No Cameras: politics, international humanitarian law, military theory and ferrets

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01 May 2003: "Tangled webs: drugs and international relations"

What with the war in Iraq (and its aftermath), SARS, North Korea, etc. it was easy to miss the special ministerial session of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs, which took place in Vienna two weeks ago. This is a pity, because the dynamics of the Commission, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (ODC) and the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) reflect a very different picture than that which one generally associates with the UN.

Global drug policy is set out in three conventions (the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971 and Convention against the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988), which oblige the signatories to outlaw production, trade, possession and use for non-medical purposes of plant-based and synthetic drugs (except alcohol and tobacco); these are actually very far-reaching as international treaties go, since they actively regulate national legislation of sovereign states.

In 1998, the UN General Assembly resolved to strive towards the "elimination or significant reduction" of drug production and use within ten years; the Vienna session was the halfway mark. To say the conclusions were inauspicious would be an understatement; worldwide, production, purity and use are up, and the only thing coming down about drugs is the street price (according to ODC, the retail price of heroin in the EU dropped by about a third—from $88 to $58—between 1997 and late 2001).

It's not hard to guess who was the biggest backer of spreading the "War on Drugs" (or as Harry Browne would put it "the Insane War on Drugs") to a global level; it was the United States. The US is also the biggest donor to the ODC and its predecessor, the International Drug Control Program (UNDCP). Ironically, when one speaks of the horrors of the UN bureacracy—such as gross mismanagement, petty politicking, internal feuding, punishment postings, backstabbing, what have you—the UNDCP was probably the best example around; two years ago, a senior official (immediately prior to resigning) referred to the organisation as a "snake pit." (You never saw those guys at the Inter-Agency Games, either, though that was probably for the best.) Arguably, the revamping of the UNDCP into the ODC might be described as "pulling a Sellafield."*

As far as "UN ineffectuality" is concerned, the 1998 resolution is also an outstanding example; no standards were set by which to measure success, and given developments since, one is left to wonder whether this was not intentional, in order to avoid having to admit that the whole project is an abysmal—and moreover predictable—failure, as well as being an exercise in pointless denial.

Given the failure of "zero tolerance", several UN member states, supported by a number of NGOs, are looking into other ways to minimise the harm inflicted by drug abuse; this includes liberalising the approach to milder drugs, such as cannabis, in order to direct police efforts at more worthy targets. The countries involved are, perhaps unsurprisingly, predominantly western European. The UK has recently downgraded cannabis to "Class C" (low risk) status; Jamaica, Portugal and Spain are experimenting with the partial decriminalisation of cannabis by not enforcing the law against possession in cases where there is no intent to traffic, which has been long-standing policy in the Netherlands for over three decades. Australia, Canada and Germany are looking into alternative policies as well.

The INCB, as the agency responsible for monitoring breaches of the three Conventions, wasted no time springing into action: in February it condemned Britain's reclassification of cannabis, despite the fact that the ODC had advised the INCB that this action might not be in violation of the Conventions. The British response was, by diplomatic standards, quite vicious.

Any attempt to modify, let alone scrap, the Conventions is widely expected to be met with overwhelming hostility from the anti-liberalisation lobby; the ODC and the INCB are controlled to large extent by the members of this lobby, due to the fact that these members are the main donors. Equally, any attempt on the part of signatory to withdraw from the Conventions is likely to draw the wrath of the United States, the fact that the US government has been quite happy to withdraw from various inconvenient treaties itself notwithstanding. (Switzerland is probably breathing a sigh of relief it never signed the things; voices are being raised in the Netherlands advocating pulling out anyway and screw what the American federal government thinks).

But what is truly fascinating is the make-up of the anti-liberalisation lobby; when it comes to drugs, the closest allies of the US are (perhaps not surprisingly) Mexico, Thailand and Sweden (which takes a remarkably hard line on drugs), but more remarkably France and most of the muslim world, not in the least place Iran (and this is the fun part, the theocratic component of the Iranian government in particular; you know, the ones which cause Iran to be lumped into the "Axis of Evil"). Clearly, the current federal US policy on drugs is imposing some strange bedfellows indeed. We'll just have to wait and see which allies are more valuable on the global stage.

Note: obviously, my main motivation for writing this entry is to demonstrate that the US relationship with the UN apparatus and other member states can be dramatically different from the more conventional associations.

* - a reference to the fact that after the nth cock-up in 1981, British Nuclear Fuels Limited, British Energy and HM Government ceased mentioning the name "Windscale," thitherto the designation of several successive reactors at the Sellafield site (all shut down following near-catastrophic mishaps), and spoke solely of "Sellafield"; the obvious criticism was that this was simply an attempt to avoid the negative associations the name "Windscale" by then invariably conjured up on the part of most British (not to mention Irish) citizens.