United Nations Opens Three-Day Session to Address Global Drug Policy

The United Nations (UN) starts a three-day special session Tuesday to address global drug policy, the Associated Press reports. It is the first special session to address the topic in almost 20 years.

Hundreds of government officials, non-governmental organization representatives and individuals will attend the session, which is expected to feature a debate over whether drug policy should emphasize criminalization or health and human rights.

The 1998 special session on drug policy set a goal of eliminating illegal drugs by 2008.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy, which includes former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, as well as the former presidents of Mexico and Brazil, issued a statement in March that said discussions to draft the special session’s outcome document relied too much on an outdated law-and-order approach.

“Although it includes positive references to human rights and public health, it offers no hard solutions to make them stick,” the group said The Commission called for a number of steps, including ending the criminalization and incarceration of drug users, abolishing capital punishment for drug-related offenses and ensuring a broad spectrum of treatments for dependent people and services designed to reduce the harms of drugs.

Last week, more than 1,000 people signed a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon calling for global drug policy to shift from emphasizing criminalization to health. “Leadership must come from those who recognize that psychoactive drug use is first and foremost a matter of health. Drug control efforts must never do more harm than good, or cause more harm than drug misuse itself,” the letter stated. Signatories included Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, financier Warren Buffett, several U.S. senators and the former presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Switzerland.