Written by Grace Mmesomachi Oji, Aggie Dennett Harmon, Claire Perry and Teresa Castro

Every year on 12 August, the world celebrates International Youth Day with familiar calls to action and promises to youth: we are the future, that our voices matter, that young leaders are currently and will continue to change the world. Across social media, conference halls and policy forums, these messages are repeated with genuine enthusiasm. Yet for many young people working in drug policy, harm reduction and public health, another question quietly persists:

If our voices matter “so much”, why are so many decisions still made without us?

For decades, young people have been labelled the beneficiaries, volunteers, peer educators or future leaders. But rarely are we recognised for what many of us already are: researchers generating evidence, advocates influencing policy, service providers reaching communities, storytellers changing narratives and leaders building solutions.

Meaningful, not symbolic youth inclusion

There is a growing recognition from governments to organizations about the importance of including young people in drug policy-related conversations. From United Nations  Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) Youth Forum to youth-led events at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, there’s increasing recognition of the value of our contributions.

This is progress worth celebrating. But inclusion alone is not enough. 

Too often, youth engagement follows a predictable pattern of tokenism. Young people are invited to consultations after priorities have already been decided. We are asked to share personal stories but not shape the recommendations that emerge from them. From meetings with the UN Office of Human Rights, to meetings discussing the future of UNAIDS and HIV care, we attend all sorts of high-profile events to discuss how young people should have a say in the decisions that will impact their future lives, careers and livelihoods, but we’re often left out of governing boards, funding committees and technical working groups.

Granted, youth participation has become increasingly visible. However, leadership with strong influence and impact remains frustratingly rare.

As conceptualized in the ladder of youth participation, meaningful youth engagement exists on a spectrum. At one end, institutions inform young people about decisions that have already been made. Some move further by consulting young people through surveys, focus groups or workshops. Others involve young people in delivering programmes. While all are important, strong youth leadership begins only when organisations are prepared to collaborate with young people as equal partners and, ultimately, share decision-making power. Beyond this, there are even youth-led initiatives in the realm of youth engagement. This is when young people are given the resources to lead and self govern projects, services, and programming in the drug policy space. However, these initiatives are incredibly rare. This distinction is more than semantics. It determines whether youth engagement becomes transformational or merely performative.

Young people who use drugs continue to experience tokenistic engagement despite possessing invaluable lived, living, laboured, learned, and loved expertise. In particular, too often, living and lived experience is welcomed as a story to strengthen advocacy but not as knowledge capable of mobilizing policy, programmes or research. They argue that meaningful engagement requires recognising lived experience as expertise, ensuring fair compensation and creating genuine opportunities for young people to influence decisions. 

Lived experience is – and will always be – the secret sauce and defining element of the drug policy space. Young people sharing their experiences of both stigma and compassion, difficulty accessing harm reduction and meaningful support, or harmful laws and reform can guide the sector towards instituting impactful, large-scale change. 

For years, we have asked the wrong question of “how do we involve young people”. We must start asking deeper, more uncomfortable questions:

  • “Why do adults still get to define what “meaningful engagement” means, without asking the young people it’s supposed to describe?”
  • “Can youth be meaningfully involved if they can’t comment or truly modify the project at hand?”
  • “Why are young people expected to volunteer for labour that funds entire careers for everyone else in the room?”
  • “Are young people clearly labelled as leaders and involved in all stages of planning and preparation? Are they explicitly and individually named as key contributors to projects or initiatives?” 
  • “Why are youth organisations treated as subcontractors, delivering someone else’s programme, instead of as grant holders shaping their own?”
  • “Why do drug policy conversations claim to centre lived experience, while the people with that experience are rarely involved in funding decisions?”

These questions stem from work we’ve done to ensure youth are meaningfully involved in drug-related programs. They are uncomfortable on purpose. Luckily, comfort has never been what moved institutions to change.  

What does meaningful youth leadership actually look like?

Meaningful youth leadership isn’t an invite to sit at the table. It’s building it alongside others. Young people have demonstrated time and time again that they’re able to lead. Across the world, young people produce community-based research, conduct peer outreach, design harm reduction programmes, document human rights violations, and generate an evidence base of their needs that can shape policies at the local, national and regional level. 

Young people who use drugs are organising in contexts where simply naming their drug use publicly carries enormous personal risk. Young people navigating incarceration and criminalisation are building peer networks from inside systems explicitly designed to isolate them. It is also worth noting that many of these systems do not allow youth to even openly lead from a place of lived experience, as expressing these parts of our stories and identities can result in legal consequences and other punitive measures. The impact of this is tenfold – as it both diminishes and dilutes the stories that young people can share, discouraging other youth from contributing their knowledge to the drug policy world. 

This is leadership by any definition. It is too often excluded from the governance structures and funding decisions that determine whether it survives past the next grant cycle.

So what does the alternative structure look like?

It looks like power and accountability, not just presence. It looks like young people co-authoring strategy with the power to redirect or veto it, not simply comment on a draft someone else will finalise. 

Youth leadership should be funded, not romanticised. A budget line, a staff role, a fair rate – not the assumption that passion is its own currency.

Meaningful youth leadership must be designed for sustainability: young people’s involvement in drug-related processes – from treatment to policy design – should be made with the intent to nurture talent and provide long-term opportunities for engagement and potential career paths. There is a need for accountability and transparency in both directions where institutions report back on what happened to young people’s input, instead of collecting it and moving on.

There is no single youth experience

Young people who use drugs are incredibly diverse. Some navigate multiple forms of discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, disability, migration status, poverty or HIV status.

These intersecting realities matter because not every young person has equal access to opportunities for leadership.

Young women who use drugs, for example, often experience overlapping forms of stigma and oppression linked to both gender and drug use. In many settings, they face heightened risks of violence, criminalisation and barriers to accessing youth-friendly sexual and reproductive healthcare.

Similarly, LGBTQ+ young people who use drugs, Indigenous youth, young people living with HIV, young people experiencing homelessness, migrants, refugees and those affected by conflict often face multiple layers of exclusion that remain largely invisible within drug policy discussions.

Meaningful leadership does not mean replacing one form of exclusion with another. It means intentionally creating space for those who have historically been left out, even within youth movements themselves.

Prioritising these voices is not about ranking whose experience matters more. It’s about correcting for whose voice institutions have already, structurally, made louder and building the pathways that let the young people usually locked out of the “youth voice” pipeline lead on their own terms. It is about recognising that those closest to the challenges are often closest to the solutions.

Co-creating with youth, establishing joint priorities and sharing funding not only creates better drug policies and services, it ensures they’re grounded in the realities of those most impacted by them. 

This article was cross-published with Dianova International.