TEN WASTED YEARS: UN DRUG STRATEGY A FAILURE, REVEALS DAMNING REPORT

The UN strategy on drugs over the past decade has been a failure, a
European commission report claimed yesterday on the eve of the
international conference in Vienna that will set future policy for
the next 10 years.

The report came amid growing dissent among delegates arriving at the
meeting to finalise a UN declaration of intent.

Referring to the UN's existing strategy, the authors declared that
they had found "no evidence that the global drug problem was
reduced". They wrote: "Broadly speaking, the situation has improved a
little in some of the richer countries while for others it worsened,
and for some it worsened sharply and substantially, among them a few
large developing or transitional countries."

The policy had merely shifted the problem geographically, they said.
"Production and trafficking controls only redistributed activities.
Enforcement against local markets failed in most countries."

Representatives from governments are split in their efforts to
formulate an international drugs policy for the next decade. The UN
Commission on Narcotic Drugs is due to formulate a strategy over the
next two days, but there is widespread disagreement among delegates
and a general feeling that an opportunity for a united approach has been lost.

In an article for the Guardian, Mike Trace, chairman of the
International Drug Policy Consortium, says: "We're about to see the
international community walk up the political and diplomatic path of
least resistance. It will do nothing to help the millions of people
around the world whose lives are destroyed by drug markets and drug
use. And the depressing thing about it is that we can all book our
seats for 2019, to go through this charade again."

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and
Crime, has defended the approach. He is due to talk today on
organised crime, which he has described as "one of the unintended
consequences of drug control". He will warn that "a criminal market,
of staggering proportion, risks undermining drug control" and outline
a three-pronged approach to tackling drug-related crime.

In London, however, Lady Meacher, speaking on behalf of more than 30
members of the Lords, warned that the existing hardline
prohibitionist strategy, which has been led by the US, had been
deeply damaging. It was now being challenged by politicians,
scientists and lawyers around the world, she said.

"We are concerned that the war on drugs has failed and the harm it
has caused is far greater," said Meacher, at a briefing organised by
the drugs advice charity Release. "What we want the UN to do is
accept that the previous declaration was hopelessly unrealistic."

She said that Barack Obama had yet to appoint a new drugs tsar in the
US but there were already signs that he was adopting a more liberal
approach to the issue. The US president has lifted the ban on federal
funding for needle exchange programmes, which are seen as crucial in
the struggle to combat the spread of HIV. Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch,
director of the global drug policy programme at the Open Society
Institute, Warsaw, said: "It is now clear that after months of
negotiations, millions of people around the world will continue to
suffer needlessly. Thanks to the global 'war on drugs' over the past
decade, close to 2 million people living in the former Soviet Union
are infected with HIV, half a million US citizens languish in prison
for non-violent, drug-related crimes, and billions of dollars are
spent on destructive military actions in Colombia while the
production of cocaine continues to rise."

The first two days of the session will be held at ministerial level
to assess progress made in the decade since a special session of the
UN general assembly set the target of a "drugs-free" world. The aim
has been criticised for not addressing the problems of addiction and treatment.

Prof Tim Rhodes, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Health,
said the number of injecting drug users around the world could have
reached 15 million and this was responsible for 10% of global HIV infections.

Rhodes said the problem was particularly serious in Russia, where
intensive street-level policing had exacerbated the difficulties.