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1/5 UNGASS 2016 - The most powerful actors

  • Benjamin-Alexandre Jeanroy
  • Apr 6, 2016
  • 9 min read

Crucial to the Special Session are the implicated actors which we will intend to present in this new set of articles. Who are the participants? What are their public positions and their respective influence during the course of the summit? Because several debates are likely to take place among member states, how are they able to navigate within to potentially soften or reinforce the parameters of the current International Drug Control Regime (IDCR)? How will they decide to “manage” and potentially reduce the “unintended consequences” of the present system? Similarly, how do they evaluate the need and ways to deliver on desired, long awaited outcomes, and how do they position themselves in regard to numerous internal and global political pressures?

As we are starting to understand, shifting away from a more orthodox understanding and application of the U.N. drug control cornerstones, as-much as re-investing in alternatives remain certainly a challenge. By considering decades of political and financial investments from the parties into the prohibitionist foundations and applications of the current regime, the task ahead is not to be downplayed. By definition, an international and multilateral setting concerns most and foremost the national countries that would take part in such a forum. U.N. member states, are therefore inherently, - although not the only ones -, the central actors of the Special Session of the General Assembly on “the world drug problem”. This is why they will be the center of our analysis in this section.

The main intent of this set of articles will therefore be to summarize the different public positions of some of the different actors that are currently involved in the preparations of the upcoming Special Session, while analyzing their current internal interpretation of the conventions. This could allow us to perceive a glimpse of what could be the future positions of the most important actors involved in the debate, namely the member states. As there remains little chance that they would shift significantly from their recent previous public statements, the examination of the current experimentations potentially happening at the national and local levels could nevertheless allow us to determine more finely the current global state of affairs, as well as pointing out potential self-contradictions.

As we previously discussed, proponent parties wishing to perpetuate the current regime are advocating for an increase in efforts and funding. Certain parties believe that “the failings of the ‘war on drugs’ to date are not due to any fundamental flaw in the prohibitionist paradigm, but rather due to a lack of application and resources.” (LSE, 2014) As such, they intend to demonstrate that “the ‘wars on drugs’ could be won if it were fought with sufficient vigour, with more resources put into coordinated supply-side controls, and more consistently punitive responses directed at drug users.” (Transform, 2012)

As we will intend to show, more and more governments are, to different degrees, distancing themselves from such punitive approaches. However, in most parts of the world, the reality of drug control on the ground remains grounded in zero-tolerance, “‘crackdowns’, and ‘get tough’” (Ibid.) approaches, while the core response feature remains firmly embedded within growing conflict militarization as-well as severe punishment towards users and low-level participants of the illegal drug trade. By notably favoring an essentially criminal justice-led view on the matter, proponents of the current IDCR intend to maintain the rhetorical commitment of the international community to rid society of all 'drugs'. But it is important to realize that while reforms in regard to law enforcement remain fundamental in order to be able to truly face a multi-diverse and inter-connected range of criminal activities, “what they cannot achieve is a move beyond a symptomatic response to engage with the primary role of the wider enforcement paradigm in fuelling the creation of drug market-related harms in the first place.” (Transform, 2012)

The topic of harm reduction will also play a decisive part in the debate, notably because of the growing amount of direct empirical evidence of the efficiency of such practices that have forced even the most refractory agents to review their position on the matter. Due to the wide range of practices that this concept encompasses, debates will certainly focus on which definition and which constraints could be publicly supported by the community of the member states as a whole. The most fundamental debate around the topic remaining the need to overcome distinctive moral ambiguity that see harm reduction practices as a form of encouragement for drug use.

Additionally, while state regulation and control of drug supply will most certainly not be part of the debate as they clearly fall outside of the boundaries of the current conventions, the fact that an increasing number of member states will be, at the time of the Special Session and in this regard, experimenting with alternative policies - notably those related to the cannabis market regulation - remain worth pointing out. As will all references to any type of reform to the aforementioned treaties be similarly absent, the need for them has never been so great.

A growing number of states, heterogeneous in their experiences and geographical locations, are increasingly expressing more vocally their dissatisfaction towards the current regime emphasis on punitive approaches and the idea that illicit drugs should be suppressed. As we will see, “this reaction is hardly uniform throughout the world.” (Felbab-Brown & Trinkunas, 2015) For example, while the U.S. is facing internal contradictions with their long standing global leadership on prohibition and alternative policies being implemented at the state level - which will probably have consequences on the debate -, others such as Russia and China are taking over the task of conducting the charge against any attempts to deviate from an orthodox interpretation of the drug conventions.

Historically, as we saw during the drafting of the conventions and the following international debates, including past UNGASSs, a sharp divide existed between a small number of major producer countries from the Global South, and consumer countries found in the Global North. This articulation, allowed notably the formation of stable policy coalitions “centered on shifting blame and harms onto other countries connected to the illicit market: producers onto consumers and vice-versa.” (Felbab-Brown & Trinkunas, 2015) Today, the situation is quite different on the ground. One important trend which makes this Session different from the precedent ones is indeed “the increasing breakdown of the distinction between production, transshipment, and consumption countries.” (Ibid.) The rise in ATS use and production, as-well as the production of designer drugs, have turned countries from the Global North such as Canada, Israel and the Netherlands into some of the biggest producers in the global trade; the rise in cocaine demand in South America, turned Brazil and Argentina into vast profitable consumers market; and the rise in drug demand in West Africa, East and Southeast Asia is pushing Mexican Cartels to initiate vast investment in the regions. Clearer distinctions of the past are becoming increasingly blurry which has a notable consequence on the potential coalitions that could be formed during international debates on the topic.

Although geographical regroupments have proven to be less pertinent, in regards to the previous duality between Southern producers and Northern consumers, other geographical aspects are worth considering. It has now become quite common to cite the American continents as being on the vanguard of drug policy reform advocacy, whether it be the groundwork or at the highest political level. As such, the dual continent embodies the vast range of actions which form the reformist movements. From Uruguay and the first regulation worldwide of their domestic cannabis market; to Guatemala Ecuador and their respective policy project aiming at regulating a wide range of previously illicit substance (which have now been set aside as we will see in articles on Worldwide Imagination); to the U.S and Canada which have initiated process of regulation for the cannabis market; almost all countries of the region have shifted away from a strictly prohibitionist stance, including the founding figures of the modern IDCR. But among these countries experiencing alternatives policies domestically, many view the matter quite differently. As such, on the stage of the upcoming Special Session, “there are now sharply contradictory views within the international community as to how the world’s drug regime should be (re)designed and what policies should be emphasized.” (Felbab-Brown & Trinkunas, 2015)

On the other side, opponents of any change in the regime also represent a heterogeneous group. For example, many Arab countries oppose any liberalization of the regime on the public ground of religious believes and contemporary cultural choices in regard to illicit drugs, while many former Soviet states have been struggling with drug abuse and transmission disease epidemic and see any attempt at loosening the current drug control regime “as likely to exacerbate an already critical situation.” (Fazey, 2003) Additionally, other ex-USSR countries, African and Southeast Asian countries find their political elite deeply entrenched within the illegal drug market (Handelman, 1995) which, to an extent, explains in part the reticence of these countries to advocate for change.

In regard to the latter, the Asian continent is worth pausing to examine here. This vastly heterogeneous geographical space includes most of the countries still executing drug offenders and generally applying the harshest measures for drug control. Out of the dozen states that still use the capital punishment for drug related offenses and crime there, most have started adopting such draconian laws from the 1980’s and onward. Researchers Rick Lines, Damon Barrett and Patrick Gallahue have argued that this state of affairs is closely connected to international drug control legal obligations. As explained, “rather than reflecting traditional ‘values’ of the region, these policies are instead a response to the anti-drugs climate of the period, and the drafting and adoption of the 1988 United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, the third UN drug treaty that established State obligations in international law to enact harsh penal provisions for drug offences at domestic level.” (Lines & al., 2015) With the notable exception of long time capital punishment practitioners Iran and China on one side (1), and Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand on the other (2), the rest of the countries of the region exerting this punishment have started doing so only after the 1988 Single Convention ratification.

However, what is probably more remarkable about this region is that most of these previous comments centered around the death penalty are far from representing accurately the current situation in the region. 49 countries are heterogeneously forming this socially - some would say artificially - constructed huge space that is Asia, and “of these, only a dozen actively execute people of drug offences, and only four or five execute people with any regularity or in any great number. Rather than capital punishment being a ‘shared’ regional approach to drugs, the countries executing drug offenders are a minority, and those executing with regularity represent a tiny minority of only one in ten.” (Lines & al., 2015) As such, it is important to consider the vast and complex variety of approaches and mindsets, while avoiding geographical generalization.

We would argue then, that regional classification and regroupment have lost significant pertinence and as such, we have intended to classify the different U.N. member states by potential coalition, notably in regard to their respective national policies and past interventions during the UNGASS preparation meetings. This presentation is not made to be exhaustive and further developments, national specificities and political maneuvers have certainly escaped the grasp of this analysis. Countries have been chosen in regard to different criteria, including their potential influence, innovative policies or public stance (and in some cases, lack thereof). Nevertheless, we will intend to present possibilities by interpreting the potential influence of the different agents as well as the possible reasons behind specific public political stances. The task will certainly lack evidence, in the form of actual implementation of new drug control policy in a country not in the process of achieving such reforms, and vice-versa. But most hypotheses are directly linked to internal experimentations and/or public stance in regard to the current IDCR. As such, U.N. member states have been regrouped into four groups, each representing a certain degree of the drug-control political diagram on which they find themselves. Within these groups, we have chosen to observe two specific regional political entities which have still significant influence on their respective member states, namely the E.U. and the ASEAN. These distinctions are subjective and will intend nonetheless to shed a light of grey on the member states respective positions in regard to which group they belong to.

Consequently, we will propose an overview of the current domestic policies of some U.N. state members. This by no means equivalent to their position during the upcoming Special Session. These commentaries are here to underline, a fortiori, the distance in between probable and potential positions and domestic legislations; as-well as underlying the actual possibility for alternative experimentations and compare them to the more probable results of UNGASS 2016.

(1) Which have had capital punishment for drug offenses since the 1940’s and 1950’s respectively,

(2) This mentioned Southeast Asian countries have passed such a law only in the 1970s under processes greatly influenced by the 20th century model for international drug control treaty regime, in which criminal approaches were greatly favored. Most specifically they fall under “the period of the global ‘war on drugs’, launched by the U.S. in the early 1970s, which formed the international political backdrop for the drafting of the 1988 treaty.” (Lines & al., 2015)

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