International Drug Treaties Research Articles

The Norm Prohibiting the Chewing of Coca Leaf: From the International System to the Colombian State

Este artículo trata sobre el proceso de adopción de los tratados internacionales de drogas en el orden jurídico interno colombiano. La ley internacional establece que los únicos usos lícitos para las substancias que son objeto de vigilancia, como es elcaso de la hoja de coca, son los medicinales y científicos. Por lo tanto, la masticación de hoja de coca realizada por las comunidades indígenas andinas debe ser eliminada. El Estado colombiano ha firmado y ratificado estos tratados internacionales y tiene la responsabilidad de respetar sus compromisos internacionales. Sin embargo, siendo una nación multicultural con dos sistemas formales e igualitarios de derecho (el indígena y la jurisdicción ordinaria) y con el incremento de la participación de las comunidades indígenas en la política colombiana la tarea produce una confrontación. El Estado colombiano se encuentra frente a un dilema: por un lado, cumplir con sus obligaciones jurídicas internacionales y por el otro respetar los derechos de las comunidades indígenas.

Rethinking ‘flexibilities’ in the international drug control system—Potential, precedents and models for reforms

BackgroundMuch international drug policy debate centres on, what policies are permissible under the international drug treaties, whether member states are openly ‘breaching’ these treaties by changing national regulatory frameworks and shifting priorities away from a ‘war on drugs’ approach, and what ‘flexibility’ exists for policy reform and experimentation at national and local levels. Orthodox interpretations hold that the current system is a US-led ‘prohibition regime’ that was constructed in an extremely repressive and restrictive manner with almost no flexibility for significant national deviations. This paper challenges these orthodox interpretive frameworks and suggests no absolute and clear dichotomy between strict adherence and ‘breaches’ of the international treaties. MethodsThis paper uses historical analysis to highlight the flaws in orthodox policy analyses, which assume a uniform interpretation, implementation and set of policy trajectories towards a ‘prohibition regime’ in the 20th century. It challenges some existing legal interpretations of the treaties through recourse to historical precedents of flexible interpretation and policy prioritisation. It then examines the legal justifications currently being formulated by member states to explain a shift towards policies which, until recently, have been viewed as outside the permissible scope of the conventions. It then examines a functionalist framework for understanding the likely contours of drug diplomacy in the post-UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) 2016 era. ResultsThe paper highlights that, contrary to current policy discourses, the international control system has always been implemented in a ‘flexible’ manner. It demonstrates that drug control goals were repeatedly subsumed to security, development, political stability and population welfare imperatives, or what we might now refer to under the umbrella of ‘development issues.’ The paper further demonstrates that policy prioritisation, inherent treaty ambiguities and complexities as well as the recognition of broader issues of security and development were just some of the ways in which member states have flexibly implemented the treaties over the last century. This has frequently occurred in spite of apparent contradictions between national policies and reigning interpretations of international drug control obligations. ConclusionUNGASS 2016 inaugurated a new era based on an evolving understanding of the UN drug control system. In this ‘post-‘war on drugs’ era’, national and local policy choices will increasingly hold greater relevance than international ones. Further, based on numerous historical precedents, international legal interpretations will likely continue to evolve and serve a reactive functional role in providing the formal scope to justify national and local deviations from past global norms. These shifting interpretations are, and will continue to be, reflected in an interim reliance on treaty ‘flexibilities’ to explain sustained international cooperation, even as that cooperation shifts to an entirely new implementation framework.

The failure of drug prohibition and the future of drug law reform in Australia.

Australia’s first drug laws, introduced before Federation, banned only the smoking of opium and were aimed at Chinese people working on the goldfields. Since then, like most other countries, Australia has slowly adopted an evolving system of drug prohibition. This included approving three international drug treaties (1961, 1971, 1988) which require signatory nations to pass legislation imposing criminal sanctions on persons convicted of trafficking any of the listed drugs, now numbering approximately 250. A complex UN system has devised and implemented international drug policy and monitored national drug policy. Drugs were defined as a law enforcement issue by the political use of harsh language when referring to people who use drugs and the allocation to the criminal justice system of the overwhelming majority of government expenditure in response to drugs. Politicians have seen benefits in responding to drugs punitively and relying on the criminal justice system.1 In recent decades, this approach has been increasingly questioned on the grounds of ineffectiveness, often severe collateral damage and the waste of scarce resources.2 Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott conceded in 2014 that regarding the war on drugs ‘It’s not a war we will ever finally win. The war on drugs is a war you can lose.’3 In recent years, retired (and recently serving) senior police4 and politicians in Australia and other countries have acknowledged the failure of global drug prohibition. During the last 50 years, the drug market in Australia and other countries has continued to expand and become more dangerous. The production and consumption of drugs, the number of drug types and the hazardousness of drugs available have all increased. Prices fell, purity often increased and an overwhelming majority of drug users continued to report that obtaining illicit drugs was ‘easy’ or ‘very easy’. Although the aim of our drug laws was to protect the health and well-being of Australians, deaths, disease, property crime, violence and corruption have increased. For example, the rate of heroin overdose deaths in Australia increased 55-fold between 1964 and 1997.5 In contrast to the poor record of criminal justice measures, health and social interventions have often had impressive results. Harm reduction measures such as needle and syringe programs, strenuously opposed initially, averted the spread of HIV among and from people who inject drugs, thereby protecting the community. $1 spent on needle and syringe programs saved an estimated $4 of healthcare costs and $27 overall, while $1 spent on methadone treatment saved an estimated $7.6 The incidence of hepatitis C has declined substantially in Australia in recent years following expansion and improvement of the needle and syringe and drug treatment systems. This trend is likely to continue with further reform of drug laws. Outcomes for the USA and a number of other countries that have relied on law enforcement have also been poor, costly and have often led to severe unintentional negative consequences. In contrast, countries such as the Netherlands, Switzerland and Portugal that have started to emphasise health and social interventions have achieved improved outcomes including reductions in overdose deaths, HIV infections and crime. Some US states (Colorado, Washington) started taxing and regulating cannabis like alcohol in 2014. Oregon, Alaska, Uruguay and Jamaica are now also committed to this approach. For almost a year from July 2013, New Zealand regulated some new psychoactive substances but stopped because the assessment system was not adequate.7,8 The threshold change required for drug law reform is to redefine the problem as primarily a health and social issue.2 This means that illicit drugs will be treated more like alcohol and tobacco with much more emphasis on expanding and improving the drug treatment system and ensuring that disadvantaged populations have better opportunities in life. Many people with severe drug problems manage to regain control of their lives without help.9 For those who need assistance to lead normal and useful lives as members of the community, GPs will play an increasingly important role. If Australia starts moving from criminal to civil penalties for drugs, the thresholds for drug offences will need to be raised and the severity of criminal sanctions reduced. Cannabis, and possibly ecstasy, are among the few drugs that could be taxed and regulated. Drug checking could replace drug sniffer dogs at youth music events. Prescription heroin treatment has proved effective in trials and clinical practice in half a dozen countries and would be helpful in Australia for the small minority of people with severe and treatment refractory heroin dependence.10 Pressure is now growing in Australia for the medicinal use of cannabis.11 Like any other medicine, policy and practice should be based on evidence of its effectiveness and safety.12 Drug prohibition took many decades to evolve and implement. It is likely that a reformed system based on harm reduction will also evolve slowly over several decades.

Julia Dickson-Gómez on Francisco Bastos’ “Structural Violence in the Context of Drug Policy and Initiatives Aiming to Reduce Drug-Related Harm in Contemporary Brazil: A Review”

Bastos’ article on structural violence and drug policy in contemporary Brazil raises a number of big questions that substance abuse researchers, particularly social scientists and public health researchers, should tackle to a greater extent than they have to date. The first big question raised by Bastos’ article is the extent to which international drug treaties influence, and often hamper, national drug policies that may reduce the harm associated with illicit drug use. As Bastos hints, more powerful countries (often those that have problems with “demand”) have more power to dictate the content of international drug treaties than poorer countries (often those that supply). International conventions have defined particular drugs as “illicit.” These treaties—and the recent history of Brazil’s dictatorship—have made drug reform “timid” at best. While drug reform has occurred, moving national law and policy from extremely punitive criminalization to some more tolerant and flexible approaches, these efforts have been hampered by local police enforcement and ambiguities in the law that allow judges considerable latitude in prosecution. For example, a number of state legislations protect the implementation of needle and syringe exchange programs (NSEP) to reduce druguse-related harms. In spite of this, national law has not protected outreach workers or NSEP, and outreach workers and users of these programs continue to be harassed by local police. Law 11343, passed in 2006, draws a distinction between personal use and trafficking with penal sanctions recommended only for the latter. However, the distinction between the two in terms of the amount or nature of the substance was not clear in this law, and left to an interpretation of “contextual factors” and the “personal characteristics and history of each individual” giving each judge considerable and somewhat arbitrary latitude in deciding who should be prosecuted as a drug trafficker.

Reform by subtraction: The path of denunciation of international drug treaties and reaccession with reservations

Almost all countries are parties to the international drug conventions of 1961, 1971 and 1988. These strongly bind parties with respect to their domestic regulation of controlled substances, including requirements that possession, growing or use be a criminal offense and that any regulated market in the substances be limited to use only for medical or scientific purposes. Even where countries have argued they have “wiggle room”, reform within the bounds of the conventions has often resulted in “net-widening” which nullifies the intent of the reform. Among the options for effective reform, probably the most immediately viable is the route of denunciation and reaccession with reservations – the route which Bolivia has now taken in order to legalise a regulated domestic market in coca leaves for chewing. The paper considers the existing record of reservations (by more than 30 parties to each of the conventions). Also discussed are the options for response to the reservations by other parties, which vary between the treaties, and how pursuing the option of denunciation and reaccession with reservation might potentially play out.

How well do international drug conventions protect public health?

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 aimed to eliminate the illicit production and non-medical use of cannabis, cocaine, and opioids, an aim later extended to many pharmaceutical drugs. Over the past 50 years international drug treaties have neither prevented the globalisation of the illicit production and non-medical use of these drugs, nor, outside of developed countries, made these drugs adequately available for medical use. The system has also arguably worsened the human health and wellbeing of drug users by increasing the number of drug users imprisoned, discouraging effective countermeasures to the spread of HIV by injecting drug users, and creating an environment conducive to the violation of drug users' human rights. The international system has belatedly accepted measures to reduce the harm from injecting drug use, but national attempts to reduce penalties for drug use while complying with the treaties have often increased the number of drug users involved with the criminal justice system. The international treaties have also constrained national policy experimentation because they require nation states to criminalise drug use. The adoption of national policies that are more aligned with the risks of different drugs and the effectiveness of controls will require the amendment of existing treaties, the formulation of new treaties, or withdrawal of states from existing treaties and re-accession with reservations.

North Korea—who will help?

North Korea—who will help?

SCALES AND BLINKERS, MOTES AND BEAMS - WHOSE VIEW IS OBSTRUCTED ON DRUG SCHEDULING?

SCALES AND BLINKERS, MOTES AND BEAMS - WHOSE VIEW IS OBSTRUCTED ON DRUG SCHEDULING?

Ensuring Opioid Availability: Methods and Resources

The pain and palliative care fields are encouraged to learn about government drug control policy and to engage with their governments to examine these policies and their implementation in order to address impediments to patient access to pain management. Although pain management is a necessary part of palliative care, it is often impossible because strict national and state regulations block access to opioid analgesics. It is important for us to know that in adhering to international drug treaties, governments often concentrate on drug control to the exclusion of their obligation to ensure opioid availability for medical and scientific purposes. Indeed, international health and regulatory authorities are increasingly concerned about wide disparities in national consumption of opioid analgesics and have called on governments to address barriers in their national laws and regulations that govern the prescribing of opioid analgesics. The Pain & Policy Studies Group (PPSG) has developed methods and resources to assist governments and pain and palliative care groups to examine national policies and make regulatory changes. Romania, India, and Italy are examples. The PPSG is developing several new resources, including a training program for Fellows from low- and middle-income countries, enhanced support of collaborators working on opioid availability, an internet course in international pain policy, an improved website with policy resources and country profiles, and new approaches to the study of opioid consumption indicators.

A framework for prevention

Prevention activity often occurs at different levels of community and social network. At the smallest level it could occur among a group of drug users and their peers, at the largest level, it could take the form of international drug treaties and conventions. Clearly, there are a number of ways of facilitating changes at these different levels of community and social network. This paper describes a framework that has been used by the National Drug Research Institute. It is useful in explaining that various prevention activities can operate at different community levels and in different contexts, and describes their mechanisms of action. The framework borrows from, and adapts, the 'alcohol prevention conceptual model' of Holder and the 'conditional matrix' of Strauss and Corbin. The framework is limited in that it is not a fully conceptualized, data-based or theory-driven model that specifies how its elements relate to one another. Despite these limitations it has proved to be useful in planning, understanding and describing prevention activity.

The international drug treaties: ‘paper tigers’ or dangerous behemoths?

Communism, global drug prohibition and the international supremacy of the United States were among the dominant developments of the twentieth century. The ultimate fate of communism and global drug prohibition were both dependent on the dominance of the world by the United States. By the end of the 20th century, communism had already imploded, its demise accelerated by the United States. Likewise, no other country was more responsible for the creation and expansion of global drug prohibition than the United States. An implacable and almost religious commitment to prohibition was sustained by the United States over many decades, despite the fact that most other countries remained indifferent or even hostile. The United States was largely responsible for convening an international drug policy meeting in Shanghai in 1909, a forerunner of a series of later meetings which gave birth to the three international drug treaties and created the present network of international organisations charged with monitoring and implementing these treaties. During the last quarter of the 20th century, drug prohibition in many countries became a useful device for electing and re-electing the otherwise unelectable, sustaining for some time the lost cause that global drug prohibition had become. Communism and global drug prohibition both began as idealistic movements in the early years of the 20th Century. Communism perished because it ignored powerful market forces, especially the importance of profits in driving economic activity. The same shortcomings also apply to global drug prohibition. At the dawn of the 21st century, global drug prohibition still survives, propped up by the global supremacy of the United States. The failure and futility of prohibition is now apparent to ever-increasing numbers of commentators. This is because of the high costs, limited effectiveness and often-serious unintended negative consequences of banning substances whose demand is largely irrepressible and whose supply is largely uncontrollable. Many have concluded that some form of controlled availability could not possibly produce even worse health, social and economic outcomes than already occur from prohibition, partially successful at best. What is unclear at this stage is what arrangements should replace global drug prohibition. The likelihood is that the repeal of global drug prohibition will follow the same path as the repeal of alcohol prohibition in the United States in the 1930s: when the time comes, different states will go down different paths. As the end of drug prohibition and the end of the century drew near, the international community gathered at the United Nations in New York in 1998 to take stock and contemplate a new slogan (‘‘a drug free world, we can do it’’). The international community decided to commit itself within ten years to achieving SCOPE: the Scheme for Coca and Opium Poppy Eradication. This was denial on an impressively global scale and took place at the very time that the worst international public health threat since the Black Death was quickly gathering pace. By 2002, it was estimated that 25 million had died from AIDS; 42 million were living infected with HIV while an additional 45 million would become infected with HIV by 2010. This public health crisis is accompanied by almost unimaginable damage to the social and economic well being of the lives of hundreds of millions of people. In most regions of the world, sharing of needles and syringes associated with injecting drug use was either the major or the second most important risk factor for HIV infection. Measures to control HIV infection among or from injecting drug users remain among the most effective and cost-effective interventions in the entire HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment repertoire but are still imE-mail address: awodak@stvincents.com.au (A. Wodak). International Journal of Drug Policy 14 (2003) 221 /223

International drug treaties: The connexion between ratification and social and economic conditions

This study examines social and economic conditions in 152 countries and relates them to ratification of the two major international drug control treaties, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances. The findings show that: (i) countries which ratified only the Single Convention had the greatest drug problems; (ii) ratifications were more common among developed countries than developing ones; (iii) ratifications were not more common among larger countries or those having higher expenditures on health and education, but they were more common among older U.N. member countries and those having ratified more nondrug treaties; (iv) the best predictors of ratifications were a high level of life expectancy, a high degree of economic development and a substantial drug problem. The trend has been for more countries to ratify these treaties over time. However, a shorter-term solution would involve international support for those poorer countries which have not yet ratified them. Technical advice in the form of legal experts and translators is one example of such support.