is no option for voter-driven referendums. However, Mike Trace noted that within 24 hours of an online campaign run by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas and Avaaz hitting 100,000 signatures, all three main political parties became more eager to discuss the issue. It seems that even in the UK politicians are becoming aware that the public mood might be shifting.

Behind the Staggering Rise in Women’s Imprisonment in Latin America

Harsh drug laws are driving a surge in the number of women imprisoned in Latin America.

Between 2006 and 2011, the female prison population in Latin America almost doubled, increasing from 40,000 to more than 74,000 inmates. The vast majority of incarcerated women are in prison for drug-related offenses. Estimates range from:

75–80 percent in Ecuador
30–60 percent in México
64 percent in Costa Rica
60 percent in Brazil
70 percent in Argentina
More than 90 percent of Argentina’s foreign female prison population is incarcerated for drugs

As Latin America assumes the lead in reforming drug laws internationally, many domestic laws are incredibly harsh. In some Latin American countries, sentences for drug offenses can be as high as 30 years of imprisonment, often with no distinction between minor offenses and involvement in organized crime.

It is clear today that our punitive law enforcement strategies are unjust and have failed to achieve policymakers’ stated goals: to protect public health and increase public security.

Women are primarily involved in the lowest rungs of the drug trafficking ladder, and more often than not, they become involved in order to put food on the table for their children, according to Women, Drug Offenses and Penitentiary Systems in Latin America, a new report published by the International Drug Policy Consortium and written by Corina Giacomello.

The criminalization of these women hardly makes a dent in the drug trade. When they are arrested, they are easily replaced and criminal structures remain basically intact.

But their incarceration does have tragic consequences both for the already overcrowded penitentiary system and for the lives of those women and the people who depend on them.

At the OAS General Assembly meeting in Antigua, Guatemala, in June 2013, the hemisphere’s foreign ministers issued a declaration that highlights that drug policies need to be implemented from a human rights and a gender perspective, with a focus on prevention and ensure civil society participation.

To meet this mandate, more research is needed on women incarcerated on drug charges across the hemisphere; more proportionate penalties should be imposed for drug offenses, especially for vulnerable groups; and far more prevention and income generating programs should be established to keep women from going to jail in the first place.

Finally, a special focus should be put on alternatives to incarceration for low-level, nonviolent offenders and for social reintegration for those who do serve time such that they can return to their families and communities with opportunities for employment and adequate housing.

The criminalization of poverty is not the solution to problems caused by drug use and drug trafficking in Latin America.

This blog was written by Coletta Youngers and originally appeared on Open Society Foundations Voices Blog

Coletta A. Youngers is the Latin America regional associate with the International Drug Policy Consortium and a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America.

Global Drug Policy Program, Latin America Program

Modernizing Drug Law Enforcement takes the stage at United Nations headquarters in New York

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Last week the topic of modernizing drug law enforcement took center stage at UN Headquarters when the Permanent Missions of Switzerland and the Czech Republic to the United Nations co-sponsored a program with International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), Harm Reduction Coalition, the International Security Research Department at Chatham House and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) entitled “Modernizing Drug Law Enforcement”. Featuring a distinguished international panel of scholars and law enforcement personnel including Professor David Bewley-Taylor (Director, Global Drug Policy Observatory (GDPO) at Swansea University, UK), Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown (Brookings Institute, Washington D.C.) and Interim Chief of Police Jim Pugel (Seattle), the event aimed to promote debate around the current challenges to drug law enforcement, the concept of managing drug markets to minimize harm and the implications for future law enforcement strategies. The program was moderated by Heather Haase of IDPC and Harm Reduction Coalition and was well-attended by the UN community and civil society.

The first speaker was Professor David Bewley Taylor, who gave an overview of the Modernizing Drug Law Enforcement project and its key goals and objectives. Providing background for the project, he explained that for decades drug law enforcement has focused on reducing the size of the illicit drug markets by seeking to eradicate drug production, distribution and retail supply, but that these methods have failed in significantly decreasing supply and demand in consumer drug markets. As a result there is a need for an adjustment in drug law enforcement strategies: the new challenge is to manage drug markets policing strategy in a way that will minimize harm to communities.

Minimizing harm is particularly relevant in the case of drug-related violence. Discussing the relationship between violence and drug markets, Professor Bewley-Taylor explained how actions of law enforcement can affect – and even cause – drug drug-related violence. He noted the growing recognition that law enforcement powers can be used to constructively shape these markets and discussed several underlying concepts, especially focusing on the need to change indicators to “metrics that matter” – from metrics concerned with numbers of drug-related arrests, seizures, or hectares of crops eradicated to measures relating to public health and community well-being. He also discussed the need for selective targeting of law enforcement efforts on areas where the most impact on harms can be achieved, and concentrating law enforcement action on the basis of the level of harm caused by individuals in the market (rather than focusing on the easiest to catch).

Professor Bewley-Taylor then presented the core objectives of the program, supported by a series of publications as well as network development and seminars. He ended by expressing the hope that “we will move into the High Level Review in Vienna and the 2016 drugs UNGASS with a different view about policing drug law enforcement”.

Next, Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown discussed her report “Focused deterrence, selective targeting, drug trafficking and organized crime: Concepts and practicalities” (as well as various concepts addressed in the other reports in the series), focusing on enforcement efforts in the context of global drug markets. Giving an overview of the ever changing global drug market, she noted that while each country is different and “one size does not fit all” in the context of law enforcement responses to each situation, there were some things that are generally true across the board. These included that we not only cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem but we also cannot “eradicate” our way out: eradication efforts have not had a lasting effect on markets due to the “balloon effect”. The drug markets pose very severe threats to states and societies – including violence – and therefore it is critical how these markets are managed. She discussed traditional law enforcement methods (exported from the US, particularly NY) such as zero tolerance and high-value targeting (going after heads of criminal organizations) that have been ineffective overall. She then suggested an alternative: while law enforcement has traditionally focused on suppression on the flow of drugs, it makes more sense to focus on suppressing the violence instead. Drug markets lend themselves to this prioritization because drugs are an infinitely renewable resource; thus it would be more effective to focus on the harms associated with the flows, rather than on the flows per se. Another method is to identify the greatest threat generated by a particular drug market and apply selective targeting and focused deterrence methods to signal to criminals that certain behaviors are less tolerated than others (e.g., trafficking will be punished, but violence will be punished far more). Also, middle-level targeting is more effective than high-value targeting, as it is really the middle layer that allows an organization to operate, while in many cases high-value targeting disrupts an organization leading to more violence but no change in conditions.

Finally, she suggested that the goal of law enforcement in connection with drug markets should be to shape behavior of criminals to pose the least threat to societies. She discussed certain aspects connected with this goal, including reducing, to the lowest level possible, the violence of criminals, their capacity to corrupt societies, and their interaction with society. She pointed out that these goals might be achieved not just through deploying law enforcement approaches but with other policies including socioeconomic approaches to dealing with criminality.

The last speaker was Interim Chief Jim Pugel, acting chief of the Seattle Police Department. Chief Pugel described a program that puts many these concepts into practice: the Law Enforcement Diversion Program, or “LEAD”, operating in Seattle. The LEAD program is a comprehensive initiative championed by government and non-government, multi-agency and community partnership to divert non-violent, low level drug dealers away from jail and toward a productive life while making residents feel safer and saving money.

First he discussed some of the challenges law enforcement faced in Seattle that gave rise to the program, including business and resident complaints of street level drug dealing in the downtown area, pressure to arrest low level drug dealers, many of whom were ‘subsistence’ sellers, and concerns of disproportionate impact of these arrests on racial minorities – as the result of which the police department and prosecutors were sued. In the end, they realized that the system was very expensive for everyone involved, and did not produce results. To come up with a better solution for the community, numerous stakeholders, including ACLU, public defenders, police, prosecutors, elected officials, local businesses and community, came together, and, over an 18-month period, met to define the issues and agree on moving forward. The result was the LEAD program.

Chief Pugel then discussed the program including eligibility for LEAD (involving factors such as amount of drugs sold or possessed, whether the person is amenable to diversion, and whether the person exploits others or has committed a violent crime) and how it works: at the point of arrest, the officer offers the choice of going to jail or going to see a case manager. The case manager from a service provider performs an initial assessment at the police station, and within a week a 3-hour assessment is done. The program tries to meet the person’s needs on a holistic basis whether that entails treatment, housing or other services. Any treatment is harm reduction based, and a person can be in the program indefinitely.

A brief audience Q&A session followed the panel speaker presentations in which the discussion circled back to examples of “metrics that matter” – metrics based on community health, such as HIV/AIDS rates, drug-related violence (particularly homicides), and the level of penetration of criminal groups into political processes were cited as examples. The point was made that the difficulty of measuring “smarter” metrics should not deter us from using them – and that there were many indices already available such as the Human Developments Index.

The following day, Professor Bewley-Taylor and Dr. Felbab-Brown, along with Virginia Comolli, Research Associate for Transnational Threats at IISS, presented a similar program to an audience of US officials, security experts, members of the drug policy reform community and embassy personnel at IISS-US in Washington, DC. During his stay in New York, Chief Pugel also made a presentation on the LEAD program to a group of state prosecutors, district attorneys, public health professionals and law enforcement personnel from all over New York State in a meeting held by Drug Policy Alliance and Open Society Foundations, at OSF’s offices in New York City.

The full audio of Modernizing Drug Law Enforcement at UN Headquarters is available here and a video of the IISS-US event can be viewed here.

By Heather Haase, IDPC New York consultant

This post was originally published on the IDPC website –