http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227096.300-comment-get-real-drug-czars.html

Comment: Get real, drug czars

   * 26 May 2009 by Robin Room
   * Magazine issue 2709. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

ELEVEN years ago, the UN pledged to win the war on drugs within a decade. It has
failed.

At this year's meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, held in Vienna in
March, there was a two-day session to evaluate the progress since 1998. In his
opening remarks, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria
Costa, claimed "measurable progress". The drug problem has been "contained", he
said, and drug use has "stabilised".

Costa's position flies in the face of the evidence, and by the end of the meeting he
was on the defensive. But he said the goal remains the same, and he reiterated the
UN's position: that the choice for the world's nations is either to apply strict
prohibition or concede to total legalisation.

Soon after the meeting, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard
Holbrooke, acknowledged the failure to stamp out poppy farming in Afghanistan. Of
the US expenditure of over $800 million a year on counter-narcotics, Holbrooke said:
"We have gotten nothing out of it, nothing."

Those in charge of the world's drug control system seem more committed to
maintaining the existing policy than to addressing its failures. International
discussions on the subject have become absurd, and nowhere is this more apparent
than with cannabis. Although cannabis amounts to perhaps 80 per cent of total
global illicit drug use, there was scarcely any mention of it in Vienna.

International prohibition of cannabis was established in 1961 under the UN's Single
Convention on Narcotic Drugs, a document drafted in a wholly different era when
cannabis use was confined largely to small subcultures. Though huge changes since
then have rendered it outdated, the status of cannabis remains unchanged and is
apparently not up for negotiation.

In Vienna, the only action on cannabis was a resolution from ultra-prohibitionist
Japan on cannabis seeds. Its aim was to clamp down on the growing trend of
cannabis cultivation in private homes, which Japan claimed was "a global threat".

It doesn't have to be this way. Last year, the UK-based Beckley Foundation published
its Global Cannabis Commission Report, of which I was an author. The report sets out
how countries might move to fairer and more effective systems of cannabis control. It
offers tools for policy-makers to break the stalemate, such as decriminalisation and
depenalisation, and evidence on what happens if they are adopted. As the report
points out, "that which is prohibited cannot easily be regulated".

A regulated cannabis market offers more options than prohibition for acting to limit
harms from use. We need to move beyond the deadlock on drug policy, to transcend
the polarisation, and to give serious consideration to the options for change.
Cannabis would be a good place to start.

Robin Room is professor of social alcohol research at the School of Population Health,
University of Melbourne, Australia, and director of the AER Centre for Alcohol Policy
Research at the Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre in Melbourne


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