UN reviews anti-drugs policies, worldwide divisions revealed
A United Nations (UN) General Assembly gathered in New York on Tuesday to discuss and rethink their strategy against drugs. This conference is the first time activists, UN officials, and world leaders will gather together after two decades as they cite an international trend towards more liberal drug laws.
But divisions among its 193 member states have been immediately revealed as some countries favor decriminalization while others still use the death penalty as punishment for offenders.
The three-day special session was requested by Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala who have seen spiraling drugs violence.
Some Latin American leaders say that the aggressive approach against drugs has failed and only resulted in the deaths and destruction of thousands of lives all over the world. Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto warned that harsh penalties “create a vicious cycle of marginalization and crime”.
“We should be flexible to change that which has not yielded results, the paradigm based essentially in prohibitionism, the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ … (which) has not been able to limit production, trafficking nor the global consumption of drugs,” he said. He also told the assembly that Mexico will soon increase the amount of marijuana Mexicans are allowed for personal use and legalize marijuana for medical purposes.
But some major powers, including Russia, remain cautious of the trend towards legalization and frown upon moves by U.S. states to regulate access to marijuana.
“Evidence shows that prohibitionist approaches have not worked: from 1998 to 2008 the number of people using illicit drugs did not change significantly and neither did the area used for opium poppy cultivation,” U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Magdy Martinez-Soliman wrote in the Guardian newspaper.”Conventional policies have failed in reducing addiction and production.”
Several delegates called for the death penalty to be abolished for drugs crimes. But Indonesia, one of the countries where capital punishment takes place for such offences, said it was a matter on which individual states should decide for themselves.
No major decisions are expected this week but activists and delegates are hopeful that this will push the world a few steps closer to towards a more liberal drug strategy that puts human rights and public health, not repression, at the center.
Source: Reuters
