Youth RISE is attending the 65th Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) this week virtually. We will be updating daily about the side events attended, and the happenings at the Plenary and the Committee of the Whole (CoW). We are giving the youth perspective and reflection on CND through daily vlogs and through blogs.

Don’t miss our 3 side events coming up this week:

Wednesday 16th 12:15-13:05pm CET: THE GLOBAL DRUG POLICY INDEX 2021: A GLOBAL TOOL FOR EVALUATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Thursday 17th 12:15-13:05pm CET: WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN? YOUTH WELFARE IN DRUG POLICY

Thursday 17th 12:15-13:05pm CET: YOUNG WOMEN WHO USE DRUGS – BREAKING THE SILENCE

Here is our vlog for day 2:

Our Finance Officer Ross also gives his perspective on the side event titled ‘The Humanitarian Approach to Drug Policy: Opportunities and Challenges for Effective Cooperation Between Public Authorities and Health-Based Organizations’.

“This afternoon I attended a side event titled ‘The Humanitarian Approach to Drug Policy: Opportunities and Challenges for Effective Cooperation between Public Authorities and Health-Based Organizations’. The event was hosted by Italy with the support of the Council of Europe – Pompidou Group, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the UNODC Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation Section, the Vienna NGO Committee on Drugs, and public health officials from Ecuador, Kenya and Italy. 

In stark contrast to a side event I attended immediately before, hosted by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, this event featured a range of progressive interventions on the importance of people-centred drug policies with an emphasis on harm reduction and human rights. The most prominent themes throughout the discussion were that of the need to tackle the stigma around drugs and drug treatment, expanding access to harm reduction services like needle exchange and OST, and ensuring patient access to controlled medicines, such as opioids for pain relief. 

While the content of the interventions certainly deserves praise, if I were to nit-pick, there were still one or two things I thought merited some criticism. Firstly, people who use drugs were mostly referred to with outdated and stigmatising language such as “drug user”. Secondly, there was no explicit mention of young people. However, overall, the contributions from all participants in the discussion were very refreshing to hear. It was great to hear such unwavering support for precisely the type of humane drug policies that organisations like Youth RISE and our partners advocate for. 

One thing I would have liked to have heard more on is the urgent need for legal regulation of drugs in order to tackle the vast amount of harm arising from their illegality in the first place. As I mentioned, harm reduction was a central component to the discussion, but there was a failure to recognise that much of the harm associated with drugs in the first place is directly the result of prohibition and the underground, unregulated nature of the drugs market. Thus, a great deal of harm can be reduced long before the point where harm reduction services are required. However, the switch from prohibition to alternative drug policy models was never going to happen overnight, and it was very still positive to hear about the prioritisation of harm reduction and human rights, particularly from public health officials from Italy, Ecuador and Kenya where fantastic progress appears to be being made in those regards. Perhaps in years to come we will hopefully see even more radical progress with regards to ending the ‘War on Drugs’ altogether.”

Ross also attended the side event titled ‘Strengthening Anti-drug Cooperation in the SCO Space: Supporting Global Drugg Control’.

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Today I attended a side event hosted by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation entitled: “Strengthening Anti-drug Cooperation in the SCO Space: Supporting Global Drug Control”. The event featured contributions from Chinese, Indian, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajikistani officials as well as Executive Director of the UNODC Ghada Waly. The two main topics of discussion were a) combatting drug trafficking from Afghanistan into neighbouring central Asian countries, and b) cracking down on the use of online drug markets, such as those on the Darkweb.  

What struck me most about this side event was the completely depersonalised language used throughout the discussion. I scarcely recall even hearing any mention of PWUD at all, let alone young people in particular, with the only exception being China’s brief mention of “training for adolescent drug takers”. Instead, drugs (and drug markets) were referred to as if they existed in a vacuum, independent of social or structural factors such as poverty, inequality, trauma and mental healthcare infrastructure etc., and rather as something which must be eradicated through brute force as opposed to a series of evidence-based programmes designed to tackle the source of the demand for drugs in the first place. Language like “addressing the world drug problem” (China), “combatting the drugs menace” (India), and “transform[ing] Asian into a drug-free space” (China) was plentiful. But despite an abundance of tough anti-drug rhetoric and back patting, there was remarkably little in the way of substantive, concrete proposals for achieving such fanciful and poorly defined targets beyond increased cooperation and intelligence sharing.

For me, the side event thus perfectly encapsulated the futility of prohibitive drug policies which neglect to acknowledge the role of people in the use of drugs themselves and which fail to design policies to support such people in the absence of drugs. The drug market is a market like any other – so long as there is demand, supply will follow. Failure to understand and address this simple fact is what dooms such policies to failure before the ink has even dried on the legislative paper. This is precisely why people-centred policy responses are objectively more effective insofar as they not only advocate for improvements to the living conditions of people which lead to demand in the first place, but also advocate for the provision of vital services and programmes to support those in recovery after the fact. “