Damp Squib?
You wait nearly 20 years for an UNGASS on global drug policy and then...
well, not much.
See opposite for the sector’s reactions to last month’s event in New York, but first
DDN
hears from one of the architects of President Obama’s drug policy
W
hen UNODC executive director
Yury Fedotov told the closing of
the 2016 UN General Assembly
special session (UNGASS) on the
world drug problem that ‘We must take
advantage of the momentum provided by
UNGASS to strengthen cooperation and
advance comprehensive, balanced, integrated
rights-based approaches’, people could be
forgiven for asking how much momentum
there really was.
Reactions have ranged from cautiously
optimistic to uninspired, disappointed to
enraged – particularly around the content of
the session’s ‘outcome document’. This, according to
the Global Commission on Drug Policy, serves merely
to sustain an ‘unacceptable and outdated legal
status quo’.
The document has been attacked for its failure
to address capital punishment, sufficiently
advocate harm reduction approaches or
acknowledge the ongoing process of drug
policy reform occurring across the world. It
also talks about ‘a society free of drug
abuse’, something that the International
HIV/AIDS Alliance called ‘a dangerous and
distorting fantasy’, while Transform branded
it a ‘shocking betrayal’ of the countries that
had most wanted the UNGASS to take place
– Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala.
Although the session did see Canada’s
health minister announce plans to introduce a
legalised, regulated cannabis market, the main
source of disappointment with the document
was its failure to offer proposals to, in the words of
the Global Commission, ‘regulate drugs and put
governments – rather than criminals – in control’. In
other words, a significant move towards
decriminalisation or legalisation.
That, according to former senior drug policy advisor
at the White House and now professor of psychiatry at
Stanford University, Keith Humphreys (
DDN,
June 2012,
page 16), was never really on the cards. ‘I think it was a
fantasy to think there would be big change,’ he tells
DDN.
‘I think some groups may have convinced people
in fundraising, and maybe convinced themselves, that
the world was going to legalise drugs in New York, and
that was ludicrous. For years it was said, “Everyone
wants to legalise drugs and it’s just the big mean
United States standing in the way”.
The United States didn’t stand in the way and it
turns out nobody wants to do that, except for cannabis
– and not all countries want to with cannabis.’
Rather than the UN, the real obstacle to
legalisation is ‘popular opinion in all the nations of the
world,’ he argues. ‘In the US the majority of people
want to legalise cannabis, but less than 10 per cent
want to legalise heroin or cocaine – there’s been no
general spreading of that sentiment. If you look at
polls of young people in Europe, they don’t
want to; if you look at polls of people in the
Latin countries that are being hammered,
they don’t want to legalise drugs other than
cannabis. So it isn’t surprising, and it isn’t
this evil thing being imposed on the world.’
But doesn’t the roster of ex-presidents and
prime ministers calling for reform represent
something of a groundswell of opinion? ‘The
Global Commission, I think, actually shows
how unaccepted those views are,’ he says. ‘I
know a number of these people are ex-leaders,
but when former leaders call for something
the question you should always ask is, “Why didn’t they
run for office on this platform?”You didn’t run for this
and you didn’t do it when you were in office because you
knew the public wouldn’t like it. You can get 100 NGOs
or whatever, but howmany funders are there for
those 100 NGOs? Are there really 100 different
funders, or are there a couple of wealthy people
who care about this? And that’s fine, but it’s not
a constituency. The checkout line at Waitrose,
plus George Soros, is not a constituency.’
Those advocating legalisation tend to ‘live
in a bubble, and talk to each other a lot’, he
says. So are they being naïve or
disingenuous, in that case? ‘I think there’s a
third option, which is that they don’t care,
and I don’t mean that as an insult. Someone
told me recently, “Yes, use will go up – who
cares?” and I respect that. What they’re saying
is, it’s worth it. “Yes, there’ll be a lot more drug
use, a lot more addiction, but that’s not my
problem – I’m fighting for human rights”, or “I’m
fighting for the free market, for business peoples’
right to make a living”.’
Legalisation arguments can be persuasive, he says,
because it’s a case of the grass is always greener. ‘Doing
things differently often sounds good when things
aren’t going well, but still it seems that most people
just don’t buy it, in part because we have a pretty good
experience of how sales and capitalism work – not just
with tobacco and alcohol, but for anything.
‘If you got rid of the UN treaties and held a
plebiscite in any nation on earth – including the Latin
American countries – and said, “Do you want this to be
a legal, corporate industry?” people would say no.
What’s standing in the way is democracy, and what’s
making cannabis legal is also democracy. If you have
the popular will, then these things are not a barrier.’
6 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| May 2016
Global druG policy
‘I think it was a
fantasy to think
there would be
big change’
KeIth humphreys
