It’s Final: United States Helps Kill Global Drug Safety Push

In Vienna, United Nations members today signed off on the United Nations political declaration recommending global drug policy for the decade to come. Despite a strong push by Europe and others to include “harm reduction” language — a reference to health-focused policies for dealing with drug abuse — opposition from the United States and others kept the term out of the document.

The move hasn’t pleased drug reform advocates. Here’s a statement released this afternoon by the London-based International Drug Policy Consortium:

We have witnessed an almost total unwillingness to confront the real policy dilemmas and a series of increasingly surreal political and diplomatic battles over wording that are entirely disconnected from the reality of drug use and problems as experienced in the outside world.

The facts show that the political declaration is institutional self-deception on a grand scale and calls into question the competence of the CND [U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs] as the custodian of the international drug control system.

The declaration fails to address, in any meaningful way, the spread of HIV from injecting drug use. The evidence has clearly shown that harm reduction measures have reduced the spread of HIV infections and this approach has been tested and accepted by all the responsible multilateral health bodies. However, the CND has agreed on a declaration that simply ignores the facts.

Maybe a decade from now, Washington will have evolved.