International Drug Control Regime and Reforms
The extradition of Luis Hernando Gómez Bustamante, drug trafficker of the Norte del Valle Cartel, from Colombia to the United States, taken in July, 2007
By: Renyang Gao; Staff Member
Decades after the creation of the major international drug control treaties and the launch of the US-led global “War on Drugs”, global supply and consumption of illegal drugs have yet to be meaningfully controlled, and there have been repeated criticisms regarding the collateral damage of the campaign. This blog post covers a brief history of the international drug control regimes and the possibilities for reform.
On October 25, 2022, a Russian court rejected an appeal by American basketball star Brittney Griner, affirming her nine-year sentence (she was convicted in August on a charge of attempting to smuggle narcotics into Russia after police found two vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage at a Moscow airport). Many have condemned Griner’s case as politically motivated, a view that the Kremlin has firmly rejected.
Beyond its current tensions with the United States, Russia’s drug laws, harsh on paper and subject to corruption in implementation, are one of the more extreme examples of how decades of international efforts to combat drug abuse have not only failed to meaningfully curb drug production, trafficking, and consumption, but also led to a host of negative externalities.
A Brief History of International Drug Control Regime and the (Lost) War on Drugs
Humans have had a long history of drug consumption, but international drug control is a relatively new phenomenon. Nonetheless, enormous amounts of resources have already been devoted to the international regime of supply and demand reduction. The now-“dead” Merida Initiative — a United States-Mexico security cooperation framework that was aimed to address escalating drug crimes in the two states and had received billions in funding– is just one example
Currently, three major treaties make up the fundamental legal and administrative framework for international drug control: (1) Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 as amended by the 1972 Protocol (“Single Convention”), (2) Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971 (“Psychotropics Convention”), and (3) United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988 (“Trafficking Convention”). Each of the three treaties has its own distinctive background, content, and purpose. The Single Convention was a consolidation of several multilateral drug control treaties and was designed to, inter alia, extend the existing control system to include the raw materials for narcotics. The Psychotropics Convention extended international control to include a variety of synthetic psychotropic substances, such as amphetamines and LSD. The Trafficking Convention, in contrast, was intended to complement the other two Conventions by attacking the illicit traffic of drugs through cooperation of different states’ law enforcement as well as more robust domestic criminal legislation.
The United States has played an indispensable role in the global campaign against drugs. Shortly after the Single Convention, President Nixon launched the U.S. government’s “War on Drugs”, which, along with the three Conventions, would set the harsh tone for the global campaign –which has been that the threat of arrest and punishment would deter the supply, demand, and consumption of illicit drugs. This assumption also became the philosophical underpinning of a preemptive approach towards drug use and drug sale by the global community, both domestically and internationally. The global War on Drugs also fits into the broader trend of internationalization of both crimes and law enforcement (the global War on Terror being another example), which in turn have produced new “patterns of hierarchy and dominance”, thus shaping a new world order.
However, despite these efforts, the global campaign against drugs has failed to reach its fundamental goal of creating a drug-free world. In fact, a 2011 report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy explicitly condemned the global war on drugs as a failure: after five decades, the demand and supply of illegal drugs have fluctuated but not diminished in any meaningful way. In addition, criticisms are frequently directed towards the “collateral damage” of the drug war: the increasing rate of global incarceration of women, the detrimental impact on environmental justice especially for indigenous people, and racial inequalities are just a few of the examples. In some sense, the term “War on Drugs” should be interpreted not just metaphorically, but also as a “reality of wide-scaled organized violence” that has disproportionately affected the more vulnerable populations around the world.
More importantly, aggressive enforcement strategies have seriously impacted human rights violations, as there are many instances where states’ drug enforcement strategies are considered as outright violations of international human rights law. Take Russia again for an example – its “zero tolerance” policy and “social pressure” against drug users have been condemned as violations of both the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.
What Are the Next Steps?
In April 2016, following the calls by the countries that have arguably been the most affected by the drug war, including Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico, a UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) took place in New York for the discussion of current drug enforcement strategies. In some sense, UNGASS 2016 represents the beginning of the end for the “war on drugs” era, as the failure of the campaign has become almost a truism in international policy discussion. However, as warned and expected by some reformists and to the disappointment of others, the Special Session never led to a radical shift in the global legal architecture: the existing international drug control regime both reflects, and has been sustained by, overlapping international and national interests. In addition, in contemporary policy discourse the three Conventions have frequently been described in terms of an absolute mandate towards prohibition—therefore, the prohibitionist intent and the repressive policies of the global war on drugs, which supposedly flows from the Conventions (and U.S. zealotry), are rather resistant to substantial reforms.
Despite its failure to meet arguably unrealistic reformist expectations, UNGASS 2016 represented a more progressive shift in the international drug control regime, the normative basis of which has been increasingly solidified. Nonetheless, how future reforms should be conceptually framed remains open for discussion and debate. Potential treaty-based reform measures include modification, amendments, or even withdrawal, each with its unique challenges. On the domestic level, in addition to piecemeal decriminalization and sentence reform, social scientists have proposed a regulatory, rather than prohibitionist, approach to drug laws. Six years after the UNGASS in 2016, there remains a large amount of work to be done, as experts are still calling for an end to the war on drugs.
Renyang Gao is a second-year student at Columbia Law School and a Staff member of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2021.