ILLUSIONS OF YESTERDAY

"The decision taken at the UN in 1990 was as ambitious as it was unworldly:
the last decade of the 20th century should have been the ‘UN decade against
drug misuse’.

After a long debate, the UN diplomats passed a ‘global action programme’.
The 100-topics-plan comprises the fight against smugglers, dealers, and
money laundering, the eradication and prevention of poppy and coca
cultivation as well as therapy measures for drug addicts. ‘An international
drug free society’ was to be realised by the diplomats.

Now the fortuneless war against drugs is on the agenda again. In a
three-day special assembly, the UNGASS wants to decide the continuation of
its drug policy formulated in 1990. ‘Drugs are killing our children and our
future’, UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan admonishes: ‘we need an
international answer to the globalisation of the drug trade.’ But behind
Annan’s programme for the 21st century there are illusions of yesterday,
only the date is new. ‘Until the year 2008’ the UN documents now postulate
‘a drastic reduction both of the demand and the supply of illegal drugs’.
Within the next decade, the ‘cultivation of coca-leaves, opium poppy, and
Cannabis’ are to be eradicated or at least ‘drastically reduced’. In
year-long wars fought with the help of military forces, the anti-drugs
warriors in Asia and Latin-America achieved nothing more than a shifting of
cultivation from one region to another. At best, the destruction of coca
plantations in Peru lead to wide-spread cultivation in the
neighbour-country Columbia.

In spite of all UN conventions and resolutions, the global drug trade
flourishes, and consumers are offered drugs of an ever increasing quality.
UN estimates state that only 10% of the smuggled heroin and 30% of all
cocaine transports can be seized. The quantities of seized heroin increased
from 23.4 tons in 1990 to an all-time high of 31.1 tons in 1995, after
that, the amounts seized grew slightly less again. The global cocaine
seizures are moving around 300 tons per year.

According to calculations made at the global organisation, more than 140
million of people on this earth enjoy a cannabis joint from time to time -
that is to say: almost 2.5% of the global population are consumers of
Cannabis and Marijuana. About 8 million use heroin and other opiates. The
UN also counts approximately 13 million cocaine consumers.

International bodies, however, know very little about actual patterns of
use and trafficking. ‘Our verifiable knowledge is painfully insufficient’,
the authors of the World Drug Report, published by the UN, admit. However,
the UN want to stick to their failed strategy, which is mostly due to the
policy of an office with 272 staff members: the fight against drugs is the
responsibility of the UNDCP with its headquarters in Vienna. This central
body, which has offices in 20 states was founded in 1990 with the aim of
implementing the then recently decided Anti-Drugs Programme.

Pino Arlacchi, head of the UNDCP and a former Senator in Rome, is
optimistic that the plans will be successful this time: ‘there are many
reasons for being optimistic’, Arlacchi explains. The ideological conflicts
between east and west and north and south have disappeared, he adds, and
the war on drugs could profit from advanced technology, such as
satellite-supervision. ‘The UNGASS should be a turning point for the
world’, the leading anti-drug fighter - who gathered his reputation from
being a fighter against the Italian Mafia - states. Arlacchi wants to bind
the 185 UN members to six major topics. Apart from drug demand and supply
reduction, the following issues are on the agenda:

- - The fight against money laundering; according to UN estimates, the
international cartels make 400 billion US-Dollar per year - dirty money,
that can be still channelled into the legal financial circle without any
major problems;

- - The demand reduction of amphetamines and the highly popular drug Ecstasy; ·

- - A better control of chemicals that are needed in the production of drugs;
and

- - The enlargement of international co-operation of police forces and the
justice system.

New methods in curbing the social effects of addiction, such as depravation
and drug related crime by means of offering help to drug users are unheard
of at the UN. The Swiss Model of prescribing heroin to long-term heroin
addicts meets with resistance at the UNDCP.

Even though the Swiss have already pleaded for a continuation of the heroin
trials, the UN experts want an evaluation of the projects to be conducted
by the WHO. Until the WHO report has been finished, ‘no further experiments
should be made’, the UNDCP demands.

That European cities like Frankfurt, Amsterdam, or Zagreb go different and
unconventional ways in drug policy by implementing consumer rooms and
substitution programmes with the aim of reducing drug related harm as much
as possible, is also not in line with the concept of the UN. Even
Latin-American cities have gone further. In the Columbian drug capital,
Medellin, mayors and police chiefs from cities all over South America
gathered to learn from the experience of the Europeans.

Numerous drug experts all over the world harshly criticise the obstinacy of
the UN. Dozens of scientists, artists, politicians appeal to Kofi Annan to
open ‘a truly honest and open debate on the future of world-wide drug
policy’ instead of promoting ‘rhetoric about a drug free society’. In
Germany, the protest is coordinated by the network of "European Cities on
Drug Policy" - among the signatories are Heide Moser, Minister of social
welfare of the State of Schleswig-Holstein, Harald Koerner, head of the
central office for narcotic laws at the General State Attorney’s office of
the State of Hessen, the writer, Guenter Grass, as well as the publisher,
Johannes Gross. The signature of the left-wing FDP member, Sabine
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger to the letter is especially piquant. With her
public criticism of the UN programme, the drug policy responsible of the
FDP opposes her colleague from the same party, Foreign Minister, Klaus
Kinkel, who will be giving the German speech at the UNGASS in New York.
Kinkel is unlikely to go astray from the official policy.

Among the most influential of the signatories of this letter to Kofi Annan
is the US financial mogul, George Soros. The billionaire has criticised the
harsh American drug policy for a long time already: 'our drug policy is
crazy', Soros says about the War on Drugs that has been raging in the US
since the sixties. 'This war harms our society more than the misuse of
drugs itself'.

That it is impossible to solve problems with violence and powerful rhetoric
is proven by a congress-decision of the UN that was taken in 1988. It
proclaims a 'drug free America' - for the year 1995."

Checked-by: Richard Lake