Video 2: The failure of prohibitionist drug policies

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Drugs, drug use, drug policy and health

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University of Geneva

Drugs, drug use, drug policy and health

21 notes

This MOOC is the first of its kind, since it addresses critical issues related to drugs from a multidisciplinary, health and human rights-based approach. Throughout the course you will cover a range of questions including what are drugs and why they controlled? What are the benefits and harms of taking drugs? How public health policies can address drug use? You will also learn about the intricacies of the international drug control framework and the negative consequences of widespread prohibitionist drug policies around the world. Finally, you will examine ways of furthering drug policy reform. The topics will be presented by over 40 speakers from scientific, academic and institutional backgrounds, spokespersons of civil society as well as people who use drugs presenting their views. By the end of the course you will have: - a strong understanding of the major health issues related to drug use and drug policy; - a clear vision of why drug policy is debated today; - and, if you so wish, you will be equipped to engage in the drug policy reform movement at your local or regional level.

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Module 6: The case for drug policy reform

Welcome to Module 6! Congratulations, you have made it to the last Module of the Course! This week focuses on how prohibitionist drug policies have failed and how it is time for drug policy reform. Some highlights include decriminalisation, legalisation and regulation being broken down for you, so that you really understand what the terms mean and how countries can move towards them in terms of drug policy goals. A big part of this Module also concentrates on how to get involved in the drug reform movement: you will hear from people who have intimate experience with this: from civil society actors working in the field to networks of people who use drugs; before being able to you, yourself think about how and what you could do to join the drug reform movement. By the end of this Module you will be able to: • Give examples of decriminalization and regulation of drugs and discuss outcomes; • Defend the involvement of civil society and people who use drugs in the design and evaluation of drug policies; • Reflect on and develop your potential role in the world drug debate.The final evaluation will consist of a peer – review, during which you will have the possibility to think about how what you have learnt throughout the course applies to the situation in your own country with regard to drug policy (specifically in relation to protecting human rights and promoting health); and to reflect on how people who use drugs are perceived and/or treated and consider what role you could play in this possible reform. Please don’t forget to go through the essential reading list and some of the optional additional resources available to you. We hope you have enjoyed the six Modules and look forward to receiving your peer-evaluations as well any feedback you may have. Best wishes,The Drugs, Drug Use, Drug Policy and Health team

Video 1: Introduction to Module 63:41

Video 2: The failure of prohibitionist drug policies10:41

Video 3: The case for drug policy reform9:12

Rencontrer les enseignants

Michel Kazatchkine
Senior Fellow
Global Health Center, Graduate Institute for International Affairs and Development, Geneva
Barbara Broers
Professor (in Addiction Medicine)
Community Health Departement, Geneva University Hospitals
Jennifer Hasselgard-Rowe
Researcher and Lecturer
Institute of Global Health, University of Geneva
Aymeric Reyre
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Medicine, Paris 13 University

[MUSIC]

Let's talk about the effectiveness of prohibition drug policies.

And I'd like to do this by starting to look at the drug market and

then looking at the outcomes from drug policy.

Then we'll have a look at what opinion leaders are saying around the world.

Let's look at the drug market, there's really very little doubt unfortunately

that in the last several decades,

the drug market has gotten bigger and bigger and more and more dangerous.

And that's a general statement.

If we break that down a little bit, if we look, for example, at drug production

around the world, well, there's no question, drug productions gone up hugely.

It wasn't so long ago, 20 or 30 years ago,

that a thousand tons of opium was produced illegally around the work,

and we're now up to 7000, 8000, 9000.

World population's gone up in that time, but

it hasn't gone up 7, 8 or 9 times in the last 30 years.

So drug production clearly has gone up for opium and for cocaine.

Cannabis is hard to measure but probably gone up for cannabis.

And then we've got the whole range of synthetics,

which we'll come to a little bit in a few minutes.

So production's gone up.

Consumption's also gone up.

Again, it's pretty hard to measure something that's defined as illegal.

If we look at the first half of the 20th century,

there was only one country in the world that had a significant drug problem.

That was the United States of America, and

they still have of course a significant drug problem today.

In the third quarter of the 20th century,

almost every developed country in the world, with the exception of Japan,

Standard have report significant drug problems.

In the final quarter of the 20th century,

we started seeing developing countries apart from Africa,

one after one reporting for the first time very serious problems with drug problems.

And then in the first quarter of this century, we're seeing Africa,

one country after another starting to report serious drug problems.

So there's no doubt that consumption of drugs around the world has gone up.

The price of drugs like heroin and cocaine has gone down dramatically.

It's gone down by about three-quarters,

80% over the last 20 or 30 years.

And of course, drug law enforcement is trying to push prices up,

not see drug prices fall, so there's more production than there is even demand,

which is why the drug prices are falling.

Purity is stable or may be even going up.

There are a lot of reports where the purity of drugs has been increasing.

We also see a much larger number of different types of drugs

than we use to see.

In the European Union, there are two new psychoactive

new substances reported every week, so over 100 every year.

So definitely they are more drugs.

And unfortunately, there are more different kinds of drugs,

and unfortunately, the drugs that are fatal [COUGH] are available today.

And often much more dangerous than the drugs that were available 40,

50 or 60 years ago.

And where we can measure the availability of drugs,

in my country we do that every year.

Drug availability has always been high and continues to be very high.

70, 80, 90% of people that use drugs say that getting drugs is easy or very easy.

So really however you look at it, it's very clear that drug prohibition has not

achieved what it set out to achieve, that is to make drugs scarce,

less dangerous, less concentrated and higher priced.

It's failed abjectly on all of those regards.

Now worrying about the drug market is important,

but worrying about the outcomes of drug policy is much more important.

And if we look at deaths, disease, crime, corruption, violence,

even threats to national security, these have all increased related drugs or

related drug prohibition in the last quarter century or more.

Another example from Australia,

there were six deaths from heroin overdose in Australia in 1964.

In 1999, there were 1,116.

That's an increase in the rate of drug overdose deaths of

55 times in 30 plus years.

So the news is bad about the drug market, but

the news is much worse about the things that matter much more to ordinary people,

and particularly to parents.

Deaths, disease, crime, corruption, violence,

all these things are being getting much, much worse.

So it's not surprising that opinion leaders around

the world are much more vocal about, and

much clear about what they regard as the failure of global drug policy.

And at first it was only retired politicians and

retired police chiefs who were saying these things.

Now serving politicians and serving police commissioners and

many other people are saying these things.

Former secretary generals of the United Nations are saying these things.

And we know that the current UN Secretary General when he was prime minister of

Portugal organized a major reform of a drug policy in his country in Portugal.

So opinion leaders also

tell us that something is seriously wrong about drug policy.

I'll put to you that there's another way in which our drug policy is

fundamentally wrong and that is, let's look at the question of punishment.

When the state decides to punish one of its citizens for

wrongdoing, that's taken very seriously in countries all around the world.

But we've come a long way in many countries in recent years in

regarding it as abhorrent, barbaric to punish people with minority

sexual preferences assuming there's no harm to a third person and

it's all done with consenting adults in private.

But there are great parallels with drug use here.

If it's wrong to punish people for a minority sexual preference,

why isn't it also wrong to punish people for a minority drug preference?

Yet that's exactly what we're doing.

Again, I'm emphasizing this is in situations where

harm is not being done to other people.

If harm is being done to other people, of course, that has to be,

always be punished.

But I think looking at this question of the ethics of drug policy

is in many ways just as important, or

even more important than the questions of whether our drug policy works or not, or

whether there are better ways of managing drugs than the way we're managing it now.

Thank you very much. >> So

in terms of the predominant approach and whether it's been effective,

governments have to ask themselves these questions in a very honest way.

At present, there really has been very little honest assessment

of the impact of punitive and draconian drug policies.

The UN has a goal enshrined in the 2009 Political Declaration and

Action Plan on Drugs to have eliminated or at least significantly reduced demand,

supply and the global drug market by 2019.

So that's two years away.

And still they have not identified a very clear review process on how

they plan to do this.

But they could and they could look at the evidence.

For example, the UN office on Drugs and

Crime estimates that around 250 million people world wide use drugs.

The drug market is as robust as ever.

We don't know for sure how much the global drug market is worth, but

estimates are somewhere between 300 and 400 billion US dollar per year.

In the mean time, we also estimate that government spend

around $100 billion per year at least trying to fight this global drug trade.

However, the drug market is diversifying.

There are new substances coming into the market.

These are called new psychoactive substances.

And move away a bit from the traditional drugs that we have of cocaine, heroine,

and cannabis, and amphetamines.

These drugs, we don't know necessarily what the long-term

effects of such drugs are for human health.

But we know that it is prohibition of the traditional drugs that has led to this

diversification.

In addition, the market itself is becoming more innovative, with

there being increasing numbers of people selling and trading drugs on the dark web,

for example, which is much harder for law enforcement to monitor and track.

So what has actually been the effect of trying to eliminate the drug

market has actually created a host of other sort of unintended consequences,

which make the problem even more intractable and harder to manage.

And so new solutions will need to be sought because the existing solutions

simply aren't working and the current approach has failed.

[MUSIC]

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