A report investigating the United Nation’s “war on drugs” released Sunday has found that international drug policy in the last 10 years has been a complete failure, CNN reports.
According to the report, the UN’s drug war has done nothing to reduce international rates of drug use while at the same time has negatively affected human rights, health, security, and development around the globe.
The report was published by the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), which is composed of 177 national and international NGOs who focus on issues related to drug policy and drug abuse.
“This report is another nail in the coffin for the war on drugs. The fact that governments and the UN do not see fit to properly evaluate the disastrous impact of the last ten years of drug policy is depressingly unsurprising. Governments will meet next March at the UN and will likely rubber-stamp more of the same for the next decade in drug policy. This would be a gross dereliction of duty and a recipe for more blood spilled in the name of drug control.” — Ann Fordham, Executive Director of IDPC, in a statement
The report found that drug enforcement efforts in the last 10 years have led to heightened violence against civilians and police and the mass incarceration of otherwise innocent people.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark — who is a current member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy — wrote in the report’s forward that, “Since governments started collecting data on drugs in the 1990s, the cultivation, consumption and illegal trafficking of drugs have reached record levels,” and that “…the ‘war on drugs’ has resulted in millions of people murdered, disappeared, or internally displaced.
Last week, Canada became the first G7 nation to end the prohibition of cannabis, which is the most popular illegal substance in the world.
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