International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC)

In this advocacy note, IDPC discusses the WHO’s strategic role in drug policy, including progress made and ongoing gaps and challenges, and calls on the WHO and its governing bodies to engage in a more progressive and systematic way in various aspects of global drug policy to ensure more coherence with the UN system on drug policy, health, human rights, and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The drug policy reform movement continues to strengthen and diversify with many new players joining the calls for a serious re-think of repression and punishment as instruments of drug control. Repressive drug control measures are increasingly being understood as a form of state violence that serves to deepen and entrench structural inequalities which has garnered stronger interest in challenging current drug policies from other social movements such as those working on racial inequality, women’s rights, indigenous rights, LGTIQ+ rights to prison abolition and beyond.

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR), alongside other international and national human rights mechanisms, is an important tool for holding countries that are part of the United Nations, known as UN Member States, accountable for respecting, promoting and fulfilling the human rights of people who use drugs, as well as fulfilling the pledges countries have made through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The UPR has the potential to improve human rights everywhere, for everyone.

Countries in Asia implement some of the harshest drug policies in the world. As United Nations (UN) member states are set to meet in March 2019 to take stock of progress made since 2009 and delineate the next phase for global drug policy, ‘10 Years of Drug Policy in Asia: How Far Have We Come?’ evaluates the impacts of drug policies in Asia over the past decade from a civil society perspective.

Almost a decade ago, the international community agreed upon a Political Declaration and Plan of Action on International Cooperation towards an Integrated and Balanced Strategy to Counter the World Drug Problem. The Declaration included the decision to establish 2019 as the target date for the goals set within it, specifically for states to ‘eliminate or reduce significantly and measurably’ the illicit cultivation, production, trafficking and use of internationally controlled substances, the diversion of precursors and money laundering.