Pete McMartin: The long slow retreat in the war on drugs

The United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs took place in New York last week, and the UN, as it has so many times before, reached a consensus as to what it would do to counteract the world’s drug problem:

Nothing.

“It was a wash,” said Donald MacPherson, executive director of SFU’s Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, and who attended the three-day session. “There was serious resistance to any kind of drug policy reform initiatives from Asian countries and China and Russia. So (the UN’s) consensus-based model is not where change will happen. Even the legalization of cannabis in some American states was not talked about there. So things that were actually happening in the world were not discussed.”

Much was hoped for going into the special session. The last UN session on drugs took place in 1998, which convened under the chipper motto of “A Drug-Free World — We Can Do It!” The policy paper that came out of that session endorsed the status quo of enforcement and incarceration (and in some countries, like Indonesia, China and Iran, the death penalty), and proposed that the get-tough approach would free the world of the drug scourge by 2008. Need I state the obvious?

The War on Drugs continued, to the benefit only of rogue states, drug cartels and police unions. Drug use continued to rise worldwide, and small-time criminalized users suffered needless death, infection and incarceration. Not only have the illegal status of drugs destabilized Vancouver and Surrey neighbourhoods, they’ve destabilized entire nations. Case in point: This year’s special session was originally scheduled for 2019, but the presidents of Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia called for the session to be held early because the drug situation in their countries was so dire. They wanted a new global policy now.

They won’t be getting it from the UN. Instead, it will come piecemeal from different countries around the world. In 2001, Portugal became the first European state to decriminalize all drugs; the Czech Republic followed suit in 2010 by decriminalizing the personal use of drugs in small amounts, to the point of setting how large those amounts could be (for example, no more than 1.5 grams of heroin, or four tablets of Ecstasy). In 2014, Uruguay was the first country in the world to legalize cannabis. In the U.S., four states plus Washington, D.C., legalized cannabis, while 16 other states have decriminalized its use. Here in Canada, the federal government has announced its intent to legalize cannabis in 2017, and Health Minister Jane Philpott reiterated that promise at the UN session.

To MacPherson, these are all hopeful signs that at least some parts of the world are taking a more rational approach to drug control. In 2013, he co-authored the Coalition’s report Getting to Tomorrow: A Report on Canadian Drug Policy, which called for  the decriminalization of both hard and soft drugs. (The report was just updated in a hardcover edition entitled More Harm Than Good: Drug Policy in Canada.) In that year, both the government and opposition parties flatly rejected the proposal to decriminalize hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. But that was then, and in the intervening years the Conservatives’ get-tough moralizing was rejected by the voting public and, in a series of decisions, the Supreme Court. The country moved not just to a Liberal government but toward the liberal idea that drugs were a health problem and not a crime problem.

“The most important thing we can learn from a decision like that of Portugal’s,” MacPherson said, “is that the sky didn’t fall. Nothing bad happened. People thought there would be drug tourists coming, and there would be this and there would be that. But things are getting better … They’ve seen a reduction across a number of metrics, including overdoses, substance use itself, HIV-related (infection), etc.”

Decriminalization isn’t a cure-all to drug problems, MacPherson admits: no policy is perfect. The spate of deaths from fentanyl, for example, suggests we need a further conversation on the state control and sale of opioids or some other drug people want to ingest for recreational use, if only as an alternative to unregulated and potentially lethal drugs being bought on the streets. And that will be a tough conversation to have.

But this much is clear: This stupid, hypocritical and invasive war on drugs is in its long, slow retreat. The UN may be immobilized in the face of it, and, if Canada remains true to form, nothing substantial will change here until more forward-thinking jurisdictions show us the way.

But sooner or later, we’ll decriminalize drugs, both hard and soft.

Why not sooner?

pmcmartin@postmedia.com

 

 

 

 

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