AIDS Conference launches major drug law reform action
by Michael Gormly
The latest world drug report from the UN documents a global illicit drug trade of mega-corporate proportions, but supports a continuation of the War on Drugs under which the trade has flourished.
That war is visible on Sydney streets in the guise of police with sniffer dogs searching people NYPD style; in mass media obsessed with gang violence fuelled by drug profits; and in our overflowing jails.
But the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna has published a major declaration presenting a very different way forward, and is hosting an online petition asking people to endorse it. The declaration, written and supported by leading health professionals from all parts of the world, lists the failures of the War on Drugs and calls on the UN to decriminalise, regulate and scale up treatment for problem users.
The global contest between prohibitionists and reformers is at a delicate point, with prohibitionists hosting their own summit events to buttress the UN-driven war. However their arguments are sounding ever more stale as they increasingly ignore damning evidence and argument that refutes their position.
For example, the Declaration lists some consequences of the War on Drugs:
“• A crisis in criminal justice systems as a result of record incarceration rates in a number of nations. This has negatively affected the social functioning of entire communities. While racial disparities in incarceration rates for drug offences are evident in countries all over the world, the impact has been particularly severe in the US, where approximately one in nine African-American males in the age group 20 to 34 is incarcerated on any given day, primarily as a result of drug law enforcement.
• Stigma towards people who use illicit drugs, which reinforces the political popularity of criminalising drug users and undermines HIV prevention and other health promotion efforts.
• Severe human rights violations, including torture, forced labour, inhuman and degrading treatment, and execution of drug offenders in a number of countries.
• A massive illicit market worth an estimated annual value of US$320 billion. These profits remain entirely outside the control of government. They fuel crime, violence and corruption in countless urban communities and have destabilised entire countries, such as Colombia, Mexico and Afghanistan.
• Billions of tax dollars wasted on a “War on Drugs” approach to drug control that does not achieve its stated objectives and, instead, directly or indirectly contributes to the above harms.”
Unfortunately, such evidence of the failures and harms of drug prohibition is routinely denied by those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo, most notably police and jail industries bloated with Drug War funding, tax dollars that would be better spent on health, housing or infrastructure.
Australia is lagging badly in this debate. While a few reformers here occasionally break into the public discourse, governments, police and media remain cemented in a Drug War mindset that greatly exaggerates the harms of drugs while denying the much greater harms of prohibition.
The Declaration and petition are online at viennadeclaration.com
[Dr Norm Stamper, pictured, represents Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a large US group of crime and justice professionals demanding the repeal of prohibition.]
