RE-THINKING THE GLOBAL WAR ON DRUGS

UNGA SECOND COMMITTEE STUDY GUIDE — MUNSC SALIENT 2018

To learn more about MUNSC Salient and this year’s edition of the conference please visit www.salient.munsc.si.

Introduction

One would be right to wonder how come, in a globalised world characterised by all-encompassing interdependence, an issue as complex as transnational drug trade can so often remain framed in such simplistic terms. It is, in large part, our failure to openly acknowledge this deficiency of perspective that has been preventing us from coming up with more effective solutions to a myriad of different yet inextricably connected social problems related to transnational drug trade. This study guide attempts to overcome the one-dimensional mainstream narrative, still prevalent in many policy deliberations around the world, by placing the economic dimension at the heart of the discussion. Apart from providing a substantive justification for placing the topic on the agenda of the UNGA Economic and Financial Committee, this approach is also meant to encourage the delegates not to lose sight of the causal intertwinement of various socioeconomic factors when contemplating both past and future policy solutions.

Underpinning our focus on the socioeconomic dimension of the issue is the following basic questions — what are the main underlying factors perpetuating transnational drug trade? The question itself, and with it the analysis, is premised on the assumption that it is the material world which at the end of the day still undergirds all human relations. This is not to say other dimensions — such as legal, institutional, discursive etc. — do not play an important role within the issue area. These are all, as is the case with any political issue, an inextricable part of the landscape. However, by failing to first understand and acknowledge the material driving forces behind transnational drug trade, i.e. the supply and demand dynamic, we will continue to run the risk of confusing symptoms for causes, and in turn sustaining the issue instead of resolving it.

With that in mind this study guide proceeds in three main parts. Following a general overview of the committee and its working methods, the first part sketches a historic background against which the remainder of the analysis is then set. It explores how ‘the war on drugs’ and its accompanying narrative were initially conceived and the disastrous effects they entailed. The second, and most extensive, part of the study guide attempts to shed some light on the inner workings of what could be considered a perfectly functioning market. The section begins by taking a second look at the law-enforcement aspect, which was the predominant focus of past policies, before widening the scope of the analysis and positioning this dimension within the wider market dynamic of transnational drug trade. The third and final part takes stock of past UN actions on the issue, providing the delegates with a sense was what has already been accomplished and what parts of the issue remain to be addressed.

Rethink Drug Policy (Source: Health Poverty Action 2016)

Throughout the study guide the core text is supplemented by various forms of content, ranging from official reports and in-depth news pieces to short documentaries and explanatory video clips. These are meant to either expound on topics already covered in the main text or provide some insight into aspects of the issue that otherwise remain largely unaddressed. Even so, the aim of the study guide is to offer a basic introduction to the topic, with further in-depth research on the part of each individual delegate being considered a prerequisite for successfully participating in the debate. To aid one in this endeavour a list of guiding questions has also been provided at the very end of the study guide.

About the Committee

United Nations General Assembly (UN GA) is the representative and policymaking body of the United Nations (UN) that comprises all UN Member States and acts as a forum for multilateral discussions about international ‘issues covered by the UN Charter. It meets annually, intensively from September to December, resumes in January, and continues meeting until all the issues on the agenda are addressed.

Each member state has a representative, who engages in the General Debate in order to discuss most disruptive world issues. Since those are rooted in different areas the General Assembly’s has six Main Committees in which specific areas of world problematics are discussed. As per UN GAs Rules of Procedure Rule each Member State may be represented by one person on each Main Committee and on any other committee that may be established upon which all Member States have the right to be represented’’.

One of the six committees is the Second Committee also known as the Economic and Financial Committee (ECOFIN). This is where economic and financial matters are discussed. UN GA ECOFIN deals with issues of ‘sovereign debt, poverty eradication, climate change, energy, the situation of landlocked countries, and information and communication technologies’ . In order for the UN Member States to cope with the aforementioned problems, the Second Committee provides new frameworks and guidelines that assist in addressing them . Later the countries’ findings and conclusions are forwarded to the UN Member States during the General Assembly Plenary for a final decision.

The current, 72th session, focuses on economic growth, development financing and different aspects of development (agriculture, technology) and its sustainability, human settlements, globalization and interdependence, eradication of poverty, food security and nutrition and global partnerships’.

History of the War Against Drugs

The current global approach to the fight against drugs is centred on the 50 year policy of prohibition which is grounded on the discourse of securitization of drugs (OpenDemocracy 2011). Changed attitude towards drugs in the 60s when their use became a symbol of youthful rebellion, social upheaval, and political dissent resulted in a significant rise of their use. Consequently appeared a need for a global drug prohibition regime within the UN framework.

The process of the securitization of drugs as well as global prohibition regime begun in the 1960s with the Single UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs. The narcotic drugs and addiction to them were in the Convention constituted as evil and a threat to the ‘health and welfare of mankind’ and therefore a subject to prohibition (UN 1961). One of the turning points in the discourse on the securitization of drugs happened in 1971 with US president’s Richard Nixon’s declaration of War on drugs and identification of drug abuse as “public enemy number one” (Richard Nixon Foundation 2016). Since then the global war on drugs was largely waged under the lead of the US but the task of drug prohibition was given to the UN.

At the time the most efficient way to achieve the goals of the convention, reduction of supply and use of narcotic drugs, as well as Nixon’s pledges, was law enforcement which outlawed trade and possession of controlled substances. Drug market is a market as any other, conditioned by the supply and demand forces. Since demand did not decline but rose exponentially, the side of the lucrative drug supply business took place on the global black market. That resulted in the emergence of powerful transnational drug cartels which in the 1980s became to be seen as a problem to the global security (Baker Institute 2015). Consequently the discourse shifted from the threat to health and welfare of humanity to the fight against organized crime and trafficking which endangered ‘the stability, security and sovereignty of States’ as written in the 1988 United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (UN 1988).

International drug accords with their method of criminalisation and punitive law enforcement did not yield expected results, rather they made the situation excessively worse, all steaming from the Single Convention of 1961, and the UN’s plans of ‘drug free world’ which are far from achieved. Enormous and incredibly lucrative black market together with the rise of the violence, corruption and danger to the global security is one the most addressed problem but far from the only one. The spread of HIV and hepatitis C, inadequate access to controlled drugs for medical purposes, systemic stigmatisation of people who use drugs; destruction of subsistence farmers’ livelihoods by forced crop eradication, systemic human rights abuses and billions of dollars used to fight the consequences of the global drug prohibition, which were not used for the initial goals of Conventions — ‘health and welfare of mankind’ — are just some of the consequences of the past (and contemporary) war against drugs.

The Economy of Transnational Drug Trade

The middlemen: Drug trafficking as a law-enforcement issue

One useful way of conceptualising transnational drug trade is to think of it as an efficient market. Making sure supply meets demand are various criminal organisations versed in bringing the product from the producer to the consumer. It is these organisations that have been the predominant and oftentimes exclusive target of policies attempting to stymie transnational drug trafficking. After more than half a century of said policies, the devastation left in their wake is unambiguous.

In Mexico, a total of 165,000 homicides were recorded between 2007 and 2014, the majority of which was drug related (PBS 2015). It is believed that areas subject to military intervention, which began in 2006, have in fact experienced in increase in violence, including a dramatic rise of human rights abuses by Mexican security forces (InSight Crime 2015). In the Philippines, the bloody push against drug abuse undertaken by president Rodrigo Duterte was characterized by torture and extrajudicial killings, with an estimated death toll of more than 12,000 suspected drug users and dealers (predominantly from impoverished urban centers) since the ‘drug war’ was declared in the summer of 2016 (Human Rights Watch 2018).

Sectors vulnerable to corruption in relation to drugs (Source: UNODC World Drug Report 2017)

Beneath the gory surface of brutal violence lies a tangle of political and institutional issues that is equally disconcerting, albeit far less publicized. In the United States, incarceration rates have skyrocketed since the 1980s — both a direct and indirect consequence of punitive policies that disproportionately affected the poor and young men of color (Prison Policy 2018). In other countries, illegal drug trafficking met with heavy-handed policing only spurred additional violence and contributed to undermining already weak and corruption-prone institutions.

The War on Drugs: From Prohibition to Gold Rush (Source: Drug Policy Alliance 2016)

Making matters worse is the fact that past anti-drug policies were often subordinated to other political agendas. Within the context of Americas, the rise of cartels would not have been possible without preceding decades of politically motivated foreign interventions that often turned a blind eye or even actively assisted drug cartels in return for their help in waging wars that were primarily ideological in nature (Jacobin 2011). The rise of narco-cartels in Latin America as we know them today in turn a had destabilising effect in other parts of the world that are part of the global trafficking network (The Guardian 2016).

None of this is to say that transnational drug trafficking does not constitute a serious security concern, both domestically and internationally; however, challenges facing us today are to no small extent the result of past myopic policies that predominantly emphasized the law-enforcement approach while neglecting other dimensions of the issue. Therefore, in order to effectively overcome the problem of illicit drug trafficking and its destructive side-effects we first need to understand why people consume drugs and how some people rely on drug production for their livelihoods. In other words, we need to take a closer look at supply and demand by going beyond their co-constitutive relation.

Demand-side economics: Drug consumption as a domestic health crisis

Despite many of its shortcomings (Scientific American 2014), Nancy Reagan’s campaign against drug abuse launched in the early 1980s was correct in recognising the importance of demand in perpetuating transnational drug trade. The importance of this recognition lies in the fact that it is higher-income countries which account for the majority of the consumption (Independent 2015), in turn begging the question — what makes members of these societies turn to such widespread drug abuse? While this too is a multi-faceted questions with a number of different factors likely at play, it has been shown that both poor social conditions as well as systemically deteriorating mental health are two of the key driving forces in this process.

Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just say no’ campaign (Source: CNN 2011)

While drug abuse in impoverished communities (including those part of the developed world) has been well documented (Aljazeera 2018), this does not mean drug abuse is any less prevalent among those well-off. Cocaine, and more recently prescription drugs like Adderall, have for a long time been known to feature prominently in the lives of Wall Street traders (PBS 2014), with Silicon Valley also embracing them as part of its lifestyle (Washington Post 2017).

Heroin's Children

Underlying these trends is a tangle of economic, technological, institutional, and ideological factors that over the years have begun to erode the connective tissue of societies. Individualism and competitiveness, although not entirely devoid of useful functions, have become the cornerstone of human relations. This in turn has had a series of negative effects, including a now already well-documented mental health crisis (The Guardian 2016), which has led to an increase in drug consumption regardless of one’s race or class.

Addiction (Source: Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell 2015)

This goes to show that consumption has little to do with what for many are distant realities of illicit drug trafficking. Instead it is rooted in a socioeconomic system and the everyday misery (be it material or mental) which this system forces upon its members. Only be openly acknowledging this and coming up with a policy approach that will put human wellbeing, both individual and collective, front and centre can one hope to effectively tackle the demand side of transnational drug trade economics.

Supply-side economics: Drug production as a developmental challenge

With the focus primarily on large sums of money raked in by criminal organisations, there is another fact that all too often remains neglected — around the world many people depend on drug production for their basic subsistence.

Some experts believe that in addition to numerous other factors, the negative side effects of trade liberalisation also played an important role in deepening Mexico’s drug crisis. The 1980s witnessed a series of attempts to presumably better integrate the Mexican economy into the new global order that led to the destruction of more than 800.000 jobs. Predominantly affected were rural populations that were now forced to move into urban areas. The globalisation process reached its peak in 1994 with the coming into force of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. While providing a boost to cross border trade between Mexico and the US, the agreement also pushed many Mexican farmers into poverty (Guovy 2016). Those who refused to leave their land to work in assembly plants in urban sprawls and across the border were forced to resort to growing marijuana and poppies for their subsistence.

Carmen Boullosa & Mike Wallace on “Mexican Drug War” (Source: Let Them Talk 2015)

A similar dynamic has been playing out in Afghanistan, the world’s largest producer of opium poppy. There large parts of the population were and will remain dependant on poppy production for their daily income (Reuters 2017). It was their ability to control the opium trade that cemented the Taliban’s position during the civil war in the 1990s, their decision to impose a comprehensive ban on poppy production that facilitated their downfall during the US invasion in 2001, and the ability to reassert their position as a pivotal stakeholder in the illicit industry that paved the insurgency’s road back to power after 2004 (The Guardian 2018). The success of the Taliban regime, and in equal measure the failure of the US and its Western allies, was in large part grounded in one’s (in)ability to recognise the fundamental role poppy and opium play in Afghanistan’s economy and the material well-being of its population.

Main opiate and cocaine trafficking flows (UNODC World Drug Report 2017)

Cases in Mexico and Afghanistan, but also Colombia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, the Philippines and many other countries across the globe (The Guardian 2016), clearly demonstrate how drug-related issues are part of a much wider challenge of development and poverty alleviation. Until this is openly recognised and incorporated into ongoing policy deliberations, all other efforts, and especially those focused solely on the criminal dimension, will likely continue to be in vain.

PAST UN ACTION

International treaties

So far there are three international drug accords accepted within the UN framework. Adaptation of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 (UN 1961), amended in 1972 by a Protocol, marked the shift of direction to the single treaty-based international drug control from previously various multilateral agreements. The Convention adopted prohibitionist approach and introduced penal obligations to the Parties to implement the declaration in the domestic law therefore criminalizing production and trade of narcotic drugs as well as cultivation of cannabis, opium, and the coca leaf. Furthermore Declaration established The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB).

Due to the diversification of drugs of abuse, in 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances (UN 1971) was adopted, introducing new control measures. A separate convention is a result of contradictory views on the zero-tolerance expressed in the Single Convention between developed and developing countries who claim cultural ties to the plants which are subject to prohibition. Responding to the increased rates of drug related crime in 1988 the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances was adopted (UN 1988). The Convention introduced measures that promoted international cooperation in fight against drug trafficking such as mutual legal assistance in fighting international narcotics rings, extradition of drug traffickers, information sharing as well as enabling countries to freeze and confiscate bank accounts of suspects.

UN bodies

Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), established in 1946 by Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), is the policymaking body of the United Nations with prime responsibility for drug control matters. In 1991 its mandate was expanded and it assumed the role of governing body of United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) whose main function is addressing and countering world drug problem. At the first special session on world drug problem in 1998 UN GA adopted Political Declaration (UNGA 1998) on countering the world drug problem, which took the task of creating a drug-free world as a priority. The assessment of the work done and future priorities were conducted at high-level segment of the fifty-second session of the CND in 2009 which adopted Political Declaration and Plan of Action on International Cooperation towards an Integrated and Balanced Strategy to Counter the World Drug Problem (UNODC 2009).

Special session of the UN General Assembly

On the request of Mexico, Guatemala and Columbia — three countries most affected by the violence that sprung out of the global war on drugs– and proposed by CND in 2016, a Special session of the General Assembly on the world drug problem was held and a joint commitment to effectively address and countering the world drug problem was adopted (UNGA 2016). In comparison to the previous documents this one acknowledged potential for the medical use of controlled substances, called for increased access to the life-saving health and legal services and included more positive language about programs and approaches related to decriminalization and harm reduction, but the document still supports previous approaches therefore prohibition and does not critically assess the punitive policies of the previous conventions. Furthermore the document still aims for a society free of drug abuse.

Questions for further research

1. Should the law-enforcement element continue to serve as the staple of anti-drug policies with other dimensions merely supplementing it, or should prohibitionist policies be subordinated to the social and developmental aspect of the issue?
2. How does the rationale for championing a hard-handed approach differ from country to country? Despite all the criticism, are there cases in which adopting it at the expense of other, softer policies does make sense?
3. How does drug abuse and issues stemming from it fit within the Agenda for Sustainable development? Which Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) apply to the issue of drug abuse and how are they interrelated?
4. How do reasons for drug abuse and the involvement in the economy of illicit drug trade differ between developed and developing countries? In what ways should policies, both local and global, reflect these discrepancies?
5. Should the committee frame the issues of drug abuse and transnational drug trade as a direct and/or indirect symptom of the wider socio-economic system and its shortcomings? If so, what changes, both at the practical and ideational level, would be needed to render the underlying social and economic structures more considerate of human wellbeing and dignity both individually and collectively?

Additional research materials

International security and the global war on drugs: The tragic irony of drug securitisation
— OpenDemocracy (2011) → READ (15min)

How the Cartels Were Born
— Jacobin (2015) → READ (20min)

New LSE report recommends ‘War on Drugs’ is replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals
— The London School of Economics and Political Science → READ (1min)

The War on Drugs and International Development
— Advocates for International Development (2018) → READ (10min)

Why the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Need Good Drug Policy
— Open Society Foundations (2015) → READ (3min)

A Brief History of the Drug War
— Drug Policy Alliance (2018) → READ (3min)

World Drug Report 2017: Conclusions and Implications
— United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2017) → READ (30min)

The political economy of Mexico’s drug war
— International Socialist Review (2013) → READ (30min)

Cocaine Cowboys (Documentary)
— YouTube (2013) → WATCH (120min)