Leaders past and present across the Americas call on UN to end war on drugs.

AutorScruggs, Gregory

From teenage boys pressed into gangs, to farmers caught in the crossfire of paramilitaries vs. guerrillas, to women coerced into working as mules, the victims of the global war on drugs touch nearly every corner of Latin America and the Caribbean. But with the recent spike in cartel violence in Mexico, as well as the prospects for peace in Colombia, leaders across the region have felt emboldened to challenge the status quo on drugs. To that end, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico spearheaded an effort within the UN to call a special assembly on drugs.

The session, known as UNGASS, took place April 19-21 and was the first UN-wide convening on drug policy since 1998. With countries like Jamaica and Uruguay (NotiSur Aug. 3, 2012) on the vanguard of global experiments with decriminalization and outright legalization of cannabis, and nations from Central America through the Andes ravaged by the impacts of the war on drugs, there was a broad-based consensus in the region to change the UN's hardline stance on drugs.

While that goal ultimately went unmet, UNGASS nevertheless staked out a strong Latin American and Caribbean position for reform, echoed by members of civil society who came to New York for the occasion. The UN conventions on narcotic drugs may remain as they are, but countries across the Americas signaled their intention to buck global trends by pursuing national policies that emphasize harm reduction over prevention and tolerance over criminalization.

Conventional wisdom

The UN has a strong role in global drug policy, dating back to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, which classified coca and cannabis alike as "controlled substances" whose production should be heavily regulated by national governments. Both plants have a long history of medicinal and spiritual use in the Americas, but the UN's public health experts declared that they were of no therapeutic value.

This convention, alongside the later Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971 and the UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988, form the backbone of global drug policy, ratified by nearly every UN member state. National laws on drugs, in turn, reflect these conventions. They classify a host of narcotics as "controlled substances" and criminalize their production and consumption outside of government regulation. The letter of these conventions is policed by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna...

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