UN Drug Report Favors Shift from Mass Arrests
June 29th, 2009 by Russ
The blogosphere is all atwitter after a first perusal of the UN’s World Drug Report 2009 (warning: PDF). Usually playing the role of a global cheerleader for interdiction and incarceration efforts, this year’s report strongly indicts lazy low-level incarceration policies that have done nothing but increase the world’s relative prison population.
Released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the report presents a highly wonky, statistics-driven approach to tracking drug production around the world, as well as assessing some of the more popular drug policies around the international sphere. One major conclusion of the report was that enforcement policies of blindly increasing arrests, incarcerations, and seizures is a dead end:
Resources that could have been focused on these individuals are often wasted on the opportunistic arrest and incarceration of large volumes of petty offenders. In the case of casual users, the sanction of imprisonment is excessive.
The report rightly notes that the addicts themselves are not the enemy in the War on Drugs, and that police and prison systems are ill-equipped to deal with them. It continues:
In the end, the criminal justice system is a very blunt instrument for dealing with drug markets. As necessary as the deterrent threat remains, the arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of individuals is an extremely slow, expensive, and labour intensive process.
Any shift in the UN’s position is surprising, given that World Drug Czar, Antonio Maria Costa, an old-world drug warrior, has been in office since 2002. This also explains why the report at no point attempts to make any real distinctions between the different types of drugs, and their relative levels of harm. Not a single thought is given to actually developing different policies based on what type of substance a country is dealing with. This is because, in the eyes of Costa, drugs are a scourge, and the question is never whether to control them, but simply how to control them most effectively. From such a myopic perspective, it’s very surprising to see any innovative suggestions at all.
The fun in all of this is watching the War on Drugs’ right wingers as they are violently dragged back towards the center by the ever-mounting evidence of a reality that doesn’t meet with their ancient world views.
