UN's 10-year plan to tackle world's drug problem has been ‘spectacular failure’ as production and consumption soar, report says

The UN’s 10-year global strategy to eradicate the world’s illegal drug market has been “a spectacular failure of policy”, a report by a network of 174 NGOs has concluded.

The report said there had been a 145 per cent increase in drug-related deaths over the last decade, culminating in around 450,000 deaths per year in 2015.

It also found that despite a specific target to eliminate or reduce the “illicit cultivation of opium poppy, coca bush and cannabis plant”, there was a 130 per cent increase in the cultivation of opium poppies, a 34 per cent rise in the coca bush production and no sign of a reduction in cannabis growing.

The report, by the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) – Taking stock: A decade of drug policy – evaluated the UN Office of Drug and Crime’s 10-year plan, which it said “continues to generate a catastrophic impact on health, human rights, security and development, while not even remotely reducing the global supply of illegal drugs”.

By analysing data from UN, government, academic and civil society sources, the report says it “illustrates the carnage that the war on drugs has wreaked over the past decade”.

It said the number of people aged 15 to 64 who used drugs at least once in 2016, was estimated to be 275 million, a 31 per cent increase since 2011.

The main drug used was cannabis, followed by opioids and amphetamines, for which consumption had increased 136 per cent in the same period.

“This report is another nail in the coffin for the war on drugs,” said Ann Fordham, executive director of the IDPC.

“The fact that governments and the UN do not see fit to properly evaluate the disastrous impact of the last ten years of drug policy, is depressingly unsurprising.

“Governments will meet next March at the UN and will likely rubber-stamp more of the same for the next decade in drug policy. This would be a gross dereliction of duty, and a recipe for more blood spilled in the name of drug control.”

The report said punitive drug policies focusing on eradicating the illegal drug market had been associated with human rights violations as well as threats to public health and order.

Mass incarceration, fuelled by the criminalisation of those who use drugs, has left one in five prisoners incarcerated for drug offences – most for possession for personal use.

At least 3,940 people have been executed for a drug offence in the last year, and 33 jurisdictions retain the death penalty for such crimes.

The report also noted around 27,000 people had died in extrajudicial killings in drug crackdowns in the Philippines.

The report also warned of a global pain epidemic as a result of restrictions placed on access to controlled medicines, which have left 75 per cent of the world’s population without proper access to pain relief.

It concludes by urging a rethink of the UN’s strategy for the next decade, and says member states should identify more meaningful drug policy goals and targets.

“Since governments started collecting data on drugs in the 1990s, the cultivation, consumption and illegal trafficking of drugs have reached record levels,” Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand, and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, wrote in the report’s foreword.

“Moreover, current drug policies are a serious obstacle to other social and economic objectives, and the ‘war on drugs’ has resulted in millions of people [being] murdered, disappeared [sic], or internally displaced.”

Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, said: “This report lays out the horrific failure of the global war on drugs in stark terms – on every single indicator the news is dismal.

“The international drug control system promised a world free of drugs but has delivered the exact opposite – and worse than that, it has created a vast criminal controlled market that makes drugs more dangerous, empowers organised crime, fuels crime, violence and insecurity across the globe, and leads to mass incarceration and human rights abuses.

“It’s disgraceful that once again it’s fallen to civil society to tell this story – but the UN drug control agencies that oversee the war on drugs have flatly refused to undertake any kind of meaningful evaluation – presumably, because they know it would lay bare another decade of shocking failure and negligence.”

The report’s findings came after Canada became the second, and largest, nation to fully legalise the sale and recreational use of cannabis.

Uruguay was the first country to legalise marijuana, in 2013, though Portugal and the Netherlands have decriminalised the drug.