The issue of drugs is generally not presented at the United Nations General Assembly. This year is different
The United Nations – Each year, tons of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs flow in the world, an underground river that crisscrosses borders and continents and spills into violence, dependence and suffering. However, when the leaders of the nations give the UN their annual approach on large problems, drugs generally do not receive many spotlights.
But it was not a usual year.
Firstly, US President Donald Trump praised his aggressive approach to the application of drugs, including decisions aimed at appointing certain Latin America cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and making fatal military strikes on speedboats which, according to him, said that drugs in the South Caribbean.
“At each terrorist thug tracing toxic drugs in the United States of America: be informed that we will blow you out of existence,” he boasted in the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
A few hours later, his Colombian counterpart retaliated that Trump should face criminal charges for authorizing an attack on “young people who were simply trying to escape poverty”.
The “anti-drug policy of the United States does not target the public health of a society, but rather to support a policy of domination”, Gustavo Petro in Colombia has been bristling, accusing Washington of having ignored the traffic and the production of domestic drugs while demonizing its own country. The United States has recently listed Colombia, for the first time in decades, as a nation below its international drug control obligations.
The beards were bare, on the largest scene in world diplomacy, the broad and sharp differences in the world on how to manage drugs.
“The international system is extremely divided on drug policy,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, who followed the subject as a principal researcher at the Brookings Institution, Washington based on the Brookings group. “It’s not new, but it’s really very intense in this Unga.”
While wars in Gaza and Ukraine, climate change and other crises were a great concentration in the week of United Nations speeches and meetings, the subject of drugs appeared from the difficult speech of Trump and Petro to secondary events on themes such as drug policy and international cooperation included to combat organized crime.
Some 316 million people worldwide have consumed marijuana, opioids and / or other drugs in 2023, an increase of 28% in a decade, according to the most recent statistics available from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Figures do not count alcohol or tobacco consumption.
The specificities vary according to the region, the consumption of cocaine growing in Europe, the methamphetamine increasing in Southeast Asia and the synthetic opioids making new breakthroughs in West and Central Africa and continuing to disturb North America, although the deaths linked to opioids have dropped.
The United Nations Drug Office claims that traffic is increasingly dominated by crime groups organized with tentacles and partnerships around the world, and nations must also think of trying to tackle unions.
“Governments are increasingly considering organized crime and drug trafficking as national and regional security threats, and some present themselves to the fact that they must join diplomatic, intelligence, law and central bank application to postpone,” said the Chief of Staff of the Agency Jeremy Douglas.
Although organized crime has not been very importantly in high-level discussions in the general meeting to date, he said: “We are at a point where it must and, hope, will change.”
Nations associate themselves in various joint operations and working groups and sometimes form regional coalitions, but some experts and managers see a need to globalize.
Countries must “pool resources in a fight that must be a common cause among all nations,” Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said in the Assembly. He said that his nation had seized a “historic and alarming” total of 150 tonnes of cocaine and other drugs this year only.
Admittedly, there is already a global collaboration on drug control. The Commission of Narcotics of Narcotics decides which substances are supposed to be regulated abroad in the context of several decades old treaties, and it can make political recommendations to the member countries of the United Nations. The International Narcotic Control Office monitors compliance with the treaty.
But the UN is a large tent policy for its greatest, so even if certain components of the global organization deal with the application of drugs, others emphasize public health programs – treatment of drug addiction, overdose prevention and other services – on prohibition and punishments.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, pleaded for decriminalization at least one drug use while tightening illegal markets. Since the police have not reduced substance consumption or crime, “the so-called war against drugs failed, completely and completely,” he said last year.
In addition, a report of the United Nations Development Program last week said that control of punitive drugs had resulted in deaths and diseases among users who have hidden aid demand, racial disparities in the application and other drawbacks of society.
During a rally marking the release of the report, former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo deplored that “the global drug control regime has become a substantial part of the problem”.
“The question is: do governments have the wisdom and the courage to act?” Asked Zedillo, now a professor of Yale and commissioner of the World Drug Policy, an anti-drug defense group based in Geneva.
The other question is whether they could never agree on the measures to be taken.
Even if the countries agree – or say they do it – with the end of the drug trade and the resulting evils, “the objectives can be different, and certain means, tools, the resources they are ready to devote to them, are different,” said Felbab -Brown.
The own laws on drugs of nations vary considerably. Some impose the death penalty for certain drug crimes. Others have legalized or decriminalized by marijuana. At least one – Thailand – legalized only to have the second thoughts and tighten the rules. The opening of countries to needle exchange programs, safe injection sites and other “misdeed reduction” strategies is also everywhere on the map.
While the leaders took their turn to the rostrum of the assembly this week, the observers occasionally have an overview of the different views of the world on its problem of medication.
Tajikistan president Emomali Rahmon called drug trafficking “a serious threat to world security”. Guyanese President Irfaan Ali approved international efforts to combat drug trafficking, which he counted among the “crimes that destroy the life of our people, especially young people”.
The new president of Syria, Ahmad al-Sharaa, noted that his administration closed the factories that produced the stimulating Captagon of amphetamine type, also known as Fenethylline, during the time of its predecessor now. Costa Roan Minister of Foreign Affairs Arnoldo André Tinoco said that drug smuggling networks operate the routes traveled by migrants and “take advantage of the vulnerability of those looking for international protection”.
“The isolated responses are insufficient” because the traffickers simply go elsewhere and create new hot dots of the crime, said Tinoco.
Examining the challenges that Peru is faced, President Dina Boluarte listed transnational organized crime and drug trafficking alongside political polarization and climate change.
“None of these problems is simply national, but rather global,” she said. “This is why we need the United Nations to be a forum for dialogue and cooperation again.”
