Between 13 - 17 March, a TNI delegation participated at the 66th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna, the UN’s principal forum on drug policy.
TNI organised a side-event together with several other NGOs and the governments of Brazil and Colombia on ‘Aligning Drug Policy with Environmental Protection’. During the event, panellists spoke about the negative consequences of drug control policies for the environment, biodiversity, and people, and put forward recommendations for an environmental harm reduction approach.1
A full transcription of the side-event is to be found here.
As all previous interventions have made plain, drugs are unequivocally an environmental issue.
Looking ahead, three opportunities where the debate around the environmental impacts of drugs and drug policy can be taken forward:
The first is to integrate the environmental impacts of drug policy into the 2024 mid-term review of international drug policy commitments as reflected in the 2019 CND Ministerial Declaration. The modalities resolution for this review as adopted by this year’s CND sets out the process and format for such a review process, including the organisation of “Two interactive, multi-stakeholder round tables, in parallel with the plenary meetings, on the topics ‘Taking stock: work undertaken since 2019’ and ‘The way forward: the road to 2029 and beyond’.
In light of government commitments emerging out of both the climate and biodiversity COPs, it is crucial that environmental concerns in relation to drugs and drug policy are integrated into this review process and in the plans for the coming 5 year, 2024-2029 period. As the UN Secretary General has said, “Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century ... It must be the top, top priority for everyone, everywhere.”
The 2022 UNODC’s World Drug Report for the first time included a Special Booklet on drugs and the environment. While this is a welcome first step in raising the importance of the issue, the international drug policy community must acknowledge the breadth and severity of the environmental impacts associated with drug control policies, particularly for countries in the global South, and member states should commit themselves to reforming policies to eliminate this damage. Some of our more detailed proposals for doing so are contained in our response to the World Drug Report, copies of which can be found in the room!
The second recommendation – and related to the above - can be summed up as ‘don’t go it alone’. The agreement of the UN Common Position on Drugs and linkages to the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda are all welcome developments that can help to foster UN system wide coherence and overcome some of the regime contradictions and blindspots that were spoken of earlier.
There is much scope, certainly at in-country programme level but also at international regime level, for greater inter-agency collaboration between UNODC and e.g. UNEP, UNDP, FAO, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to enhance understanding of the drugs-environment-development nexus. Such inter-agency collaboration could help in the formulation of an environmental harm reduction approach and could look at things such as:
Such an environmental harm reduction approach can be used to submit drug control policies to an environmental stress test or risk assessment framework as talked about earlier. This would not only put an end to harmful drug control strategies such as forced eradication or badly designed crop-substitution programmes, but can be used to predict and prevent future harm moving forward.
The third recommendation is around how best to integrate environmental standards within models of legal regulation. Taking the example of cannabis, the environmental record in jurisdictions where cannabis has been regulated is decidedly mixed. On the one hand, we see the emergence of a standards, testing and trade regime that is driving a lot of cultivation indoors, where, inter alia, the use of high-intensity grow lights contributes to high greenhouse gas emissions. This has come at the expense of legacy cannabis growers, including in traditional producing countries in the global South where sungrown cannabis cultivation is the norm. Fears around the identification of cannabis residue outside track-and-trace systems have also placed restrictions on the possibilities for the recycling of waste, and encourage the use of single-use plastic in packaging.
On the other hand, the design of environmental standards cannot become so onerous and complex that it generates barriers to entry for those wishing to transition from the illicit to licit market. This cumbersome bureaucracy has for example been identified as one of the main reasons for the continuance of an extensive illicit cannabis market even in jurisdictions where cannabis has been regulated, allowing only bigger players to successfully navigate the market. This not only facilitates corporate capture but, without proper safeguards in place, also opens the door to industry greenwashing.
A number of the organisations represented here today have been engaging over the years in dialogues with governments, operators, civil society groups and growers, about models of cannabis regulation that allow for social equity and environmental sustainability to go hand in hand. There are lessons to be learned – both positive and negative – from experiences with transitions from illicit to regulated markets. It is important that the CND can provide a space where these lessons can be socialised and where honest debate/frank exchange can take place.
This is salient not only in terms of cannabis reform but also in light of the call by the governments of Bolivia and Colombia for an independent review process of the scheduling of the coca leaf. We have heard in plenary and in a number of side events this week on this issue. These have included also lived testimony from cocalero, peasant and indigenous communities of the human rights and environmental harms that follow from the persecution of particular plants and the perverse and unintended consequences of punitive drug control policies.
Repairing this rupture of humans from nature that prohibition has engendered must be a central priority for all concerned in aligning drug policy with environmental protection.
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