This is the second report from LEAP board members present at the 56th session
of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs this week.
VIENNA
March 15, 2013
According to reports issued by the Secretariat for the
UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, methamphetamines represented the largest
increase in illicit drug use worldwide in 2012 as reflected in part by the seizure
of 60 tons of meth that year. Those same reports reflected that forty nine new
psychoactive substances were identified and in use among European Union member
states in 2011, compared with forty one new substances in 2010 and twenty four
in 2009.
The Commission on Narcotic Drugs is charged with
responsibility for establishing drug policy for the United Nations, consistent
with three UN prohibitionist treaties adopted in 1961, 1971 and 1988. In March
of each year, the Commission has the opportunity to study the Secretariat's
reports and other evidence of drug use and trafficking, examine the
effectiveness of its policies, and recommend revisions and changes to world
drug policy. Given that responsibility and authority -- and given the
Secretariat's facts regarding the explosion of meth use, meth seizures and new
synthetic-drug proliferation -- a serious reexamination of the UN drug
prohibition policy was warranted.
But it didn't happen. Concluding a week of meetings of
the 56th session of the CND on Friday, the three UN drug prohibition treaties
escaped alive and well without any significant policy change recommendations.
One reform group, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
(LEAP), a non-profit organization composed of drug cops, prosecutors, judges
and other law enforcement personnel, who for years led the fight against drugs
but who now oppose the failed drug war, expressed disappointment that the CND
never engaged in a discussion of fundamental questions concerning world drug
policy.
The CND failed to take up the question of whether drug
prohibition does more harm than good. Despite the huge meth seizures and
proliferation of new drugs in the market, the CND failed to take up the
question of whether drug prohibition policy itself causes increased drug
availability, potency, use, abuse, addiction, disease and death.
Ignoring other fundamental questions, the CND failed
to consider whether drug prohibition policy itself causes addict crime and
turf-war crime, violence, corruption and injustice; and whether it erodes
freedom, liberty and human rights.
The CND failed to consider the fundamental question of
whether the United Nations should repudiate the UN/Al Capone style
drug-prohibition paradigm, instead adhering to the failed and harmful drug-war
policy.
Triggered by unrelenting violence and other threats to
the public health and safety of their people, some Latin American countries,
such as Guatemala and Uruguay, are increasingly unwilling to accept the
drug-prohibition status quo. Signs of change are also evident in the United States,
where the people of Colorado and Washington have expressed unwillingness to
live with nonsensical cannabis laws that feed Mexican drug cartels and deprive
citizens of freedom.
In some European countries sentiment is also being
expressed for a rejection of the top-down UN-mandated prohibition of drugs and
for the restoration of national sovereignity that would enable each country to
establish drug laws that best fit their people's problems and needs through a
system of legalization, regulation and control.
Courageously, Bolivia, by insisting on the
constitutional right of its people to preserve the traditional use of the coca
leaf, has shown the nations of the world a way to throw off the straight-jacket,
zero-tolerance UN prohibitionist conventions.
Following Bolivia's procedural success, other nations
of the world could also reject the current prohibition policy and replace it
with drug policies that are conducive to the public health, safety and welfare,
through a system of legalization, regulation and control.
- Jim Gierach, Annie Machon, Terry Nelson, Maria Lucia Karam
