By Matt Lamers, International Editor / MJ Biz Daily

Key European government ministers have concluded more work must be done to craft a sustainable framework for regulating recreational cannabis across the region – arguing the current situation is untenable after an unusual meeting of top officials earlier this month.

Government ministers from Germany, Malta, the Netherlands and meeting host Luxembourg met July 15 to discuss adult-use cannabis regulation and the legal issues involved in market oversight.

The gathering – believed to be the first of its kind and held at Senningen Castle – involved countries with varying degrees of interest in regulating recreational cannabis.

At the meeting’s conclusion, Germany, Luxembourg and Malta adopted a joint statement – with the Netherlands electing not to take part.

‘Status quo not a tenable option’: EU ministers discuss cannabis policy hurdles

Across the world, the state of environmental stress is unprecedented. As scholarship and activism on ‘environmental justice’ point out, poorer and marginalised communities face particular exposure to environmental harms.

This holds especially true for populations in the Global South, including Myanmar. The role of opium cultivation in relation to these environmental stresses is an underexplored terrain. Yet, as this new TNI report argues, drugs, as well as the policy responses to them, are an environmental crisis in Myanmar as well as other countries where opium poppy, coca bush and cannabis plants are cultivated.

Across the world, the state of environmental stress is unprecedented. This includes major threats to the lands, soils, waters, forests, and oceans that make up our ecosystems and biodiverse nature. Cutting across all of this are the unfolding effects of climate change and global heating. All of these developments will continue to have dramatic impacts on both people and planet. These impacts are however not evenly distributed. As scholarship and activism on ‘environmental justice’ points out, poorer and marginalised communities, often differentiated along class, gender and racial lines, face particular exposure to environmental harms. This holds particularly true for populations in the Global South.

The role of illicit drugs in relation to these environmental stresses is an underexplored terrain. Yet, as this report will argue, drugs, as well as the policy responses to them, are an environmental issue. This disconnect between drug and environmental policy is the result largely of the institutional compartmentalisation of the issue of drugs into the domain of crime and law enforcement with little outreach to other spheres related to the environment or sustainable development. References to the environment within drug policy have as such remained sparse and limited in scope.

This is slowly changing. A resolution on alternative development adopted by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) - the central drug policy-making body within the UN system - in March this year gave special attention to environmental protection, encouraging “Member States to examine and address, within the efforts of alternative development, the harmful impact of the illicit cultivation of crops used for the production of narcotic drugs on the environment, which may lead to deforestation and the pollution of soil and water, and to seize the opportunities offered by alternative development with regard to the conservation and sustainable use of the environment and the protection of biodiversity”. And for the first time this year, the 2022 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report will include a special booklet on the connection between illicit drugs and the environment. This follows on from an increasing number of official side-events that have been organised in recent years at the CND in Vienna on the issue of drugs and the environment.

TNI’s latest report ‘Prohibited Plants. Environmental Justice in Drug Policy’ explores, among other things, the environmental dynamics associated with opium poppy cultivation in the two regions with which it is most associated: Myanmar (as part of the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’ along with Thailand and Laos) and Afghanistan. The two cases make for an interesting contrast. While in the case of Myanmar, more traditional forms of cultivation practised by upland populations and ethnic minority groups as part of mobile agricultural systems are examined, in Afghanistan the environmental implications of the introduction of new ‘green’ technologies in the form of solar-powered deepwater wells for long-term sustainability are discussed. In both cases, opium cultivation has continued, if not dramatically increased, against the backdrop of a series of bans and, with few exceptions, failed crop-substitution and alternative development (AD) programmes.

Opium cultivation and environmental justice in Myanmar

By Claudia Stoicescu, Associate Professor, Public Health, Monash University, Indonesia

On a balmy day in 2009, Adinda Amalia (not her real name) and her boyfriend were arrested after they were caught injecting heroin in an informal shooting gallery – a derelict property in a South Jakarta slum. The arrests followed a police raid on the area.

The couple were brought to the local police station. While her boyfriend was allegedly beaten and tortured in a separate cell, Adinda was allegedly blindfolded, drugged, and gang-raped by police officers over four days.

The police allegedly demanded IDR95 million (US$6500) to end her ordeal and drop all charges – an unfathomable amount for someone living below the poverty line in Indonesia.

My latest research shows that experiences similar to Adinda’s at the hands of police officers are widespread in Indonesia.

Worse still, drug law enforcement in Indonesia including crackdowns, arrests for drug use, incarceration, and extrajudicial abuses were linked with negative health outcomes for women, and increased their risk of suffering a drug overdose.

New research shows how Indonesia’s drug control policy victimises women, and puts their health at risk

The first time Patricia Tévez went to the district prosecutor’s office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to demand that the system do something to protect her husband, who was being tortured and beaten inside a prison, she felt lost and alone. With her two young children beside her, she was left standing in the office with no support and no idea as to what to do next. What she did know is that if she didn’t do something, her husband could be killed. The authorities told her everything was fine.

It was then that Patricia met Andrea Casamento, the mother of a young man who had been in a very similar situation. She had received calls from her son, who was being held in the Penitentiary Center of Ezeiza, a department 20 kilometers south of the country’s capital, saying that all he had to wear was underwear, and that he had gone many hours without eating. He told her that if he didn’t find a way out of prison soon, he would take his own life.

Patricia remembers the feeling well: “Our family members tell us ‘go to the Ombudsman’s office, say this or that’ but they explain things to us using words that we don’t understand. Family members aren’t lawyers. It’s because of this that family members don’t go, don’t ask, and don’t claim their rights.”

Andrea and Patricia have faced the reality of thousands of women whose relatives are in prison: coming face to face with an intricate maze of institutions, mechanisms, and vulnerabilities that systematically violate the rights of their loved ones, as well as their own.

“The narrative of human rights surrounding prison systems across Latin America has largely been centered on those on the inside of the bars,” explains WOLA Senior Fellow, Coletta Youngers. “But we also need to take into account, from a gender perspective, who is left behind when people are detained and how their lives change virtually overnight.”

Women make up the majority of people who care for those in prisons across Latin America. They are often responsible for securing food, medicines and other essential needs States fail to provide. They suffer from abusive searches and other forms of violence when visiting their loved ones behind bars.

The invisible resistance to Latin America’s prison systems

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The place where Chris gets his fentanyl is bright and airy, all blond wood and exposed brick. The staff is friendly and knowledgeable about the potency of the pills he can crush, cook and inject.

Soft pop music played, and an attendant spritzed a bit of Covid-cautious spray on his seat before he settled into a booth on a recent afternoon with a couple of red-and-yellow pills, a tourniquet, a tiny candle and a lighter.

“The best thing about this is the guarantee: I can come in here four times a day and get it,” Chris said. He no longer spends all of his waking hours in a frantic scrabble of panhandling and “other stuff” to scrape up the cash to pay a dealer. He won’t get arrested — and he won’t overdose and die using a drug that is not what it is sold as.

Canada: Fentanyl from the government? A Vancouver experiment aims to stop overdoses

Civil society organisations sent an open letter to the EU Commission to criticise the new call for drug policy grant proposals that almost only focuses on law enforcement and excludes harm reduction.

Since the Drug Unit of the EU Commission was relocated to the Internal Security Department, civil society has been concerned about the continuous shifting of its approach towards a more repressive, law-and-order direction from a balanced, integrated model of drug policies.

The new call for proposals launched by the Commission is another step in this direction. Unlike the previous EC JUST drug policy grant calls, this funding mechanism almost only focuses on supply reduction. From its four objectives, three focuses on improving supply reduction, it has only one objective on drug prevention – while harm reduction is completely missing.

Correlation – European Harm Reduction Network (C-EHRN), an umbrella of European harm reduction organisations (Rights Reporter Foundation, the organisation operating this website, is a Steering Committee member) sent an open letter to Ilva Johanson, Commissioner of Home Affairs, and Fiona Sipala, the head of the Drug Unit of the EC, to address this issue.

“We write to you on behalf of Correlation – European Harm Reduction Network (CEHRN), representing 158 civil society organisations (CSO) working in the area of harm reduction drug policy in Europe. C-EHRN is part of Foundation De Regenboog Groep and, as such, is also represented in the EU Civil Society Forum on Drugs.

Together with the undersigned networks, we would like to express our concern and disappointment with the current call of the Internal Security Grant concerning better law enforcement in the area of illicit drug trafficking. We believe this call does not reflect the principles of an evidence-based, integrated, balanced and multidisciplinary approach to the drugs phenomenon and is not in line with the Drug Strategy of the European Union. The call has a narrow focus on law enforcement interventions, with no objectives to improve complex public health and social services, including harm reduction.

For several years, the members and organisations we work with have benefited from the EC JUST Drug Policy grants launched by the European Commission. These grants demonstrated the balanced, evidence-based and multidisciplinary approach to drug policies in accordance with the core principles of the European Union. They provided an excellent opportunity for civil society organisations working in the field of drugs to cooperate internationally and exchange knowledge and good practices.
When the Drugs Unit was moved from the Justice Department to the Internal Security Department, civil society organisations were promised that this would not affect the balanced and multidisciplinary approach to drug policies of the EU Commission.
However, the apparent shift towards law enforcement and crime prevention proves different – with social and public health aspects slipping off the agenda.

The Internal Security call lays only limited emphasis on drug demand reduction and none at all on harm reduction. At the same time, no other EU Programme took over this responsibility, leaving drug demand and harm reduction behind, without any opportunity for EU funding and support.

This is an extremely concerning development. EU funding has become increasingly important in recent years because of the emerging funding crisis for harm reduction, especially in the Eastern part of the European Union. Since the 2008 economic crisis, funding for harm reduction has constantly been declining in most Member States.

Several essential services operated by CSOs have been closed down or curtailed due to budget cuts and the retreat of international donors.

On top of the funding crisis, CSOs experience a shrinking space for civil society in several Member States, where governments are increasingly hostile to those organisations that receive international funding or work with marginalised groups of society. With decreasing national and local funds, direct funding from the European Commission was often the only funding opportunity to improve advocacy and innovation in the harm reduction field for many organisations. This opportunity is now lost.

DG Home is the department within the EC responsible for developing and implementing a balanced, integrated and evidence-based EU Drug Policy. Such a balanced approach requires that funding mechanisms are available for all drug policy areas and not only for law enforcement and crime prevention programmes.

We, therefore, call upon the European Commission and DG Home to reinstall the funding mechanism for drug demand and harm reduction to ensure a balanced and evidence-based drug policy also in the future.

We look forward to your response and hope for your continued support for civil society in the area of drug policy and harm reduction.”

Drug Policy Network South East Europe [DPNSEE]

EU HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis and Tuberculosis Civil Society Forum

Eurasian Harm Reduction Association [EHRA]

European Network of People Who Use Drugs [EuroNPUD]

Federation des Acteurs en Education en Promotion de la Sante de Guyane [AGRRR] International Drug Policy Consortium [IDPC]

International Network of People Who Use Drugs [INPUD]

Youth Organizations for Drug Actions [YODA]

Civil society demands balanced EU funding for drug policies

A week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Brittney Griner was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, where cannabis oil vape cartridges were found in her luggage.

Griner, an American basketball star and Olympic medallist who played part-time in a Russian team, admitted the cartridges were hers and that she had packed in a hurry, not intending to break Russian law.

She was charged with drug trafficking, an offence that could see her imprisoned for up to 10 years. She is attending a fifth hearing of her trial on Tuesday.

What to know about Brittney Griner’s case and Russia’s drug laws

Part-time position (initially 50%, or 2 days / 18 hours per week)

Starting Salary: £30,554 to £34,389 pro rata, depending on experience

The International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) is a global network of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that aims to promote objective and open debate on the effectiveness, direction and content of drug policies at the national, regional and international levels. We have nearly 200 member organisations worldwide, and employ nine staff and consultants based in the UK, the Netherlands, Thailand and Ghana.

As our work, budgets and activities continue to expand, we are looking to appoint a Senior Finance Officer to contribute to the smooth and effective running of our secretariat operations. Working closely with the Executive Director and the Chief Operating Officer, this new role will help us to maintain the systems and diligent financial management needed to protect IDPC’s reputation as a reliable partner and grantee.

The successful candidate will have demonstrable finance and accounting experience, and will ideally be AAT or ACCA/CIMA qualified. They will be highly motivated, flexible and capable of working both independently and as part of a busy team. Excellent English communication skills are therefore essential, as are IT skills and experience with detailed financial management processes and independent audits. This role will suit a candidate who is committed to the details, and whose inquisitive and collaborative nature will drive them to look at and beyond the financial information to provide the narrative and insight needed by senior management and the Board of Directors.

Previous experience in the drug policy sector is not expected, but desirable attributes will include experience of working with non-governmental organisations and charities; experience of international work, especially in the Netherlands; competency in other languages; experience of building the capacity of other staff or partners with regards to financial management; and/or previous experience working with “Xero” or similar online accounting software.

Please click here to access the job description.

In 2021, IDPC transitioned into a remote working organisation and a four-day working week, so this role will be home-based rather than office-based. Nonetheless, applicants must have (and be able to evidence) the right to live and work in the UK, and must be able and willing to travel to regular team meetings that take place in or around London.

In return, IDPC will provide the necessary resources to support your remote working, as well as generous employment terms (including pension contribution in excess of the statutory requirements, 29 days’ annual leave pro rata, and a commitment to supporting personal development).

This position is an initial one year contract, with a view to further extension and expansion if funding permits. Probation is for an initial three-month period.

If you wish to apply for this post, please complete the application form (right-click to save) and send it to contact@idpc.net, before 11pm (UK time) on 

. Shortlisted candidates will be contacted soon after, for interviews in late August. We regret that we cannot respond directly to unsuccessful applicants.

IDPC recruits Senior Finance Officer

By Luis Jaime Acosta and Oliver Griffin / Reuters

BOGOTA, June 28 (Reuters) - Colombian leaders must recognize how drug trafficking has penetrated the country's culture, economy and politics and how the global war on drugs is driving its internal armed conflict, Colombia's truth commission said on Tuesday in a long-awaited report.

The commission, established as part of a 2016 peace deal between the government and the now-demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels, urged the country to reassess the role of drugs in its almost 60-year internal conflict.

Colombia truth commission urges drug policy change to end violence

Two people on death row for drugs are scheduled to be executed tomorrow, in violation of international law

LONDON [6 July 2022] – The government of Singapore is scheduled to execute Kalwant Singh and Norasharee bin Gous tomorrow, 7 July. Both Singh and bin Gous were arrested for drug offences and have already spent several years on death row. After a two-year pause in executions, Singapore has resumed executions for drug offences at an alarming rate this year. If carried out, these would be the third and fourth executions in Singapore this year, all of which have been for drug offences.

An open letter published this week calls on the United Nations’ major human rights and drug control bodies to intervene and help stop these impending executions. Harm Reduction International, together with the International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD), the Network of Asian People who Use Drugs (NAPUD), the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) and 99 other organisations and human rights experts from over 50 countries are calling on the United Nations to urge Singapore to immediately halt the executions.

“The government of Singapore is acting in violation of international human rights law,” said Naomi Burke-Shyne, Executive Director of Harm Reduction International. “The international community must urge Singapore to stop using this inhumane punishment that disproportionately impacts marginalised people,” she added.

Kalwant Singh is a Malaysian national arrested for a drug offence when he was 23 years’ old. His trial has revealed the economic circumstances that pushed Singh into committing the drug offence, including having to repay a debt to an illegal money lender. Norasharee bin Gous was arrested in relation to the same case, based purely on the testimony of another co-accused, who was spared the death penalty based on this testimony. Both Singh and bin Gous were notified of the scheduled execution last Thursday, 30 June. They were tried in connection to the same drug transaction, and despite being found to be mere drug couriers, they were sentenced to the mandatory death penalty. Their cases mirror the vast majority of death penalty cases in Singapore and around the world; the death penalty for drugs disproportionately impacts poor people as well as racial and ethnic minorities. These cases are also often ridden with concerns about fair trials.

The letters sent to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reiterate that the death penalty for drug offences violates international human rights and drug control standards.

At least 30 people are currently on death row for drugs in Singapore and are thus at imminent risk of execution. According to research by Harm Reduction International, although 35 retain the death penalty for drug offences, Singapore is one of only six countries to have carried out executions for drug offences in the past five years (China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Vietnam).

Suchitra Rajagopalan – Tel: (+44) 7518 457 693

Harm Reduction International is a leading NGO working to reduce the negative health, social and legal impacts of drug use and drug policy.

Harm Reduction International has monitored use of the death penalty for drug offences worldwide since our first ground-breaking publication on this issue in 2007. We provide regular updates on legislative and practical developments related to the use of capital punishment for drug offences, a practice which is a clear violation of international human rights law.

Over 100 human rights groups and experts urge UN to demand Singapore halt imminent executions

GENEVA (24 June 2022) – UN human rights experts* have called on the international community to bring an end to the so-called “war on drugs” and promote drug policies that are firmly anchored in human rights. Ahead of the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking on 26 June 2022, the experts issued the following statement:

“Data and experience accumulated by UN experts have shown that the “war on drugs” undermines health and social wellbeing and wastes public resources while failing to eradicate the demand for illegal drugs and the illegal drug market. Worse, this “war” has engendered narco-economies at the local, national and regional levels in several instances to the detriment of national development. Such policies have far-reaching negative implications for the widest range of human rights, including the right to personal liberty, freedom from forced labour, from ill-treatment and torture, fair trial rights, the rights to health, including palliative treatment and care, right to adequate housing, freedom from discrimination, right to clean and healthy environment, right to culture and freedoms of expression, religion, assembly and association and the right to equal treatment before the law.

These policies, many of which are gender blind, have also had a profoundly negative impact on the world’s most vulnerable people including minorities, people of African descent, indigenous peoples, children and young people, persons with disabilities, older persons, people living with HIV/AIDS, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons, homeless persons, sex workers, migrants, the unemployed and ex-convicts. Globally, women are serving prison sentences in relation to drug offences at a much higher rate/proportion than men, despite their often low-level, non-violent and first-time involvement in such crimes. Often discriminatory gender stereotypes of women’s “moral” conduct plays a role in the disproportionate prison sentence.

These same policies also propel detrimental practices such as racial profiling and sustain the scheme of systemic and structural discrimination affecting those made vulnerable and marginalized communities, especially people with multiple intersectional identities.

In a major study released in 2021, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that the “war on drugs” had resulted in mass incarceration through racial profiling, search and seize laws and procedures, excessive pretrial detention, disproportionate sentencing, and the criminalisation of people who use drugs, including pregnant women in some countries. The study also found widespread rights violations associated with the enforcement of drug laws, including unlawful imprisonment, the trial of children and adolescents as “adults”, torture and ill-treatment, lack of fair trial guarantees, extra-judicial killings, and the abusive use of the death penalty.

Although the death penalty can only be imposed under international law for ‘the most serious crimes’, which are consistently interpreted to mean acts of intentional killing, a wide range of drug-related offences are punishable by death in over 30 countries.

Everyone without exception has the right to life-saving harm reduction interventions. However, the coverage of harm reduction services remains very low, even though they are essential to protect the people who use drugs and guarantee their right to physical and mental health.

As the UN system Common Position on drug policy has emphasised, drug use and dependency should not be treated as a criminal matter, but rather as a health issue to be addressed through rights-based measures including public health education, the provision of mental hygiene treatment, care and support, rehabilitation and transition/reintegration programmes.

Moreover, the threat of imprisonment should not be used as a coercive tool to incentivise people into drug treatment. Drug treatment should always be voluntary, based on informed consent, and left exclusively to health professionals. To this end, all compulsory drug treatment centres should be closed.

The forced eradication of crops in the context of drug control policies can lead to loss of life due to the excessive use of force by security forces. Aerial spraying of hazardous substances used to kill illegal crops can cause serious harm to the environment, subsistence harvests and clean and safe water, as well as the health, economic and financial independence, and welfare and well-being of indigenous peoples and peasant communities, especially women. The implementation of forced eradication programmes without respecting the right of affected groups and individuals to information and participation in the decisional process is also of concern.

The UN system, the international community and individual Member States have a historical responsibility to reverse the devastation brought about by decades of a global “war on drugs”.

We collectively call on the Member States and all UN agencies to ground their drug policy responses in international human rights law and standards. Furthermore, states and international bodies that provide financial or technical assistance on drug policy should ensure that these policies are gender responsive while upholding and actively seeking to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms.

We urge Member States and international bodies to supersede their current drug policies with ones grounded in the principles of the application of a comprehensive, restorative and reintegrative justice approach. Effective, community based, inclusive preventive measures are equally important.

Now more than ever, the international community must replace punishment with support and promote policies that respect, protect and fulfil the rights of all communities.”

Ms. Elina Steinerte, Mr. Matthew Gillett, Ms. Priya Gopalan

 (Chair), Dorothy Estrada Tanck (Vice-Chair), Elizabeth Broderick, Ivana Radačić, and Meskerem Geset Techane, Working Group on discrimination against women and girls

Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health; 

, Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing;

 Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; 

Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association

, Special Rapporteur on the implications for human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes; 

, Independent Expert on the enjoyment of all human rights by older persons; 

, Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, including its causes and consequences; 

Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran; 

Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children

Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; 

 (Jordan), Special Rapporteur on violence against women 

 are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work voluntarily; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent of any government or organisation and serve in their individual capacity.

For further information and media requests, please contact Ms. Lucie Viersma (+ 41 22 928 9380 / 

For media inquiries related to other UN independent experts please contact Dharisha Indraguptha (+41 79 506 1088 dharisha.indraguptha@un.org) or Renato Rosario De Souza (renato.rosariodesouza@un.org)

Follow news related to the UN’s independent human rights experts on Twitter @UN_SPExperts.

End ‘war on drugs’ and promote policies rooted in human rights: UN experts

“Drugs can kill” – This is how the preface of the newly published World Drug Report, written by the director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime – the Egyptian Ghada Waly – begins. But is it drugs or bad drug policies that kill people?

One would like to think the UN had departed from this simplistic language when speaking about the complex phenomena of drugs. But ‘drugs can kill’ looks like a didactic and moralising message from an old-school, fear-based drug prevention campaign rather than the preface of one of the most prestigious reports on drug trends.

Of course drug use can have lethal consequences under certain circumstances. But it is never the molecule in itself that has murderous properties or intentions. Even water can “kill” you if you have too much or if it is too hot/cold. It is the context we should explore in which people who use drugs die. By demonising (some) substances and attributing them “killer instincts” we distort the reality and fail to recognise the role of set and setting.

Even tobacco does not “kill” in itself: it is the human behaviour of inhaling the carcinogenic smoke of cigarettes mass-produced and advertised by tobacco companies for many decades that kill millions of people every year. And it is not opioids in themselves that kill more young people in North America than car accidents. It is the black market supply of highly potent fentanyl-type drugs, the end products of the iron law of drug prohibition, that is responsible for the huge increase in overdose deaths.

Whenever we have seen a surge in drug-related deaths, it was because of bad regulation, either allowing full commercialisation and benefiting profit-hungry legal companies, or waging a “war on drugs”, fuelling the black market and criminal organisations.

Ms. Ghada Waly is right to point out that “the whole of the international community shares the same goals of protecting the health and welfare of people everywhere.” But she is wrong to say that our “shared understanding…is rooted in the fact that drug use for non-medical purposes is harmful.”

I don’t share the understanding of non-medical drug use as necessarily harmful.

Risky, yes. But most adults are able to mitigate these risks. We know from epidemiological research that the vast majority of people who use drugs do not develop compulsive, abusive relationships with substances but they use them to play, to explore, and to relax, without causing much harm to themselves or to their environment.

Addiction as such is not caused by drugs themselves – it is caused by suffering. It is an unsuccessful response to the pain felt by people who may be traumatised, isolated and/or socially excluded. Only when drugs are used as tools to give temporary relief from the suffering of “sober” life, which can be miserable in many ways, do they become the source of a compulsive and self-destructive behaviour.

The more people feel that their lives are miserable, that they are isolated and can find no meaning and connection in their lives, the more people will be at risk of addictions. It is not accidental that drug dependence is the most prevalent among people who live on the margins of society. It is not simply access to drugs that creates dependence: it is social isolation, inequality, and exclusion.

As Gabor Mate, the renowned author and healer says, we live in a toxic culture that alienates us from people around us, and even from our true selves. And toxic cultures create a toxic relationship to drugs.

It is a pervasive illusion in drug policies that governments should focus on “fighting” drugs and trying to eliminate drug demand and supply altogether. Not all non-medical drug use is harmful – and even when it becomes harmful, we need to focus on reducing the harms and not “fight” drugs themselves.

We can witness all around the world how governments kill, torture, and incarcerate millions of people in the name of “fighting drugs”. There are currently 3000 people on death row for drug offences worldwide. We can see how thousands of people who use drugs are murdered on the street in some Asian countries, without any trial, with absolute impunity. We documented in our video how hundreds of thousands of people are detained in the name of “drug rehabilitation”. It is documented how people are denied access to medications and services that could save their lives in the name of drug control. How people die of otherwise manageable/curable medical problems because they have no access to sterile needles and/or medications, due to repressive government policies. How families are broken apart by ridiculously long prison sentences for non-violent drug offences. We see how the banning of psychoactive substances leads to the emergence of ever more potent new psychoactive substances, leading to mass hospitalisations and deaths. How drug policies become a tool to control and punish ethnic minorities and the war on drugs fuels racial discrimination.

But there is not much information about these harms and their policy context if you read the World Drug Report. What you can read is a lengthy analysis on cannabis legalisation, focusing mainly on its alleged harms and not so much on their benefits. There is also no reflection within the report about the devastating human rights abuses committed in the name of drug control. The lack of explicit references to harm reduction and human rights in this report is in stark contrast with the statement of UN human rights experts who called on the international community to end the so-called war on drugs on the eve of the world drug day this year.

If governments would like to prevent drug misuse, the logical step is not to spend more on drug policing, prisons or fear-based prevention campaigns in schools, but to make sure that every child grows up in a nurturing environment, protected from abuse and isolation. They should focus on reducing social, racial and gender inequalities and support the poor, the marginalised. They should respect human rights and support a free and vibrant civil society (unlike in Egypt, where civil society was under attack by the government Ms. Waly worked for).

We can have meaningful debates about how to regulate cannabis (or other drugs) and there is a valid concern about how cannabis is being commercialised in some countries, without the meaningful involvement of civil society or any focus on redressing the harms of the war on drugs. We should put the lives and health of people before profits – but our choice is not black-and-white, total prohibition or full commercialisation.

Legal regulation, unlike prohibition, has the benefit of giving us plenty of room and opportunity to maximise benefits and minimise harms.

The reduction in smoking-related deaths, one of the greatest public health successes in history, shows how this can be done. With smart regulation, without mass incarceration. Cannabis could be regulated in a similar, non-criminal international public health framework, such as the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. And governments should consider similar regulatory frameworks for other substances, adjusted to the special context in which they are used.

For too long the international community demonised the non-medical use of some drugs while it ignored the harmful consequences of repressive drug policies.

We urgently need a paradigm shift, a new shared understanding about the so-called “world drug problem” – shifting the focus from fighting all non-medical drug use to supporting people to live a healthier and more meaningful life in which drugs cannot cause much harm.

This also means that UNODC – and Ms Ghada Waly – has to show stronger leadership in its willingness to analyse, discuss and question the impacts of repressive drug policies on the lives of millions of people worldwide.

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