In many countries, governments use drug laws to disproportionately criminalize people associated with a particular race or ethnicity. The war on drugs provides states with a tool to justify the social control of minorities and marginalized communities. Decriminalization must be accompanied by decarceration and releasing people held in custody or in prisons because of drug offenses.
Since 2000, the world prison population has grown by 20 percent.Footnote 45 The female prison population has increased by 50 percent.Footnote 46 Over 11 million people are imprisoned worldwide today, the highest number ever recorded.Footnote 47 Punitive drug policies and laws continue to drive this mass incarceration: 1 in 5 people in prison globally—2.5 million people—are detained because of drug offenses,Footnote 48 and the proportion is even higher among women.Footnote 49,
Footnote 50UNAIDS estimates that 56–90 percent of people who inject drugs will be incarcerated at some stage in their lifetime.Footnote 51In 1980, 580,900 people were arrested on drug‐related charges in the USA. By 2014, that number had increased to 1.56 million. Nearly half of the 186,000 people serving time in federal prisons in the USA are incarcerated on drug‐related charges.
Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are overrepresented in the world’s prisons. Higher arrest and incarceration rates for these communities do not reflect a higher prevalence of drug use; rather they reflect law enforcement’s greater focus and greater use of violence and force in urban areas, lower-income communities and communities of color.Footnote 52
The consequences of incarceration can transcend individuals and even generations. Incarceration of a parent or breadwinner can impact a family’s income and ability to fulfill its basic needs. The negative consequences of incarceration are more severe and long lasting for women—impacting health, finances, social stability, family and personal relationships. Negative consequences for children can extend to social exclusion, educational attainment, housing status and health.Footnote 53Footnote 54,
Footnote 55 These effects are compounded in the social groups that are more likely to experience incarceration, reinforcing pre-existing inequalities related to race, nationality and class.
For those incarcerated for drug offenses, the negative consequences can extend far beyond prison, as drug offenses can impact individuals for years or even a lifetime. In the USA, for example, people are penalized throughout their working careers, as a criminal record can severely limit job opportunities.Footnote 56In the UK, benefit payments and entitlements may stop or change if a person, their partner or child is sent to prison or is in custody awaiting trial.Footnote 57 This has particularly strong implications for ethnic minorities and other historically disadvantaged groups. In the USA, students are denied financial aid due to drug convictions.Footnote 58 Efforts to decolonize drug policy and combat racial inequality must also create opportunities to heal and restore past harms and injustice. As the recent cases of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the USA and Rashan Charles in the UK exemplify, the war on drugs is used to justify the callousness with which Black lives are taken.Footnote 59
Drug policy reform must be driven by the transformation of our relationship to punishment, which is to say a radical commitment to a new world, or it risks no meaningful change in the long term.Footnote 60 States must support people to live healthy lives by not solely relying on the prison system as a catch-all solution to social ills,Footnote 61 and by creating, developing, practicing and promoting alternatives to incarceration. In 2020, many drug policy reformers with an anti-racist and decolonial framework for reform supported demands from prison abolitionists to divest from law enforcement entirely. This calls for a drug policy landscape that is able to operate entirely separately from the carceral state, that is, without policing, prisons, surveillance and coercion (e.g., forced abstinence or treatment). Abolishing the prison system and the carceral state arguably extends the widely valued harm reduction philosophy to both ‘do no harm’ and to actively support, not punish people who use drugs.Footnote 62
Divest and redirect: move funding from ineffective law enforcement to essential harm reduction and other social and community programs
Every year, USD 100 billion is spent on global drug law enforcement, roughly 750 times more than the amount invested in life-saving services for people who use drugs.Footnote 63To decolonize drug policy, funds must be redirected away from the institutions that uphold racist, discriminatory policies and disrupt the white supremacist system created in service of colonial violence.Footnote 64 Calls for funding to be redirected from ineffective, punitive drug law enforcement to social, health and other community services must be heeded if drug policy reform is to address the root causes of the harms created by the war on drugs.Footnote 65
In 2019, the total budget for harm reduction in Thailand was estimated to be USD 1.7 million; in contrast, the Thai government allocated around 1,500 times this amount to drug law enforcement activities.Footnote 66Drug law enforcement expenditure in Thailand is USD 1.8 billion. In Indonesia, drug law enforcement is estimated to be USD 250 million, of which USD 81 million is for prison costs for drug-related offenses and USD 31 million for prison costs for possession for personal use. The Drug Enforcement Administration in the USA, which cost US tax-payers USD 3.136 billionFootnote 67 in the financial year 2019, is an organization that militarizes police in the USA as well as other countries, such as South Africa, to enforce drug control policy.
Harm reduction interventions that seek to reduce the negative health and social harms of drug use and drug policy are drastically under-implemented and underfunded. Fewer than half of the 179 countries where injection drug use occurs implement needle and syringe programs (NSPs). Even in those countries that do, coverage is generally low and limited to certain regions and urban centers.Footnote 68 There are also considerable differences between the regions in terms of harm reduction implementation. While NSPs are available in most countries in Eurasia, North America and Western Europe, they are severely lacking in the majority of countries in other regions. An unfavorable drug policy environment hinders harm reduction service implementation in many countries across Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Africa.Footnote 69 For people in prison, the situation is even starker: only 11 countries around the world have NSPs in prison.Footnote 70
The solution can be simple: redirect resources from the billions spent on drug control to fund harm reduction and other health and social services for the people impacted by drug policy.
In Austin, Texas, USA, the city council redirected USD 150 million in funds from law enforcement to purchase housing for people experiencing homelessness, and to expand healthcare, access to food and prevent violence. In New York City, USA, there are plans to redistribute USD 1 billion to youth, education and other social services.Footnote 71 In Denver, Colorado, USA, the city has been running a program to send medics and clinicians instead of the police out on emergency calls related to mental health, homelessness and substance use. As a result, people in crisis in Denver received help without having to talk to police on 748 occasions. No one was arrested, and people received healthcare and opportunities to heal instead.Footnote 72 These are some examples of models that show how we can change the system.
In addition to a redirection of resources, reforming drug policy requires a relocation of influence. In the context of the aims of decolonizing drug policy, it is unsustainable that the UN agency tasked with dealing with crime, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), also holds the portfolio on drug use, which is an issue of health and bodily autonomy. With a broader mission of making the world safer from drugs, crime, corruption and terrorism, and an active commitment to supporting governments in the practical implementation of the colonial international drug policy commitments,Footnote 73 there is little space for questioning the hegemonic powers behind international drug policy or creating political support to explore a decolonized path forward. A clear demonstration of this tension is found in the UNODC strategy, which seeks to improve HIV prevention, treatment and care for people who use drugs but fails to use the term ‘harm reduction.’ Focusing on prevention, treatment and care allows UNODC to endorse services rather than engaging with the more holistic approach to drug use inherent in the term harm reduction. As described by Harm Reduction International:
Harm reduction is rooted in a commitment to addressing discrimination and ensuring that nobody is excluded from the health and social services they may need because of their drug use, their race, their gender, their gender identity, their sexual orientation, their choice of work, or their economic status. People should be able to access services without having to overcome unnecessary barriers, including burdensome, discriminatory regulations.Footnote 74
Similarly, UNODC’s mission sees its law enforcement and drug control operations conflict with, and impede on, the rights of people who use drugs and other vulnerable groups. In 2020, UNODC announced funding to support the refurbishment of a specialized voluntary drug rehabilitation center in Sri Lanka,Footnote 75 even though there have been extensive reports of human rights violations, abuse and ill-treatment in drug detention facilities in Sri Lanka.Footnote 76 Between 2012 and 2014, human rights groups called for UNODC to end its support for counter-narcotics police operations in Iran, recognizing UNODC resources were fueling police processes that resulted in the use of the death penalty for drug offenses, in violation of international human rights law.Footnote 77
The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and the two subsequent treaties in 1971 and 1988 have been deployed to consolidate trade gains and secure the supremacy of colonial powers. We need to halt ongoing programs that fuel human rights violations in the name of drug control, such as the death penalty, compulsory detention and rehabilitation, and interrogate ongoing investments in these systems, including the role of state funding and UN actors, as part of efforts to divest and redirect.