UN MEETING 1ST STEP TO ENDING GLOBAL WAR ON DRUGS

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Mexico (HRNW): “A drug-free world — We can do it!” That was the overly ambitious motto endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1998, the last time it convened for a high-level debate on global drug policy.Eighteen years later it seems clear that, no, we can’t do it.

Just ask the governments of Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala which, amid staggering violence fueled by the international narcotics trade, have pleaded with the UN to radically rethink the war on drugs.

That rethink, or at least its early stages, could be near.

Today, the UN General Assembly will meet to scrutinize the UN treaties that, critics argue, are steering the Sisyphean delusion of a “drug-free world.” A wide breadth of world leaders, academics, public health and human rights advocates are among those calling for significant reforms.

The special session may mark “the beginning of the end for international support for the war on drugs,” wrote Bill Bogart, a law professor at the University of Windsor and author, in a recent editorial.

Intergenerational damage

Drug policies of UN member states must adhere to three global treaties. The most expansive and important is the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which prohibits the production and supply of certain drugs and criminalizes their use. It was ratified in 1961 and hasn’t been amended since 1972.

The 1998 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs reaffirmed the treaty, and agreed that member countries would work to stamp out illicit narcotics entirely within ten years.

It didn’t work, but the war on drugs, continued anyway.

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