Abstract

Abstract Health sciences have always had a lot of influence in the formulation of drug policies. However, the international system for the control of illicit drugs is distant from the World Health Organization, for example. It was in the name of health and well-being protection that the Single Narcotics Convention (1961) established a ban on drugs as a rule, with the exception of medical and scientific uses. But it was also in the name of a health category, Harm Reduction, that the so-called Vienna consensus began to break in 2009: it is about the global bipolarization around drug policy, locating member states in two groups. Taking strategy as a means designed to achieve a purpose, which updates the position of agents in the International Drug Control System and which operates the renunciation of the other (FOUCAULT, 2001), we ask: what, in the last decade, was their strategy groups of countries in managing the global drug problem? To answer this question, an ethnography of events and documents was carried out, in addition to semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The field research was the 62nd Ministerial Segment of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (Vienna, 2019), when the last 10 years of drug policy were evaluated and the next decade was planned. Following the Brazilian resolution, created in partnership with Norway, entitled “Promoting measures to prevent transmission of HIV for women who use drugs, including by improving access to post-exposure prophylaxis”, it was possible to observe the effort to maintain that space as a place where health has no voice. Categories such as 'women who use drugs' and 'emergency contraceptives' have been the subject of controversy among diplomats, who have backed down to maintain the already weakened consensus. It is concluded that health is historically used as a strategy for the prohibition of substances, but it can be a tool for changing the paradigm if observed as an instrument in dispute and based on Harm Reduction Key messages Health is the strategy to legitimize drug prohibition, but it can also be the protagonist of the paradigm shift in drug policy if it is anchored in harm reduction. There is an effort to keep the UN's international illicit drug control system out of the health field.

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