Many journalists and activists who follow the drug war picked-up on the report last week from the Global Commission on Drug Policy—the most recent of several international ‘blue ribbon’ commissions of former world leaders and dignitaries that has called for a rethinking of the global drug war. This particular report was remarkable insofar as its opening language is unambiguous and condemning: “The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.”
One commentator mistakenly identified the commission as a United Nations subsidiary and considered it “not terribly surprising” that the U.N. would make these findings. I don’t mean to embarrass her for the mistake, but it highlights an important but often overlooked fact about the global war on drugs: any signatory to the U.N. Drug Conventions of 1961, 1971, and 1988 (and their respective modifying protocols) is legally bound to maintain, at minimum, a broad prohibition of the drug trade. While the treaties are not self-executing, any country that would unilaterally legalize drugs would draw the ire of powerful hyper-prohibitionist countries—most notably, the United States—and would likely result in retributive economic sanctions and political pressure against them.
This is not to say other countries are completely helpless to face their own internal drug problems. Most notably, Portugal has decriminalized drug use and possession while maintaining a prohibition on trafficking, which falls within the bounds of the conventions in letter, though arguably not in spirit, of the law. As discussed in the Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s 2009 paper “After the War on Drugs: A Blueprint for Regulation,”:
The growing global trend towards actual or de facto decriminalisation of personal possession/use of drugs, whilst nominally permitted within the treaties, like harm reduction, poses serious practical and intellectual challenges to the status quo in the longer term. Such reforms not only challenge the spirit of the conventions but are now pushing the ‘room to manoeuvre’ to its limits, and arguably beyond.
Other nation states have carved out their special interests within the global status quo. While Afghanistan supplies roughly 90% of the world’s illicit opium-based drug trade, China, India, and Turkey maintain opium operations to supply the world’s licit medicinal opiates with minimal diversion into illegal markets. Legalizing Afghanistan’s opiate production could, among other things, legitimize the nation’s number one export and lessen the tension created by the contradictory U.S. military strategy there. (The counter-insurgency strategy (COIN) employed in Afghanistan depends on the trust and cooperation of poppy farmers, but the official policy is to take an active role to prevent those farmers’ crops from getting to markets abroad.) Unsurprisingly, the United States government refuses to even consider legitimizing Afghanistan’s poppies for medicinal purposes, protecting its prohibitionist policy and supporting the interests of the opiate triopoly. (One could argue that Afghanistan lacks the necessary legal structure to protect its produce from diversion, but it’s hard to imagine a situation with a more robust black market and greater corruption than currently exists there.)
The United States’ drug policy has, with the U.N.’s full support and cooperation, become the global drug policy. Year after year, the U.N. committees hold meetings and release reports on new ways to tackle this Sisyphean struggle—despite all evidence that it’s not working. Other countries suffer senseless tragedies simply because the U.S. government has enlisted other governments to control the supply side of its own failed attempt to sate the greatest demand for drugs on the planet—the wealth and desire of the American people.
