By Lucas Bartolomé -Chairperson, Mihnea Dorneanu -Chairperson

At the present time, the demand for drugs is growing as strong as ever, and to meet this demand, criminal organizations set up drug production operations, particularly in politically unstable regions, often with the collaboration of local militias. These operations help fund the violence and many other criminal activities committed by these organizations, including money laundering, wildlife trading, smuggling, prostitution, human trafficking, and modern-day slavery. Furthermore, the kind of drugs grown are harmful both to the growers of the raw material in the origin country, as they are often trapped in cycles of poverty which inhibit economic development, as well as to the users, due to the societal harm addiction causes upon the population. Therefore, it is essential to fight against the drug trade and find ways to mitigate its effect; however, this is notoriously difficult. Typically, the mechanism for these kinds of operations is the following: farmers in politically unstable regions are forced to grow the plants from which drugs are extracted as they are the only ones from which they are able to make a living; they do this under the protection of local warlords or militias, to whom they often have to pay tax to. Raw opium is delivered, generally through local middlemen, to the criminal organizations that handle the refining and distribution to the rest of the world. This is usually done with either the tacit acceptance of the government, which might consider the militias as strategically useful, or by bribing corrupt government officials who will turn a blind eye. Nowadays in Asia, there exist two main areas where drug production is rampant. These are the socalled "Golden Crescent" and "Golden Triangle". The Golden Crescent covers parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, though production is nowadays mostly concentrated in Afghanistan. The area has had a long history of cultivating poppies in order to extract opium at a small scale; nonetheless, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, many mujahideen guerrillas turned to poppy farming and opium refining as a source of income, and this continued and increased throughout the end of the Soviet occupation, and the beginning of Taliban rule, as Afghanistan became the world's major source of opioids and replaced Iran and Pakistan's dominance in the region. This lasted right up until the Taliban introduced a ban on poppy farming in 2001, which was brutally enforced and caused a sharp drop in poppy farming with an accompanying skyrocketing of the price. This was short-lived as the September 11th attacks soon occurred and the ensuing invasion of the country by the United States yet again plunged the area into conflict and poppy production once more became the only source of income for many farmers. Despite many attempts by the democratic Afghan government, to this day Afghanistan continues to be the world's largest producer of opioids, which mostly get trafficked to Europe and North America, and the end of the Afghan War and resumption of Taliban rule don't seem to have put a stop to it. Despite nominally being against the drug trade, the Taliban has been accused of using poppy farming to secure its own funding and of intentionally causing the spike in price in 2001 to sell its own reserves at a higher price. The democratic government seemed more inclined to genuinely try to solve the problem; however, local corrupt officials severely undermined its efforts. Though the Golden Crescent's main export is opium, recent forays into the production of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamines have been reported, and the region is also the top exporter of cannabis.

Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Model United Nations of Bucharest, 2023. 30p.

By David Restrepo

On August 25th, 2020, a group of Colombian legislators challenged one of the last drug policy taboos left standing since the start of the current prohibition era: they proposed the legal regulation of both coca and cocaine.

The bill, Proyecto de Ley No. 236, unexpectedly passed the first round of committee-level congressional debate in 2021, but was archived by Colombia’s conservative-dominated legislature. Its opponents claimed that legalisation would unleash drug use and a crime wave, kicking the country back to its Pablo Escobarera international pariah status (Colombian Congress, 2021).

Despite its shelving, the bill’s relative success in Congress reflects a growing understanding that, no matter what governments do, drugs are here to stay. If a drug-free world is not an option, societies are better served by making peace with drugs via regulations that help us contain their harms and maximise their benefits.

Sensible drug policy today means leaving behind disproven measures like eradication, crop substitution, drug seizures and incarceration, which do little to prevent “drug addictions”, henceforth referred to as substance use disorders or SUDs. Like child abuse, punitive drug policy achieves the opposite of education. It unleashes highly profitable, powerful underground markets where drug use is promoted and glamourised, and violence and corruption become the business model (Durán-Martínez, 2018). Punitive drug policy channels public and private resources towards attacking rather than helping marginalised populations whose livelihoods depend on the least lucrative and most unsafe rungs of the illicit drug supply chain.

In Colombia, the Amazon basin, and South East Asia, conflicts and economies made possible by cocaine or opioid prohibition do not just victimise people: they are also speeding the demise of mega-biodiverse ecosystems, tugging the world towards the cliff of runaway climate change (McSweeney, 2015). In Mexico and Central America, homicidal drug wars are destabilising democracies and sending out waves of refugees, vulnerable to exploitation and xenophobia even as they attempt to rebuild their lives (Junger & Quested, 2020; Agren, 2020). In Central Asia, illicit opium helped fund the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan, after trillions of dollars spent on the US war on terror (Felbab-Brown, 2021). In the Global North, punitive drug laws reinforce ethnic and racial profiling, turn low-income neighbourhoods into ganglands, and promote the mass incarceration of people of colour (Davis, 2003).

Colombia’s bill does not endorse cocaine use. Neither does it overlook the risk of turning coca and cocaine into for-profit industries like alcohol and tobacco. It is unwise to hand private corporations unchecked control of the plants and molecules that can inebriate and damage our mental health, but also, in the right circumstances, connect us with others, spark our creativity, and even allow us to experience altered states of mind that facilitate personal and community growth (Griffiths et al., 2019). Rather, managing the power, risk and benefits of psychoactive substances demands careful regulatory design that harnesses democratic accountability and knowhow from as diverse an array of human experience as possible.

Colombia’s bill captures the evidence-based perspective that regulations can help contain the self-serving excesses of legal markets. They can delay the age of drug initiation, promote moderation and encourage pro-social norms. They do this whilst enabling the emergence of legal industries that pay taxes, provide legal employment and generate medical and social benefits. If done via controls that prevent publicity and reduce profit motives, regulation can minimise drug-related harms even if drug use were to rise, which is not a foregone conclusion. Overall, welldesigned regulatory regimes for psychoactive substances offer the possibility of a better cost-benefit balance for society than prohibition appears to do.

Colombia’s proposal laid the groundwork for a regulatory architecture that has social justice at its core. It recognised the authority of Indigenous and local government institutions to shape the low-potency, whole coca leaf market, thereby providing an alternative to corporate takeover. This would honour the collective property rights to coca that generations of Indigenous people have fought for, whilst benefitting small coca farmers and integrating beneficial coca leaf uses into society.

Following these equity and inclusion principles could transform coca and cocaine markets from a source of devastation to a potential driver of regenerative, intercultural development, not to mention a form of long-overdue reparations for ethnic and small farmer communities.

The proponents of Colombia’s coca and cocaine regulation bill knew it would likely fail on its first try, but challenging this longstanding taboo could nudge people to conceive another world (Marulanda, 2020). By unlocking the imagination, new strategies might emerge, and this might ultimately change the political balance of power that blocks legal regulation.

This essay seeks to build on that approach. It comments on the bill’s comprehensive proposals: the result of a group of legislators, NGOs, and local communities coming together to condense decades of lessons from Colombia’s drug war trenches. It also imagines what the legal regime would look like from farming to consumption, assessing the outcomes in terms of the potential benefits and costs. The essay closes by exploring insights for overcoming the forces that doomed the bill: a stagnant political economy that sustains the war on coca and cocaine as one of the deadliest and most environmentally destructive of all the drug wars.

London: International Drug Policy Consortium, 2022. 34p.

United States. Executive Office Of The President; United States. Office Of National Drug Control Policy

From the document: "On April 12, 2023, Dr. Rahul Gupta, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), formally designated fentanyl adulterated or associated with xylazine as an emerging drug threat, pursuant to 21 U.S.C. [United States Code] § 1708. [...] The emerging threat designation, made under the authority provided by 'The Substance Use-Disorder Prevention that Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment (SUPPORT) for Patients and Communities Act of 2018' (P.L. [Public Law] 115-271), requires the Executive Branch to take several steps: First, ONDCP, in collaboration with relevant federal agencies, must draft and publicly issue a fentanyl adulterated or associated with xylazine Response Plan (within 90 days of designation). Second, ONDCP must issue Implementation Guidance to agencies (120 days after designation). Third, agencies must provide a specific Agency Implementation Report to ONDCP (180 days after designation). Fourth, ONDCP must publish a National Implementation Report on the Response Plan (in February 2024, with other ONDCP annual reports). The response plan presented here fulfills the first of these requirements and addresses urgent public health and safety needs. The SUPPORT Act also requires that the ONDCP Director decide whether a stand-alone national media campaign would be effective in addressing the emerging threat. In the case of xylazine-adulterated fentanyl, Director Gupta has determined that it will be productive to include such public messaging on fentanyl adulterants in existing campaigns and other federal messaging on fentanyl, in lieu of establishing a new stand-alone campaign focused solely on xylazine. The SUPPORT Act requires that an emerging threat response plan include evidence-based prevention, treatment, and supply reduction action steps, in addition to establishing goals and performance measures informed by comprehensive data. In the plan outlined below, we apply those requirements to the case of fentanyl adulterated or associated with xylazine and describe critically important and urgent next action steps."

United States. Executive Office of the President. United States. Office of National Drug Control Policy 2023. 15p.

By Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (UK)

  Serious violence and drug abuse are major problems in England and Wales. In its Serious Violence Strategy, published in April 2018, the Government identified strong links between increases in violence and the exploitation of children and vulnerable adults by criminal drug dealers operating ‘county lines’. The strategy included a commitment that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services would carry out an inspection. Policing county lines drug offending involves three main components as follows: • The 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales. Each is responsible for policing a local area (usually a county, several counties or a metropolitan area). • A network of police-led regional organised crime units. These provide specialist policing capabilities to help the forces in their region tackle organised crime. • The National Crime Agency. This operates on a national (and international) basis, providing further specialist capabilities to support regional organised crime units and individual forces. Also, the National Crime Agency hosts the national county lines co-ordination centre (also referred to in this report as ‘the centre’), which it operates jointly with the police. For this inspection, we analysed documents and data. We visited the national county lines co-ordination centre, three regional organised crime units and ten police forces. We visited British Transport Police (which polices the rail network across Great Britain) because rail travel is a common feature of county lines offending. We interviewed relevant staff in each location. We also consulted representatives from other bodies. 

London: HMICFRS, 2020. 38p.

By Ty Miller

In December of 2012, Washington and Colorado implemented the legalization of possession and use of marijuana for recreational purposes. Following this, January of 2014, Colorado opened the first recreational marijuana dispensaries in the United States. Although the debate about recreational marijuana has been fought in the public and academic spheres, we have limited empirical data as to the effect of these policies. With this, arguments in regard to whether marijuana should be legalized in the United States have far outpaced reliable scientific research. As more states, and potentially the federal government, begin to vote on whether to legalize, reliable research will be necessary. Sociology provides possible theoretical justifications for both sides of the recreational marijuana debate. However, there is still relatively little research on the effects of legalization in the United States. The current project analyzes changes in measures of excessive drinking, crime, DUI-related fatalities, and DUI arrests in Washington and Colorado following legalization of recreational marijuana. Each set of analyses are carried out in two parts. First, I examine the effects of legalizing possession and use in 2013. Second, I examine the effects of opening recreational dispensaries in Colorado in 2014. These separate analyses are utilized to uncover any shock-effects that might be inherently tied to legalization of possession and use or the opening of recreational dispensaries. Results indicate that, in most of the analyses, there are no significant effects of either part of legalization on the outcome variables of interest. The lone significant effect is that policing of DUI appears to increase following the legalization of possession and use in Washington and Colorado in 2013. The implications of these findings for both sociological theory and policy-making are discussed in the concluding chapter

West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, 2018. 282p.

By Marie Gottschalk

A closer examination of media coverage, the response of law enforcement and policy makers, the legislative record, and the availability of proven, highquality treatments for substance abuse casts doubt on claims that the country pivoted toward public health and harm-reduction strategies to address the opioid crisis because its victims were disproportionately white people. Law enforcement solutions directed at people who use and sell street drugs continue to far outpace public health and harm-reduction strategies. Government support for expanding access to proven treatments for opioid use disorder that save and rebuild lives remains paltry given the scale of this public health catastrophe. And although the rhetoric has been somewhat more sympathetic, at times it rivals the excesses of the crack era. The article examines the various phases of the opioid crisis as they have unfolded over the past 25 years; related geographic and racial shifts in overdose fatalities with each new phase; media coverage of the crisis; the federal government’s response, including by the US Congress and presidents from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden; punitive developments at the state and local levels; and the country’s poor record on prevention and making effective treatment widely available for people with substance use disorder.

Annual Review of Criminology, 2023. 6:363–98 . 39p.

By The Global Commission on Drug Policy

The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed. Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption. Apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organization are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers. Repressive efforts directed at consumers impede public health measures to reduce HIV/AIDS, overdose fatalities and other harmful consequences of drug use. Government expenditures on futile supply reduction strategies and incarceration displace more cost-effective and evidence-based investments in demand and harm reduction.

Global Commission on Drug Policy, 2011. 24p.

By Jason Eligh

The flow of heroin from Asian production points to the coastal shores of eastern and southern Africa is not new. Whereas the first heroin transit routes in the region in the 1970s relied heavily on maritime transport to enter the continent, a number of transport modes and urban centres of the interior have increasingly become important features in the current movement of heroin in this region. Interior transit hubs and networks have developed around air transport nodes that use regular regional and international connections to ship heroin. As regional air routes proliferated and became more efficient, their utility and value for the heroin trade increased as well. Heroin is also consolidated and shipped over a frequently shifting network of overland routes, moving it deeper into the African interior in a south-westerly direction across the continent.

Consequently, a shallow flood of heroin has gradually seeped across the region, and this has had a significant impact on the many secondary towns found along the continent’s transcontinental road networks. These places, in turn, have spawned their own small local heroin markets, and become waypoints in rendering sustainable the now chronic, metered progression of heroin’s resolute geographic diffusion across the region.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2020. 100p.

By West Africa Commission on Drugs.

After looking at the evidence, consulting experts from the region and around the world, and visiting some of the most affected countries and communities in West Africa, the Commissioners of the West Africa Commission on Drugs detail their conclusions in this report about how the problems of drug trafficking and consumption in the region should be tackled.

Geneva: WACD, 2014. 64p.