Supply Reduction and Law Enforcement

Supply Reduction and Law Enforcement
Martin Jelsma
Presented at Conference "Towards an Effective Policy on Drugs: Scientific Evidence, Day-to-day Practice and Policy Choices"
EU-Presidency, Athens, March 2003

"What do we know about the effectiveness of crop eradication / alternative development, and issues raised to promote effective practice."

The 1998 Special Session on drugs (UNGASS) called for "eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy by the year 2008". A clear example of recycling unrealistic pledges. In 1961, with the Single Convention a period was agreed to phase out opium in 15 years and coca and cannabis in 25 years. None of these targets have been met, to the contrary, the illicit drugs market has been expanding ever since. But in New York, ignoring decades of failure in addressing the issue of illicit crops, the UN set the year 2008 as yet another deadline by which to eliminate coca and opium, arbitrarily adding cannabis on the last moment.

On supply reduction side, there is an astonishing lack of sound argumentation about the consequences and impact of policy interventions on the illicit market. The general assumption seems to be that eradication and interdiction operations contribute to achieving the aim of supply reduction simply because they are meant to do so. Contradicting effects of different interventions, market responses, displacement of production and counter-measures by criminal groups involved are not taken into account when judging the overall impact. Very basic questions are rarely posed. For example, if price developments are a useful indicator of drug availability, there are no data on the basis of which one could argue that eradication efforts and the many seizures of shipments have ever reduced the availability on the consumption markets. Wholesale and retail prices show a downward trend while purity is rising, which means there is no shortage on the market. The control efforts seem, rather, to have contributed to increased production to balance the losses. Tightening precursor control is more likely to increase their black market prices, increase criminal Research & Development in replacement chemicals and exacerbate corruption in the chemical industry, than to reduce the availability of the illicit drugs. Already the smuggling of precursors has become an illegal business as profitable as smuggling drugs themselves.

The reality is that in spite of all efforts to reduce illicit cultivation and disrupt trafficking, production and availability of cocaine, heroin and cannabis for consumption have not been reduced. The report of the UK Home Affairs Select Committee last year concluded: "If there is any single lesson from the experience of the last 30 years, it is that policies based wholly or mainly on enforcement are destined to fail. It remains an unhappy fact that the best efforts of police and Customs have had little, if any, impact on the availability of illegal drugs and this is reflected in the prices on the street which are as low as they have ever been. The best that can be said, and the evidence for this is shaky, is that we have succeeded in containing the problem". The chairman Chris Mullin added: "Attempts to combat illegal drugs by means of law enforcement have proved so manifestly unsuccessful that it is difficult to argue for the status quo".

On the demand side, the tendency towards more evidence-based and pragmatic drug policies is gaining ground. On the supply side to the contrary, there has been an escalation in repressive approaches over the last decade. Desperate attempts to show results in terms of counting hectares. Supply reduction efforts have created great harms to individuals and to society at large, filling up prisons, intensifying internal conflicts, increasing corruption, human rights violations, destruction of livelihoods and environmental degradation. The ongoing intensification of chemical spraying of crops in Colombia is a dramatic example creating many policy contradictions. European and UN sponsored development projects are being destroyed by US sponsored eradication planes. Alternative Development no longer exists in Colombia. Last week US drug-czar John Walters talked about a turning point and proudly informed Congress that last year's intensive spraying in Putumayo had forced 10% of the population to flee their homes. Adding to the problem of internal displacement is considered a major success in drug control.

All this takes place without producing convincing evidence that these harmful measures are in any way successful in what they are intended to do: to reduce the availability of drugs for consumption. All combined supply reduction efforts thus far - eradication, Alternative Development, interdiction - have failed in terms of global impact. Therefore, the adopted strategies, goals and targets have to be genuinely evaluated with an open mind towards future policy directions.

Next month, at the mid-term review in Vienna, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and various member states will try to argue that significant progress has been achieved in meeting the UNGASS goals and targets. Reporting on the follow-up of the Action Plan on Eradication and Alternative Development, the Executive Director will draw the attention to a set of historical and recent local success-stories of drug crop reductions. According to ODC, this record will show that the elimination of illicit cultivation can be achieved and sustained.

For the rest, the mid-term evaluation will largely consist of long listings of control measures that member states have undertaken since 1998 to implement the various Action Plans.

Such smokescreens are not convincing. A mid-term review restricted to descriptions of local or temporary fluctuations in the illicit market and to a process-oriented evaluation of implemented measures leads to a distorted picture of virtual progress. To argue -as has been the pattern for the past 40 years- that the answer should be to simply increase law enforcement, judicial cooperation and eradication efforts, are no longer credible. If evaluation is meant for learning lessons and improving policy effectiveness, it cannot escape an assessment of the impact on global drug trends and of the costs and collateral damage inflicted by these measures. Genuine evaluation can lead to inconvenient conclusions and therefore presupposes a political willingness to question the validity of existing policies. Herein lies the main problem.

Three conclusions

1. Cannabis - let's stop fooling ourselves. The inclusion of cannabis in the 1961 Convention was a mistake from the very start and including it again in the elimination target for 2008 is simply absurd. Cultivation takes place everywhere, no-one has a clue about global production and consumption figures anyway, more than a hundred million people use it regularly for recreational purposes without creating major problems. There's a clear policy trend towards decriminalisation across Europe, in Canada, in Jamaica, etc. If some countries want to continue to control it by means of law enforcement, let them do so, but give the rest of the world leeway for pragmatic choices. This means to take cannabis out of the straitjacket of the Conventions, which requires a revision of several 61 and 88 treaty articles - not just a rescheduling.
2. We need to open space for pragmatic policies towards illicit cultivation. The absence of latitude hinders attempts in Alternative Development strategies, to justify more realistic gradual reduction schemes, appropriate to the slow pace of demand reduction and the slow pace of securing alternative livelihoods. In the Alternative Development debate now in the context of the reconstruction in Afghanistan, the drugs issue is increasingly regarded as a cross-cutting issue, to which balanced responses have to be designed that take into account policy considerations in the areas of development, human rights, conflict resolution and prevention, etc. To enable balanced decision-making, however, there has to be room for manoeuvre. The mandatory character of the UN conventions leave no such 'room for manoeuvre' regarding the cultivation of drug-linked crops.
   The thematic evaluation of Alternative Development called for last year by the CND could serve to explore options in the direction of pragmatic policies.
   The same resolution already recognised that "despite great efforts undertaken by many Member States to implement the Action Plan and despite the measures taken to reduce or eliminate illicit drug crops, the world supply of and demand for illicit drugs have remained at almost the same levels".
3. More in general let's use the opportunity of the April CND review to undertake what Minister Papandreou has called "a thorough evaluation of the international drug treaties. We must verify their effectiveness, shortcomings must be brought into the open and proposals must be tabled to find new ways for formulating and applying drug policies". Concretely, an initiative could be taken to establish in April an ad-hoc advisory group composed of a cross-section of multilateral entities: the UNDCP Research Section, the UN World Drug Report team, the WHO Expert Commission, the INCB, the CICAD Expert Group and the EMCDDA. Such an expert group, with proper consultation procedures for academics, NGOs, representatives of users and farmers, has enormous potential. It could play a very valuable role to evaluate the costs and effectiveness of current policies, to produce evidence-based and debate-oriented analysis of ongoing policy trends, and to recommend appropriate adjustments to the current drug control framework.
   

   Consensus on new approaches will not be found easily at the UN level. But European countries have sound reasons to be assertive about their achievements with pragmatic policies, and to demand adjustments to the global legal framework that enable them to continue on the path they've democratically chosen for. As the 1997 UN World Drug Report said: "Laws - and even the international Conventions - are not written in stone; they can be changed when the democratic will of nations so wishes it".