UN "Beyond 2008" NGO Forum

[Guest niall]

The UN is hosting a historical meeting of NGOs to provide input to the next CND review in March 2009:

 

http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/event...rum_070708.html

 

"Global NGO Forum on the 1998-2008 Review of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on illicit drugs. The forum to be held in the Vienna International Centre (Austria) is organized by the Vienna NGO Committee on Narcotic Drugs, in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The forum will allow civil society to have a say on drug policy through the adoption of a global NGO Declaration along with three topic specific resolutions that will be tabled at the high level segment of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in March 2009."

 

 

The ACLU is blogging each day's events and it makes for great reading: http://blog.aclu.org/category/drug-law-reform/

 

Dispatch from Vienna: United Nations Forum on International Drug Policy

 

As I head to Vienna for a historic U.N. meeting on drug policy, I find myself reflecting on the pervasive influence of the United States on drug laws around the globe. The news of today, and of any given day, is permeated with tragedies and dramas that exist only because we, in the United States, have convinced ourselves and much of the world that prison and black markets are the best solutions to the human urge to ingest substances, despite (or perhaps because of) their powerful ability to alter brain chemistry.

 

Walking down the boarding ramp for my flight on Swiss Air, an array of Swiss newspapers faces me. From each cover, the face of Ingrid Betancourt stares out, her smile celebrating newfound freedom and her worried eyes betraying six years of brutal captivity at the hands of FARC, a Colombia guerilla group funded by cocaine sales and hostage ransom. The story of her rescue is the stuff of a fine spy novel; the embrace of her children, heart-warming; but behind it all lies a story of drugs — the consumption of cocaine, the war on those who use, sell and produce it, and a complex web of violence, destruction, corruption and destroyed lives that follow ineluctably from this endless war.

 

In other cocaine-related news of the day, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is in trouble. No, he is not yet another politician to be accused of using drugs. Rather, he was outed as being soft-on-crime, an allegation that can be just as lethal to political ambitions. Mayor Newsom’s gubernatorial ambitions have faltered following the revelation that the city has returned a handful of juvenile drug sellers to their native Honduras rather than sending them to prison and then deporting them. Newsom quickly apologized for failing to incarcerate children — at least when sale of (presumably minor amounts of) drugs is involved.

 

Much of the demand for cocaine comes, of course, from the United States. This isn’t really news, but it’s fascinating to see that researchers from the World Health Organization (WHO) have found that the United States has both the highest consumption of cocaine as well as some of the most punitive laws imposed on those who use or sell the drug. The WHO researchers concluded:

 

The use of drugs seems to be a feature of more affluent countries.

 

The United States, which has been driving much of the world’s drug research and drug policy agenda, stands out with higher levels of use of alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis, despite punitive illegal drug policies, as well as (in many U.S. states), a higher minimum legal alcohol drinking age than many comparable developed countries.

 

The Netherlands, with a less criminally punitive approach to cannabis use than the U.S., has experienced lower levels of use, particularly among younger adults.

 

The limitations of punitive drug policies principally concerned with supply-side enforcement and incarceration could not be clearer. The time has come for the international community to fully recognize that a drug free world is presently beyond reach and to focus on minimizing the dangers that drugs pose to at-risk individuals and society at large — an approach that has proven both effective and better aligned with international human rights and public safety mandates. The ACLU’s statement to the U.N. offers additional information and detailed recommendations.

 

With thoughts of Betancourt, Honduran children and a failed U.S. drug policy that drives a global market for drugs, I’ll be meeting with NGO leaders from around the world. Some will argue for more of the same, but many of us will be urging a new approach.

 

I’ll report tomorrow on the first day of the conference.

 

Dispatch from Vienna: First Day of the United Nations’ Forum on International Drug Policy

 

Today marks the beginning of the first-ever attempt to shape international drug policy, not from the perspective of national governments, but based on the views and experience of people who live and work in countries all around the globe.

 

More than 300 delegates (including me, as the ACLU representative) gathered this morning in a room in a vast U.N. complex in Vienna. More famous as the home of international efforts to control the spread of nuclear arms, the complex is also home to the main U.N. agencies charged with control of illicit drugs. We sat in the chairs usually occupied by the Committee on Narcotic Drugs, each of us with an earphone providing simultaneous translation. Dial 4 for English, 5 for French or 8 for Spanish. If you rely on any of the world’s other languages — from Albanian to Zulu — it seems that you’re out of luck.

 

If a few languages are dominant, though, it was quickly clear that only one national government held sway in this part of the U.N.: the United States. The introductory remarks from the leading figures in the U.N. drug policy structure all reflected a surprising level of allegiance to hard-line U.S. drug policy. Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (recently his title was changed from Drug Czar to something less, well, czar-ish), proclaimed that last week the world had finally reached "containment" (his word, not mine) of the drug problem. I’ll let others judge whether he is right to claim victory: compare his report with a report by the Transnational Institute not-so-subtly titled, "UNODC Rewrites History in New World Drug Report to Hide Failure." (PDF)

 

Hasn’t our own U.S. drug czar periodically (and controversially) proclaimed a statistical victory in the war on drugs, even as the rest of us know otherwise? Indeed, Congress held oversight hearings in March (PDF), slamming the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) for sugar-coating statistics and exaggerating its accomplishments. Just last week, the New York Times published a poignant editorial entitled, "Not Winning the War on Drugs," which also took ONDCP to the mat for obfuscating the truth about its failures.

 

As to any alternative to arrest and incarceration as the framework for drug policy, Costa is sending mixed signals. On the one hand, he quipped, "we must move beyond these debates between a drug-free world and a free drug world," suggesting that any alternative to drug gulags would entail providing free drugs to all who seek them. On the other hand, Costa signaled a new and most welcome opening to applying human rights rules to drug policy (much more on that later). Again he executed a nice turn of phrase: "Although drugs kill, we should not kill because of drugs." I was left wondering: is his vision of human rights limited to disallowing the death penalty, or is this an opening to talk about decades of incarceration, invasions of privacy, and the host of other human rights violations committed in the name of drug law enforcement?

 

The non-governmental representatives turned out not to share Mr. Costa’s view of the world. During the past year, NGOs (that’s U.N.-speak for "nongovernmental organizations") met in nine regional conferences around the globe. Covering vast swaths of the map (from sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast to East Asia), each meeting gathered input from hundreds of organizations and produced a report detailing NGO input. The input from these reports coalesced into a draft declaration and resolution. During the next few days, the NGOs in attendance will engage in a consensus-building process to debate the final wording of the declaration and resolution. In turn, the declaration and resolution will be presented at the U.N. General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) in March 2009, when the next 10-year global strategy for drug policy will be determined.

 

In all but one region of the world, the NGOs found an appalling over-reliance on arrest and incarceration — appalling both because it proves ineffective in addressing drug addiction and because it destroys so many lives at such great cost. In all but one region, the NGOs called for applying human rights norms to their nations’ drug policies. In all but one region, the NGOs described their work in reducing the harms of drugs by providing sterile syringes to drug users to stop the spread of AIDS.

 

The one region to part course on these fronts was the United States. A regional meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida, gathered a chorus of organizations that are funded by or collaborate closely with the U.S. Drug Czar’s office, and, having gathered only the usual suspects, they produced a consensus view that federal drug laws were consistent with the U.N. drug treaties and that they were working just fine. Their main complaint was that some states violate international law by choosing not to arrest seriously ill patients who use marijuana — a policy they call "medical excuse marijuana." (By the way, this argument about international law is being made by the County of San Diego in a lawsuit where the ACLU and our allies are defending California’s medical marijuana law, so far with great success.)

 

It’s hard to select a low point in the presentation of the Florida meeting, but I’ll go with this one: according Calvina Fay, director of the Drug Free America Foundation and a former advisor to the ONDCP, "the criminal justice system is a good referral system for treatment." In other words, we should be proud that we arrest and incarcerate more people for drugs than any nation in the entire world or in all of history because this is a way of getting these folks into treatment. I can hardly think of a more expensive or less humane way to address an issue that the rest of the world (and much of America) recognizes to be a public health issue.

 

The day ended with Fay blocking consensus on the suggestion that the words "harm reduction" should be included in a list of services provided by NGOs. The list is long and reflects the wide range of responses to people who use or misuse drugs — peer outreach, treatment, early intervention, education, etc. But the inclusion of this taboo term, "harm reduction," invokes those approaches that seek to save lives of people who cannot or will not stop using drugs. The term is used in literally dozens of U.N. documents, the approach is practiced by a sizeable portion of the service providers at this conference (I would guess half or so, from every part of world, including Iran, and yet its very mention is anathema to the dogma-police approach to drug policy.

 

I spend a fair amount of my workdays thinking about the direction of drug policy in the United States. The Calvina Fays of our country leave me worried that we’re on the way to locking up another generation of Americans and exporting our misguided policies to the rest of the globe. So far, the U.N. has been an accomplice in doing so. But today’s airing of the views of the world’s NGOs leaves me hopeful that we’re in the process of turning a page on that history, both at home and abroad.

 

To learn more about the ACLU’s analysis and recommendations to the U.N., check out our statement to the United Nations: "Adopting a Human Rights-Based Global Drug Policy."

 

Dispatch from Vienna, Day Two: A Spy in the House

 

Intrigue and then remarkable progress marked the second day of the Vienna conference on drug policy.

 

First, the intrigue. Throughout the first day, I kept noticing this one person who harrumphed, guffawed, and muttered every time someone spoke in ways critical of the drug policy status quo. By accent, she seemed to be from the United States. And she had a yellow badge, where everyone else had a red badge. Who was she? Why did she keep shuffling over to the U.S. groups like Drug Free America and other cheerleaders for U.S. hardline policy? She settled in right behind me, and gave instructions to her allies — tactics for blocking inclusion of harm reduction. She said "one of you needs to interject to stop the hand clapping in favor of their proposals." More and more, she seemed like some sort of puppet master. As the day concluded, she rushed up to the podium, accosted the chair, and, in the most agitated way, began lambasting the chair for various procedural points.

 

I had to find out about the American woman with the yellow badge. At a social gathering later that evening, I described my observations to some of the NGO delegates who regularly attend these U.N. events. Turns out that the yellow-badge woman is June Sivilli, an employee of the U.S. drug czar’s office and a regular fixture at Vienna drug meetings. Until now, she has been able to speak as an official voice of the U.S. government — and the U.S. is always the most important voice on U.N. drug policy issues. Now that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are bringing the voices of ordinary people to the table for the first time ever, she was actively subverting the process, throwing every possible obstacle in the way of this quite benign process.

 

I’d always heard that the U.S. government played a bully role in international drug policy. But it’s really ugly to see it in practice.

 

Happily, the second morning of the conference came with no U.S. government saboteurs on the scene. Someone must have let Sivilli know that her contributions were not appropriate. As if by magic, the barrage of objections from yesterday largely evaporated. Some of the pro-status quo groups continued to raise some objections, but I realized that some of those folks have a genuine desire to make the world a better place and a desire to make the NGO consultation productive. The head of Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America offered some reasonable compromises; the representative of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP) supported my calls for human rights protections; even Calvina Fay (see yesterday’s post on her deplorable statements) became fairly agreeable.

 

I shouldn’t overstate the kumbaya spirit of the day, though. A tempest erupted when a European HIV prevention group suggested that drug users should be consulted in making drug policy because they are the most affected. He asked us to imagine if an AIDS convention were drafted without mentioning people living with HIV. The NADCP representative then brought down the house with this: "I do not believe that people who are using drugs should be part of the process," followed by, "drugs are illegal, so it can’t be compared to the civil rights movement" and a comment that people could be heard only if "they submitted themselves to treatment" first. Deborah Small from Break the Chains offered an olive branch, saying that we all share the goal of helping people, so we should exclude no one. But the point of the whole exercise was brought home by the chair of the meeting, who said that some governments hesitate to consult NGOs because they are seen as unruly or undirected, so this kind of squabble would bring delight, showing that NGOs are categorically unfit to have a seat at the table.

 

Thus, with Sivilli gone and with our minds focused on not looking like a room of unruly school children, we finally rolled up our sleeves. By mid-day, we began accelerating through a draft resolution, adding in human rights protections, recognizing the value of harm reduction, and insisting that "success" in the drug war must account for all the human and economic costs of incarceration and law enforcement, not just a tally sheet of tons of drugs interdicted. We even agreed that the U.N. drug bodies should re-evaluate whether incarceration is an effective drug policy. (One stalwart — a fellow whose organization’s goal is to bring drug testing to every school in the U.S. and across the globe — objected that this was an attack on law enforcement. None of the law enforcement organizations agreed.)

 

Frankly, I’m not sure what to make of all this. It seems clear that ordinary people of the world are able to do a pretty good job describing a sane drug policy, so long as the U.S. drug czar stays out the way. The problem, though, is that this wonderful set of recommendations will matter only if national governments decide to listen. Once Sivilli resumes her customary seat at the table, she’ll surely oppose the recommendations. But will the other nations of the world have the wherewithal to chart their own course? Given that U.S. aid is often made conditional on toeing the U.S. drug policy line, it’s hard to be overly optimistic.

 

And yet, we have no choice but to find hope that other nations will join us in charting a new course. At the end of today, I talked with Deodory John. He runs program in Tanzania for young people harmed by drug use. The program, Rafiki Family, is funded by local contributions. He is certain that prisons and police would do the kids in his program no good; they need education, jobs, peer counseling and treatment. And using harm reduction interventions, he’s working to combat the spread of HIV and AIDS. (If you want to join me in supporting his program, please send an email to John for more information.) I also met Tripti Tandon, from the Lawyers Collective’s HIV/AIDS Unit in India. She told me how India had enacted draconian drug laws under pressure from the U.S. to comply with its treaty obligations. The law makes even consumption of drugs a crime, and police routinely pick up poor people, force them to take drug tests, and then convict them based on the results. A positive for marijuana lands you in jail for six months; harder drugs for a year. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, the U.S. helped design and build a remote maximum security prison, where death-row inmates are transported using CIA rendition techniques (hoods, shackles, beating), confessions are extracted under torture, and the majority of prisoners are accused solely of drug crimes. This travesty is exposed on page 45 of a March 2008 U.N. Human Rights Council report to the U.N. General Assembly. If the NGOs get our way here in Vienna, the U.N. drug bodies will start documenting the myriad human rights violations committed under the U.S.-led global war on drugs.

 

At the ACLU, we work hard to replace the drug war with a humane, health-based approach. The millions of current, former, and would-be drug prisoners in the U.S. urgently need this change. This conference makes clear that things are as bad, and often worse, in other parts of the world, and I’m glad that our work may help atone for — maybe even correct — some of the devastation that U.S.-led drug policy has inflicted throughout all corners of the globe.

 

Dispatch from Vienna, Day Three: A Global Consensus for Drug Policy Reform

 

The first-ever meeting of ordinary people, representing the entire globe and discussing the state of the world’s drug policy, concluded today in Vienna with a unanimous, united call for a new approach to drug control policy. Here are the highlights of our resolution:

 

* We recognized "the human rights abuses against people who use drugs"

* We called for "evidence-based" drug policy focused on "mitigation of short-term and long-term harms" and "full respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms"

* We called on the U.N. to report on the collateral consequences of the current criminal justice-based approach to drugs and to provide an "analysis of the unintended consequences of the drug control system"

* We called for comprehensive "reviews of the application of criminal sanctions as a drug control measure"

* We recognized harm reduction as a necessary and worthwhile response to drug abuse (harm reduction is a set of practical strategies that reduce negative consequences of drug use, incorporating a spectrum of strategies from safer use, to managed use to abstinence; harm reduction strategies meet drug users "where they’re at," addressing conditions of use along with the use itself)

* We called for a shift in primary emphasis from interdiction to treatment and prevention

* We called for alternatives to incarceration

* We called for the provision of development aid to farmers before eradication of coca or opium crops

 

In other words, we voiced the need for a very significant shift in direction for drug policy at just about every level.

 

Of course, if the national governments decide to ignore this call from the grassroots, this could just be a grown-up version of the model U.N. club some of us did in high school.

 

If you read my earlier blog posts , you’ll know about the mysterious woman with the yellow badge — she worked hard to wreck the first day, but once she was gone on the second day, the more hard-line U.S. groups became fairly pragmatic and sensible. But the mystery woman showed up again today.

 

I decided to introduce myself to the woman with the yellow badge. Today, she had a red badge, like the rest of us — meaning that overnight she had become a delegate, not an observer. Scary thought for how the day might go. I offered her my card, and got hers. I asked that she, as an official U.S. representative, please include the ACLU in future delegations. It turns out that June Sivilli is indeed in the drug czar’s office. A quick Google search reveals that she’s a big proponent of student drug testing, which may explain why she already knew who I was (thanks to the ACLU’s heretical position that, because it’s invasive and ineffective, we shouldn’t drug test students.) She didn’t offer to include me in future delegations, but was entirely civil.

 

And then the day started with a bang: obstruction and delay from Drug Free America’s Calvina Fay and a couple of her colleagues. What was interesting, though, was that many of her original allies were no longer going along with her tactics. Joined only by the "Drug Free Schools Coalition" and a group called Sundial , she renewed the call to remove any suggestion that current drug policies cause harm. Sivilli seemed to be at work again, mobilizing her dwindling troops. Things quickly became comical: one delegate made a motion for all official government employees (i.e., Sivilli) to reveal themselves. The chair denied the motion, but the point had been made. Then another delegate asked the chair why the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (love the name!) was no longer filming the meeting. A rumor had spread that Sivilli objected to being caught on camera whispering in the ears of the "drug-free" representatives. And I learned from one colleague that the Drug Free Schools Coalition representative had threatened to sue her for taking his picture and "reported" her to the U.N. (whatever that means), forcing her to erase the picture from her camera. Can anyone think of any other examples of the U.S. government these days trying to do its dirty work with no accountability or scrutiny, especially in the face of overwhelming opposition from ordinary people? (Yes, Drug Free Schools Coalition and Drug Free America are not actually the U.S. government, but they clearly were working hand-in-glove in the one space where the U.S. government representative could not speak for herself.)

 

But I’m spending way too much time on the shenanigans and not enough on the tremendous promise that today brings. For almost half a century, world drug policy has focused overwhelmingly on "supply side" tactics — a euphemism for policies based on arrests and imprisonment. The U.S. has largely driven this process, in our name but without our consent and mostly without even our awareness. Other governments were initially dragged into this regime, and many have come to embrace it enthusiastically and viciously. Yet now, in this very official space, the people of the world have responded, and we say with one voice that things must change.

 

I’ll write one more time with some thoughts about how we can make sure our government listens. And I hope you’ll all chime in with your ideas in the comments section. One more thing: thanks for taking the time to read this far. I hope it’s been useful and maybe even a little bit fun.