The Drug War Repeats Itself

Yesterday, drug law enforcement officials and policymakers got together in Vienna to set international drug policy for another decade.  The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs brings together drug policy ministers from dozens of countries to develop agreements and policy on fighting illegal drugs. Will this year's statement reflect the same backwards drug wars we've allowed to fail for so long?

While UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa compared drug use to child sexual assault in his opening remarks, protesters camped outside, calling for an end to the international drug war. Emalie Huriaux is covering the meetings in a Daily Kos journal. She quoted from Costa's opening comments:

I suggest an approach that is not ideological, or emotional.  Drugs are not harmful because they are controlled -- they are controlled because they are harmful.  The fact that certain unlawful transactions are hard to control doesn't mean that they should be made legal.  Should humanity accept pedophilia, human trafficking, or arms smuggling out of a naïve sense of market inevitability or intractability? Lifting the controls on drugs would reveal a state's impotence to fight organized crime or protect the health of its citizens.

The distinction he misses, of course, is that pedophilia, human trafficking and the trafficking and use of weapons have victims. Drug use is victimless.

Public health expert and harm reduction specialist Alan Clear wrote on the Huffington Post yesterday that U.S. participation in the meeting is ill-timed, because preparation took place under Bush and our drug policy hasn't yet caught up to the new administrations evolved policies.

Whereas the new Obama administration is making steps to move in a more progressive human rights based direction, the groundwork for the drafting of the Political Declaration has taken place with State Department employees who took their direction from the previous administration and haven't yet been presented with a new agenda. Sadly it will be another 10 years before there will be an opportunity to revisit UN drug policy again.

Follow the UN meetings, and the protests outside, on twitter - @unodc and #cndunodc09

The Economist also felt the need to repeat itself this week. Twenty years after it first urged the repeal of drug prohibition around the world, the magazine is again calling for a new way in the war on drugs.

From the 1989 Economist article: Prohibition cruelly compounds the problems it was meant to solve. So end it.

From last week: Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

Are we simply running in circles, or is there new momentum in the air? Something tells me that the generations that follow us might need a history textbook to tell them why the man above is posing in front of a police car with a bunch of baby plants. I can hope, right?