The UN is crucial to all who seek reform of the international drug policy framework and we must pay the closest possible attention to relevant global developments and how the organisation responds to them in the time between now and the review in 2008 of the targets set at the 1998 UN General Assembly special session. I believe that times between now and then may be turbulent, requiring all who strive for reform to be alert, steadfast and acutely conscious of the position that faces the UN in respect of international drug policy. As voyagers who have come a long way over the past two or three years, we have already encountered some choppy waters in our progress to 2008, but we are about to turn into the very teeth of a wind that will test us to the full.

The UN‘s Office on Drugs and Crime (ODC) earlier this year produced its latest World Drug Report, which presented a generally dismal picture of the current global illicit drugs situation and clearly indicated that the drug elimination targets set at the special session are not going to be achieved by 2008. However, the Report graciously also found time to accuse those of us who support drug policy reform as “breaking ranks” and “attempting to challenge the spirit of multilateralism”. In 2008, therefore, we may find ourselves cast in the role of renegade or subversive forces that have contrived to undermine drug control efforts and wished failure upon them. The unwritten UN slogan for the review could be, “Provided we all remain wrong, everything is alright“, a form of multilateralism that is not entirely without precedent.

For over two years I have been warning that in 2008, rigidly prohibitionist forces could attempt to counter and exploit all statistics of failure by asserting that they in fact serve to emphasise the need to apply even more aggressive approaches to eliminating illicit drugs, particularly coca and opium. The recent call by the US Defense Secretary for a Plan Colombia approach to be applied in Afghanistan therefore came as little surprise.

Plan Colombia may have recently been labelled a failure by none other than the US´s own Drugs Czar, but you may have seen that only last week, presumably in response to the Defense Secretary’s statement, the Afghan President was moved to declare publicly that his country will not consent to any programme of aerial spraying of herbicides onto opium poppy crops. Nevertheless, statements by US drug control spokesmen have increased in belligerence, suggesting to many that a unilateral Plan Colombia-style initiative in Afghanistan may be on its way. If that happened, it could lead to a split in policy between the US and its international drug control partners in respect of Afghanistan, who remain more inclined towards the kind of balanced approach of law enforcement and alternative development measures to which in fact all UN Member States pledged themselves at the special session. If such a split were to occur, where then would this leave the UN? Where, indeed, would it leave the “spirit of multilateralism” that we are accused of challenging? Who exactly would then be breaking ranks?

Mr. Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the ODC (into which the UNDCP has now been absorbed) often accuses those seeking even the mildest of policy reforms as belonging to a “pro-drug lobby“. Nonetheless, I was taken aback by the quote attributed to him last week that, “Fighting narcotics is equivalent to fighting terrorism”, which seems to move the UN closer than ever before to supporting a war model approach to drug control. Some military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are increasingly exploiting links between terrorism and the illicit drug trade as a rhetorical device and expedient means of defending budgets, so I wonder how long it will be before Mr. Costa condemns us as also being “pro-terrorist“?

Before we are too critical of the ODC, it is important we understand that it is as hamstrung as was the UNDCP by financial dependence on a small number of donor States. This dependence extends even to the job security of its staff and enormous pressure is currently being exerted upon Mr. Costa by at least one of its Major Donors to adhere to the most rigid of prohibitionist lines on international drug control. This is why his organisation, much as it might wish to do so, is substantially unable to move forward on issues such as harm reduction.

The saddest fact of the current global illicit drugs problem is that if there were honest dialogue between right-minded organisations and individuals on both sides of the debate, I am convinced that approaches that accommodate all reasonable and sincerely-held objectives could be formulated. Instead, debate is stifled, as it was at the special session, and I am increasingly reminded of an episode in the novel “ Gulliver’s Travels” in which two countries wage endless war against one another because their leaders once disagreed on which end of a boiled egg should be cracked open.

On some other major international issues, the UN at its highest level has recently been exhibiting rediscovered courage in standing by its principles and what it knows to be right and refusing to bend to pressures to do otherwise. One key element of building a new drug policy consensus, therefore, must be to ensure that at its highest levels the UN is kept provided with a steady flow of well researched data and ideas that demonstrate that other approaches to the drug problem are viable and might be more effective. At the same time, the advent of any new international policy consensus on the drugs issue will be reliant on States that are already moving in the right direction, or wish to do so, having the courage publicly to stand by their convictions, for which reason they must be supported in every way possible.

I have an image of a combined top-down/bottom-up approach which, regrettably, avoids and thereby avoids increasing pressure on the paralysed drugs bodies - the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the International Narcotics Control Board and the ODC – and focuses on the highest level of the UN and its bodies whose work is affected by illicit drugs, such as the UN Development Programme and the World Health Organisation. At the same time, we continue to inform public opinion, establish linkages with like-minded non-governmental bodies and provide as much encouragement as possible to States that are attempting to break free of the present dogma-driven, rigidly prohibitionist stranglehold.

Important social changes are typically first developed at grass roots level and then build in popular support and momentum until central policy is forced to come into alignment with prevailing reality. In the past forty years or so we have witnessed this pattern with issues such as racial segregation in the US, apartheid in South Africa, military and political suppression of most of Central and Eastern Europe and lack of human rights and sexual equality in many parts of the globe. We might have despaired that nothing short of revolution could bring about changes to some of these situations, yet old orders and attitudes collapsed surprisingly quickly and easily once like-minded people united in sufficient numbers and made it clear that enough was enough. If one compares how history has judged those who supported such changes with how it has judged those who stood against them, it should be those who defend rigid prohibition who should be viewing posterity with some unease. It is not in the interests of any of us that the UN should find itself in that position.

In New York in 1998, in the margins of the special session, I attended a number of meetings organised by groups that supported liberalisation of drugs laws. They were an entertaining but diverse bunch, including as they did academics, political radicals, flamboyant Jamaican gentlemen, rather less flamboyant Dutch gentlemen and apparent relics from the Sixties who simply wished to be free to continue turning on, tuning in and dropping out. Whilst admiring their conviction and courage, I personally felt they were then too lacking in agreed, soundly formulated agenda to make any real impact.

Today things are different. Liberalisation objectives may remain diverse but a force for change is emerging, particularly in Europe, based around the fundamental belief that there must be some reform of the international drug policy framework if we are ever to move forward and make real progress.

An Englishman once wrote: “One just man does a majority make“. Life cannot be quite that simple, nor indeed that just, but since the special session, support for some policy reform in respect of illicit drugs has grown to such extent that I believe a popular consensus of sorts already exists. Ranged against this are those who misguidedly or for their own purposes strive to perpetuate a system under which organised crime, terrorism, money laundering, corruption and a host of other social evils flourish, sustained in no small measure by the obscene profits of the illicit drug trade. Equally tragically, ordinary young people are driven into a life of social exclusion, petty crime and contact with the worst kinds of criminal elements.

As I said, our voyage together has brought us a long way. I believe that our position and objectives are clear and our case is made in all quarters of honest reasoning, but the job has yet to be done. As I indicated, I sense that we are now turning into the teeth of a violent and bitter wind that will cause the rest of our passage toward 2008 to be anything but serene. In the face of this we must keep our heads, hold to our course and maintain our belief that, to borrow part of an infamous slogan from the special session, “We Can Do It!”