The latest United Nations drug report poses a question with major implications for Latin American organized crime: is the global cocaine market shrinking?

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 2016 World Drug Report (pdf) presents a long-term analysis of cocaine production, seizures and consumption that comes to a startling conclusion: the cocaine trade appears to be in decline.

According to the UNODC, coca cultivation fell by 40 percent between its 2000 peak and 2014. Better yields through improved farming and processing techniques meant cocaine production was less affected, either falling by just 10 percent or actually increasing by 14 percent, depending on which formula is used to calculate it.

However, whichever figure is used, deducting the quantity of cocaine seizures from production produces the same result -- significantly less cocaine on the market.

North America remains the world's biggest cocaine market but consumption has been declining for some time, according to the UNODC. Between 2006 and 2014, cocaine use in the United States fell significantly by all indicators; past year use fell by 32 percent, cocaine related deaths by 34 percent, and treatment admissions by 54 percent.

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Is the global cocaine trade in decline ?

Tailyn Wang was two months pregnant when federal police officers broke into her house in Mexico City, ripped off her nightgown and threw her to the ground. They groped her breasts while punching and kicking her in front of her terrified children, before taking her blindfolded to a police base – without an arrest warrant.

The officers continued to physically and sexually abuse her until she miscarried in the attorney general’s office in Mexico City. Instead of receiving medical attention, she was transferred, still bleeding, to a prison hundreds of miles away. Here, several days after the illegal arrest, Wang was told she was accused of kidnap and organised crime.

More than two years later, Wang, a 35-year-old Peruvian cook, remains in prison awaiting trial, struggling with severe pain in her jaw, shoulders and back. Her mother has been granted a humanitarian visa in Mexico to care for her three traumatized children, now aged seven, 10 and 17.

Innocent women tortured in Mexico to boost arrest figures, report says

Vienna is the location of the headquarters of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In addition, Vienna is the third UN residence city, after New York and Geneva. The Vienna International Centre (VIC), UNO-city – contains the offices of the IAEA and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) as well as the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). The UN Vienna International Centre, at the Kaisermühlen underground station, is magnificent. It is hard to make an accurate estimate of how many people work there and how many more visit it on a daily basis as guests, visitors and sightseers. From the inside, it resembles an ant-hill: an endless flow of people, with work carrying on in a variety of halls and other rooms.

The annual CND meeting isn't just speeches and exchange of ideas, but also offers an opportunity to see with your own eyes how, for example, the Vienna police and fire service work, or what harm reduction in Vienna means. This is a tour we had a chance to take, so for several hours DUNews soaked up information in the centre providing integrated support to drug users.

Harm reduction in Vienna

Dr Nang Pann Ei Kham, coordinator of the Drug Policy Advocacy Group, speaks to Al Jazeera about the deadly addiction.

In Myanmar, thousands of families earn a living farming the crop that feeds the heroin habit of the world's drug users. But not all of the country's opium is smuggled abroad.

Pure, cheap heroin is flooding Myanmar's villages, leaving a trail of death and devastated families in its wake.

Dr Nang Pann Ei Kham, the coordinator of the Drug Policy Advocacy Group, talks about how the fear of corporal punishment and imprisonment prevents many drug users from seeking help, and the rehabilitation centres where "treatment" is based on religious teachings.

Her pressure group includes experts, opium farmers and drug users themselves.

"They are the ones whose lives, livelihoods and health are directly affected by repressive drug policies based on criminalisation and forced eradication. Unfortunately, their voices are too often ignored," she explains.

Poppylands: Understanding Myanmar's addiction to heroin

Could illicit drugs transform from being a source of violence into a source of political order ?

To many law enforcers, the question is completely heretical. For how could a criminal enterprise – associated with violence in so many countries across the world such as Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan, Myanmar, or Mali – ever bring about stability? The business of illicit drugs, many say, is simply a predatory and corrupt cause of violence and disorder. To even insinuate otherwise is sacrilegious.

The evidence emerging from the experience of some countries, however, says otherwise. Rather than dismiss such evidence as heresy, policy-makers would become better informed if they could carefully look at and consider what may really be going on.

In 2009, two US-based professors of political science – Richard Snyder and Angelica Duran-Martinez – confirmed that something was amiss in the historical understanding of opium and heroin production in the conflict-affected mountainous areas of north-eastern Myanmar.

Before 1989, there were some 25 insurgent ethnic armies operating in remote regions of the country, many of them operative since the 1960s. Around eight – who also happened to be the largest armies – operated in the Shan and Kachin regions of the northeast. As the conflicts dragged on year by year, most if not all started turning to opium cultivation and trafficking to finance their armed struggles. In this sense, illicit drugs came to be seen as a direct cause of violence and instability.

Could the drug trade bring about political order ?

Rani Andriani was just 23 when she was sentenced to death for trafficking three-and-a-half kilograms of heroin. From a family of modest means in West Java, she had been a bright high school student and a dedicated daughter. Young, naïve, and under the financial stress that affects so many village families, she was lured by the false promises of a drug syndicate and became a drug mule.

After serving 15 years in prison for drug trafficking, Rani was executed in January 2015, along with five other drug offenders.

Poor and marginalized women like Rani are vulnerable to being sucked into the drug trade, usually as mules. Yet in its eagerness to address the drug problem, the Indonesian government ignores the conditions that trigger the involvement of everyday people in drug trafficking.

For women swept up in the drug trade, legal help that starts early

Today, the UNODC released the 2016 World Drug Report. While the report flags a number of important drug policy issues, it does little to acknowledge the need for new approaches in dealing with drug policy issues through the lens of human rights and public health. It reinforces prohibitionist and law enforcement-based strategies that continue to perpetuate violence, instability, and health crises across the world.

We wanted to call your attention to a few specific areas where the report fell short and direct you to further resources that support a different perspective:


 The report recognizes that prohibition increases the price of illicit drugs and assumes that it deters use, but does not recognize that this often pushes the market underground, causing further violence and corruption. It puts the drugs and drug market into the hands of criminals, increasing safety and security concerns, and limits government control. The analysis of drug-related violence fails to acknowledge the role of the criminal justice system and the international funding dedicated to militarization efforts, ultimately fueling state-driven violence.


 It fails to recognize the importance of coca and opium economies for some of the poorest people of the world to secure a stable livelihood. While we commend the report’s recognition that “poverty, economic disadvantage and unemployment are some of the enabling factors of illicit crop cultivation and drug production,” it lacks an operational recommendation on increasing socio-economic inclusion and sustainability.


 It recognizes that drug policies disproportionately affect women and structural violence against women further marginalizes, victimizes and disempowers women. We agree that structural changes are necessary to adequately support and treatment women but there are few recommendations outlined to take that forward.


 It fails to acknowledge that forced eradication is the driver of deforestation, displacing coca cultivation to more remote areas broadens the agricultural frontier and negatively impacts the environment.


: It does not acknowledge overwhelming failures of many prevention programs and does not indicate that prevention must be evidence-based and include much broader messaging than abstinence of drug use. There is little mention of harm reduction principles or acknowledgement that in addition to abstinence, drug users can reduce their risk through practices such as testing drugs for purity and moving away from injection towards other forms of administration.


: The report blatantly omits any mention of the death penalty for drugs and does not call for its abolition. UN human rights and drug control bodies now recognize that the death penalty for drugs violates international law, but as we see in this report and the UNGASS outcome document, the UNODC continues to fund states carrying out this practice and remains silent on this topic.


The report focuses on seizures and hectares of eradicated drugs but fails to document the true costs of the war on drugs on people and communities. Despite expenditures of billions of dollars, the global marketplace for drugs has remained largely stable, particularly with the growing synthetic market and access to drugs online. This report, however, fails to significantly document the impact of such policies on the health and well-being of people, including the impacts of incarceration, forced treatment, harm to the environment, and the unaccounted for funds spent on the war that are diverted from education, public health, and infrastructure.

2016 World Drug Report - Resources for Advocacy and Communications Efforts

"I was hoping I would never have to write this. That no one would have to write this, ever. UNAIDS and civil society campaigners have had a special relationship of trust and collaboration. But now that relationship seems to have chipped. Irreparably, even.

Two shockingly opposite statements have emerged after the adoption of the 2016 Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS by Member States of the UN at the recently concluded UN General Assembly Special Session last week.

Michel Sidibe, Executive Director of UNAIDS, was quoted in the New York Times saying that he felt ‘the declaration was something to be proud of’. UNAIDS sees this Declaration as another victory in a complex political process which it was tasked with 20 years ago when it was established in 1996. Convening national governments and civil society, and building their capacities on issues related to HIV, has been the central mandate of UNAIDS.

In sharp contrast, campaigners from across the world have called the Political Declaration a ‘high level failure’. In a scathing statement issued by the global coalitions of civil society organisations, reflecting their disbelief and anger at the fatal omissions, they further called it ‘a significant set-back’ and a ‘very weak’ Declaration."

Has UNAIDS been caught napping?

, which coincided with the UN High Level Meeting on HIV in New York, Boston Medical Center (BMC) clinician researchers assessed current global evidence and found that mandatory treatment for people with substance use disorders is not effective in reducing their drug use. In addition, mandatory treatment, which is defined as treatment ordered, motivated or supervised under the criminal justice system, done without a patient's informed consent violates their human rights and does more harm than benefit to the patient.

Bulat Idrisov, MD, MSc, and Karsten Lunze, MD, MPH, DrPH, from the Clinical Addiction Research and Education Unit at BMC and Boston University School of Medicine, in collaboration with researchers in Canada and Malaysia, assessed global data and found that countries often lack the capacity to treat substance use disorders. This happens because they are not able to offer the diagnostic and therapeutic modalities and providers trained in addiction medicine that are necessary for effective treatment.

Mandatory treatment not effective at reducing drug use, violates human rights

The sudden derailing of much-anticipated reforms to legalize medical marijuana in Mexico, as well as raise the possession threshold, has raised doubts over whether President Enrique Peña Nieto's initial promotion of the ideas was ever anything more than good public relations.

"It looks like he never really wanted it," said drug policy expert and activist Lisa Sánchez, noting that it is the president's own Institutional Revolutionary Party that has blocked the reforms. "It's either that, or the PRI now considers that Peña is a liability and his opinion is worth nothing from now until the next presidential elections in 2018."

Sánchez was trying to explain what happened to make the PRI recoil from a proposal that President Peña submitted to legislators in late April. This included both the legalization of marijuana-based medication, and raising the amount of marijuana individuals can carry without risking criminal prosecution from five to 28 grams, or one ounce.

Mexico's president may have been bluffing about his support for weed decriminalization

U Bo sits on the floor of his bamboo hut and puts away a plastic tray covered with a small heap of what looks like sticky, brown tar. This is the day’s opium harvest, which he and his family scraped off the bulbs of their two-acre field of poppies.

His farm, at the foot of a lush mountain, in eastern Myanmar’s Shan state, includes another two acres of rice. Opium will provide his family of seven in Pe Kin village with much-needed cash – his 6kg of opium could fetch about $1,800 (£1,250) – while the paddy provides food.

“We grow poppies because other [cash] crops don’t grow well here. Corn is not good with the poor soil and weather,” says U Bo, 57, a farmer from the Kayan ethnic group.

“I spend most of the money [from opium] on sending my children to school, the rest I use to plant fruit trees,” he says. The opium is sold through a network of secret traders.

The opium bulbs of Myanmar: drug crop or lifeline for poor farmers?

There was praise for the bold goals in the political declaration adopted by the 193-national General Assembly at the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Ending AIDS on 8-10 June, but there was also widespread condemnation of the decision to include only limited references in the declaration to those most at risk of contracting HIV – men who have sex with men, sex workers, transgender people, and people who inject drugs – and to services for these populations.

The problems started before the conference even got underway when, as reported by the Associated Press, Russia, Cameroon, Tanzania and 51 Muslim countries blocked 22 NGOs representing key and vulnerable populations, primarily of gay and transgendered groups, from attending the conference.

In the declaration, countries pledged to end AIDS by 2030. They committed to ensuring that 30 million people living with HIV have access to treatment by 2020. They also committed to reducing the number of new HIV infections to below 500,000 a year by 2020, down from 2.1 million in 2015, and bringing the number of annual AIDS-related deaths to under half a million in 2020, from 1.1 million last year.