#ungass2016

Today is International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples

Kid and Cop Corruption Commonplace In Prohibition World

by James E. Gierach

UNGASS2016, the much anticipated special session of the United Nations General Assembly regarding the world drug problem, came and went much like Christmas. It came with great expectation and fanfare, but left with only one “gift” for the world: a worn, tarnished and antiquated 1961 UN drug convention that served as foundation for a 55-year-old World War on Drugs (WWD) (1961-2016…).

The last special session of the General Assembly regarding drugs was held in 2009, and the next such session is not scheduled to happen until 2019.

Instead, this rare 2016 call to special session regarding drugs came at the behest of Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico, because world drug policy and its consequences were so awful. Drugs poured over the world like so much spilled paint, and the war’s collateral damage took the lives of neighbors and family members by bullet, disease, addiction, incarceration and stigmatization, wholesale.

The call to special session was not only to put people first, but also to help people routinely victimized by the many toxic tentacles of prohibition drug policy. To some optimists, it was called to revitalize individual freedom and human rights trampled by drug-war maneuvers, law-enforcement soldiers, criminal-justice injustices and coercive treatment strategies.

To other reformers, the call to special session was seen as an opportunity to reduce the harms caused by the War on Drugs, or to reschedule cannabis, or to eliminate the death penalty for drug offenders.

The call to special session in my mind was an opportunity for world leaders to stop talking and to start doing. It was a time to set aside good-sounding rhetoric and to actually propose, draft, debate and adopt amendments to UN drug treaties. I wanted world leaders at UNGASS to be considering, debating, revising and voting on specific, written, proposed amendments of UN drug conventions. I wanted an “Outcome Document” to take the form of an approved, signed, sealed and delivered UN drug treaty (convention) amendment or amendments.

Action was necessary, essential for a better world, but it did not come. It did not come to the nations calling for UNGASS2016; and betterment did not come to any nation in its wake.

Mexicans suffered from drug-prohibition law enforcement, cartel blood-bath competition, and hundreds of millions of US drug-war dollars that helped take well over a 100,000 lives in the last decade, even as Mexico’s top-honcho, drug entrepreneur and billionaire “El Chapo” Guzman tunneled and bribed his way to freedom, repeatedly, in and out of two Mexican maximum security prisons. In the same timeframe, Mexico reportedly produced, according to a U.S. Department of Justice, Intelligence Center report, an estimated 21,500 tons of marijuana annually, in 2008, the world’s favorite illicit drug and palliative medicine.

Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador suffered such violence in consequence of drug enforcement and cartel competition that 60,000 drug war refugees, mostly children, were stopped at the U.S. southern border, fleeing the violence and terror spawned by UN “Just Say No” drug conventions.

In Europe, Asia, Indonesia, Africa, Australia, and North, South and Central America, everywhere in the world, an assortment of drug-prohibition problems screamed for relief at the door of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, from April 19-21, 2016, at its special session regarding drug policy.

Though billed as a special session regarding “the world drug problem,” in reality, the session concerned the world drug POLICY problem, because the same United Nations drug treaties that devastated Mexico, Central and South America also struck hard at the basic health, safety and welfare of mankind in the United States and around the world.

The oldest and most pernicious of UN drug conventions is the 1961 Single Commission on Narcotic Drugs. This treaty proclaims that the only legal use of roughly 119 mind-altering substances scheduled therein is for medical and scientific purpose, and mandates national legislative and administrative action to criminalize any deviation therefrom. The drugs listed in the onerous Schedule 1 are said to have no medicinal value and a high potential for abuse. The Schedule 1 list includes both heroin and cannabis, patently, a senseless, uninformed and arbitrary classification, having no medicinal credibility and a high potential for mischief and law-enforcement abuse.

But the treaties were not self-executing which meant individual nations had to pass laws criminalizing the 1961 scheduled “bad” drugs. In consequence of 186 nations executing their treaty mandate, the world amassed approximately 10 million prisoners, including, of course, many, many drug criminals.

Putting “the world drug problem” into meaningful perspective, according to the World Drug Report 2015, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that a total of 246 million people, or 1 out of 20 people between the ages of 15 and 64 years, used an illicit drug in 2013. That represented an increase of 3 million more illicit drug users over the previous year.

After and during 55 years of UN-nurtured prohibition, on all counts, the problems of drug use, drug trafficking and drug invention have steadily and dramatically worsened, despite dramatic increases in world prison populations.

For example, draconian prison sentences accompanying drug intolerance is reflected in substantial increases in the 1990s: “Prison populations grew during the 1990s in many parts of the world. In Europe, they grew by over 20 per cent in almost all countries and by at least 40 per cent in one half of the countries; in the Netherlands, the prison population grew by 89 per cent. The prison population also grew in the six most populous countries in the Americas: the prison population growth was only 12 per cent in Canada, but between 60 and 85 per cent in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and the United States. Countries in other regions followed a similar growth pattern: 50 per cent in Australia, 38 per cent in New Zealand, 33 per cent in South Africa and 10 per cent in Japan. The general trend during the 1990s, at least in many developed countries, was for the prison population to increase, often by 40 per cent.”

Global Incarceration and Prison Terms; by Roy Walmsley, (Dec.2003), http://www.unodc.org/pdf/crime/forum/forum3_Art3.pdf

The enormous cost of a prison-filled world, again, boasting 10 million inhabitants, is unsustainable even with robust prison research and development, given, as noted above by UN authority, a world filled with 246 million illicit drug users, annually.

These facts made UNGASS2016 so necessary, so important. But UNGASS swung and missed, its opportunity to save the world passing in New York with a strike out.

World leaders assembled at UNGASS should have called for an end to drug prohibition and an to the World War on Drugs. They should have called for the amendment, or complete repeal, of UN drug conventions. They should have discarded their intolerant and myopic view of the proper purpose of drug use and accepted the reality that people of the world predominantly use drugs for rest, relaxation and recreation (RRR).

Instead, world leaders at UNGASS did nothing. Accomplished nothing. Learned nothing.

Instead national representatives talked and talked, herded by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) paid wranglers, parroted rote, rehearsed UNODC/CND jargon, to-wit: we must speak with a “single-voice;” we need a “balanced approach,” one advancing human rights, health and “evidence-based” approaches; and we have a “common and shared responsibility.” In time of World Drug War crisis, robotic world players offered only shallow, mindless, useless, meaningless palaver. Shamefully, they did nothing, accomplished nothing and learned nothing.

From Day One of the three-day Special Session of the UN General Assembly (UNGASS2016), the UN General Assembly forsook its responsibility and opportunity. Indeed, within an hour of the Special Session opening bell, and before any substantive discussion, the body adopted and excreted, by acclamation, a spiked Outcome Document like so much dung.

The Special Session, under the leadership of heavy-handed UN General Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft, hammered home the Outcome Document prepared at the recently adjourned 59th Session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. In that same moment and with that same blow, all hope for UNGASS2016 drug policy reform and progress was extinguished.