Change of Course. An Agenda for Vienna
Martin Jelsma
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.
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 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. Measures like new laws against money-laundering, tightening control of chemical precursors, improve international judicial cooperation, ease extradition procedures, etc.
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 the control 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.
We prepared a special edition for the mid-term review in Vienna, which is launched here today. In the publication "Change of Course - An Agenda for Vienna", we look back at how the unrealistic pledges of the UNGASS were reached and how in the process every attempt was made to avoid fundamental questions to evaluate the efficacy of the current approach to drug control. The briefing also looks forward to Vienna and beyond, offering recommendations for a constructive agenda in the hope that this can contribute to a more rational, pragmatic and humane approach to the drugs issue. The briefing is an appeal to Vienna in favour of an open-minded UN drugs debate.
Looking back at the history of the 1998 UNGASS reveals the limitations of the rational functioning of the UN drug control machinery. Behind the apparent unanimity of the UNGASS outcomes, lies a longstanding conflict within the UN system between nations desperately trying to maintain the status quo of a prohibition regime rooted in 'zero tolerance', and those recognising its failure, illusion and hollow rhetoric who are opting for a more rational and pragmatic approach, the trend with its centre of gravity in Europe. Instead of the proclaimed 'growing convergence of views', it is evident there is a growing divergence and an impasse which urgently needs to be broken.
The starting point for a mid-term review should be a recognition of the absence of significant progress towards the 2008 targets. The reality is that in spite of all efforts to eradicate crops and to disrupt trafficking, the production and availability of drugs have not been reduced. The adopted strategies, goals and targets therefore have to be genuinely evaluated with an open mind towards future policy directions. There are four areas where Europe could play a major role to break the impasse using the opportunity next month in Vienna: the introduction of harm/risk reduction in the UN drugs debate, the opening up of room for manoeuvre on supply side, efforts to improve the climate of the UN-level drugs debate, and an initiative aiming to revise the drug control conventions.
Harm/risk Reduction in the UN Drugs Debate
The moment has arrived for a breakthrough for the harm reduction or risk reduction concept. At the very least it should become a normal and accepted part of the debate on the UN level. In the Action Plan adopted in 1999 to implement the UNGASS Guiding Principles on Demand Reduction, countries committed themselves to offer "the full spectrum of services, including reducing the adverse health and social consequences of drug abuse". The Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS adopted at the UNGASS of June 2001, specifically calls on nations to ensure, by 2005, expanded access to clean needles and to promote "harm reduction efforts related to drug use".
There is now broad acceptance that on demand side there is much more to strive for and to gain than only looking at prevalence figures. The European Union Strategy on Drugs (2000-2004), includes explicit targets to 'reduce drug-related health damage'. An EU Council recommendation on risk reduction is in process to specify actions in that area. In spite of considerable national differences, the EMCDDA sees a trend across Europe in the direction of more pragmatic policies. Outside of Europe, several countries have been moving in a similar direction, most notably Canada, Australia and New Zealand, while some Latin American countries are exploring taking such steps, awaiting an appropriate political moment.
There is also a growing recognition of the need to distinguish between recreational use and problematic use and a shift in policy focus accordingly, concentrating policy efforts on the relatively small group of problematic users. Only a minor percentage of recreational users develop problematic patterns of consumption. Especially for massively consumed substances like cannabis and XTC those percentages are so low that the world should stop fooling itself by putting them in the same category as heroin.
These developments taken together should lead to a change in climate at the level of UNDCP, CND and INCB, the core triangle of the UN drug control machinery that so far has consistently rejected the use of these terms in the policy debate. This is in contrast to agencies like WHO, UNAIDS and UNDP that are already using the harm/risk reduction concept as a matter of course. Thus, the issue of UN system-wide consistency is also at stake here.
Room for Manoeuvre on Supply Side
On the demand side, the tendency towards more pragmatic drug policies is gaining ground. On the production side, however, 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.
We need to open space for pragmatic policies towards illicit cultivation. More flexibility in the negotiations with coca farmer unions in Bolivia and Peru could have prevented the enormous social tensions right now. Proposals could be discussed to decriminalise small scale cultivation. Several countries have expressed their wish to decriminalise cannabis cultivation. Why can the heroin needed for the prescription programmes in The Netherlands, Switzerland and soon in Germany and the United Kingdom, not come from Afghanistan? Why has a pharmaceutical company in France to plant more opium poppies to provide these programmes with sufficient heroin while the Karzai government is pressured to eradicate poppy fields risking new violence?
The absence of latitude also hinders attempts in Alternative Development strategies, to justify more realistic gradual reduction schemes, adjusted to the slow pace of demand reduction and appropriate to 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, for 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 March by the CND, a joint British-German initiative, could serve to explore options in the direction of pragmatic policies. The Resolution (CND 45/14) calls for "a rigorous and comprehensive thematic evaluation, for determining best practices in alternative development by assessing the impact of alternative development on both human development indicators and drug control objectives and by addressing the key development issues of poverty reduction, gender, environmental sustainability and conflict resolution". The same resolution by the way 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".
Improve the Climate of Debate
The difference between the climate of debate in the CND and that of drug policy debates and practices outside of the Vienna conference hall is staggering. Over the decades, difficulties in developing a common discourse in international drug control have led to the construction of a glass bowl, a depressurised environment that keeps certain ideas and terminology on the outside to facilitate consensus-seeking.
Fresh air is badly needed to improve the debate. The CND Secretariat, UNDCP and INCB have functioned mainly as air conditioners, re-circulating stale air within the system. In preparing the agenda and documents for a session, they filter out unwanted views and concepts that threaten to put pressure on the climate within the system. They re-circulate only that air generated from the already agreed principles and the signed conventions. Rather than air conditioners, what is needed is a ventilation fan blowing in fresh air.
Ad hoc expert groups providing policy recommendations can play a role here. So far, however, their composition has been controlled and restricted to members of the triangle CND-UNDCP-INCB. As a result, they too served as air conditioners not ventilation fans.
UN-sponsored research projects can play such a role too, but they have suffered from politicisation and censorship. When things threatened to get out of hand, as happened in 1995 with a WHO research project on cocaine, which reached conclusions that did not confer with the predominant discourse, pressure built up so quickly that the whole project was simply deleted for fear that the glass bowl might crack. The US threatened to cut WHO funding, saying out loud in the World Health Assembly: "If WHO activities relating to drugs fail to reinforce proven drug-control approaches, funds for the relevant programs should be curtailed".
UNDCP, in its function as a centre of expertise, could well play a fan role, but under Arlacchi it tended to be characterised by internal mole-hunts to close off ventilation shafts. The reform process under the new Executive Director, Antonio Maria Costa, may well bring about significant improvements on that level, however. The new Operational Priorities for the Office on Drugs and Crime (ODC) already stress the need for "Independent evaluation to assess success and failure in meeting objectives and in producing impact".
Active NGO participation could play a crucial ventilation role as well -as in fact TNI is trying to do- though procedures are extremely limited and most groups challenging the dominant discourse have found the CND climate so appalling that they prefer to stay clear of it.
Somehow, the fearful attitude towards an open-minded, rational and honest debate has to be overcome and Europe has a major role to play here.
A revision of the drug control conventions
Greek Foreign Minister Papandreou has proposed to undertake "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".
Countries need to have more leeway for experimentation and pragmatic approaches than the conventions now allow for. There is a growing tension between practice and theory, which should be addressed by adjusting the conventions to the requirements of practical policy, not the other way around.
Concretely, Europe could take the initiative in April to establish 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 valuable ventilation role by evaluating the costs and effectiveness of current policies, producing evidence-based and debate-oriented analysis of ongoing policy trends, and recommending appropriate adjustments to the current drug control framework.
Consensus on new approaches will not be found easily on the UN level. But European countries have sound reasons to be assertive about their achievements with pragmatic approaches, and to demand adjustments to the global legal framework that enable them to continue on the path they've democratically chosen for. The limits of latitude allowed under the conventions are being reached, as the INCB again points out in a rather nasty way in its report released last week. But, 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".
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