Drug Policy: Ending the Failed U.S. “War on Drugs”

WOLA

Team WOLA

This piece is part of the series, A Human Rights Agenda for the Next U.S. Administration, outlining WOLA’s priorities for U.S. policies centered on human rights. As the United States prepares for a new administration, WOLA reaffirms its commitment to justice, dignity, and the fundamental rights of people across the Americas. In this series, we highlight the critical human rights issues that should be at the forefront of policy discussions during this pivotal time.

WOLA works with partners throughout the Americas to promote more effective and humane policies to address the myriad challenges associated with psychoactive drugs. Our approach is grounded in the reality that there has never been a “drug-free world” and there never will be. Prohibition and criminalization do not change that fact. To the contrary, the U.S.-led global “war on drugs” has led to more hazardous drugs and more lethal drug markets, while generating grave human rights violations the world over.

A landmark 2023 report from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights highlights the failure of punitive drug policies, urging a shift toward human rights-based approaches like harm reduction, decriminalization, and legal regulation. The report underscores the harmful impact of militarized drug control, mass incarceration, and the disproportionate targeting of marginalized groups, such as Indigenous peoples and women. 

Prohibition fuels illegal markets, organized crime, and corruption, while worsening violence, displacement, and environmental degradation. The extractive industries financed by drug profits accelerate forest destruction, eroding environmental governance and endangering Indigenous communities.

Progress is possible, but reform will not come easily. Bureaucratic buy-in, powerful vested interests, and the politics of fear have created massive drug policy inertia. Blaming foreigners for U.S. travails remains politically potent. The next U.S. administration should put the country on the path toward drug policies that truly respect human rights, protect public health, support security, and foster peace and sustainable development.  

We advocate for policy reforms guided by these three themes:

1. Change Begins at Home

  • Put public health at the center of U.S. domestic policies, investing in evidence-based prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery efforts. The overdose crisis has cast a harsh light on the shortcomings of a threadbare U.S. public health system and fragile social safety net. Especially given the rise of illicitly-manufactured fentanyl and the lethal toxicity of street drug markets, the next administration should expand federal support for harm reduction strategies, such as ready access to overdose reversal medications like Naloxone, drug test strips, medication-assisted treatment, and supervised drug consumption sites, which are already underway in some U.S. states. Ultimately, legal access to well-regulated, safe drug supplies is the best strategy to limit the devastation wrought by fentanyl and other potent synthetic and plant-based drugs.
  • Support decriminalization of drug possession and cultivation for personal use. There is no evidence that enforcing harsh criminal sanctions deters or diminishes drug use. There is, however, abundant evidence that criminalization ruins lives, pushing people away from needed health services, exposing many to abusive enforcement, landing them in jail, and saddling them with criminal records that blight prospects for education, housing and employment. The cruel burdens of criminalization have always fallen hardest and disproportionately on Black and LatinX populations.
  • Create a federal framework for decriminalizing and  regulating cannabis. With states moving ahead with both medical and recreational cannabis legalization, federal legislation to decriminalize and regulate cannabis is overdue. There is already much to learn from the states’ own regulatory experiences, but there is no off-the-shelf model for regulating psychoactive drugs responsibly. Congress and the next administration should step up to reform federal law to protect and promote public health, safety, and equity. 

2. Get Real About the Limits and Harms of Supply Control

  • Conduct a Top-to-Bottom Review of Supply Control within Prohibition. The next administration should conduct a comprehensive and candid review of U.S. policies and programs intended to curb illicit drug supplies and restrict their availability. Crucially, such a review should take into account the effects of prohibition itself, especially in light of the rise of highly potent, compact, and inexpensive synthetic drugs such as illicitly-manufactured fentanyl. The review should assess the challenges to supply control and the likelihood of achieving significant and sustainable reductions in illicit supplies.
  • Create Meaningful Indicators to Measure Policy. Traditional indicators of supply control efforts, such as hectares of crops eradicated, tons of drugs seized, and number of people  arrested, convey a misleading sense of decisive action and progress. Illicit drug markets are dynamic, and drug traffickers hedge against inevitable product losses by ensuring ongoing production, by constantly experimenting with new distribution routes and modes, and by bribing and coercing government officials. Despite these flaws, the traditional supply-side indicators have become so embedded in U.S. policymaking that they shape the incentives of drug control agencies, which continue to be funded and structured to pursue indicators that paint a mirage of progress even as drug trafficking spreads and drug markets expand.
  • Focus U.S. aid on bolstering civilian justice institutions and strengthening the rule of law. For decades, U.S. administrations from both parties have backed foreign security forces with billions of dollars in aid, equipment, and training in the name of disrupting and dismantling drug trafficking organizations. These efforts have not slowed the flow of illicit drugs, but have often undermined human rights and citizen security. The next U.S. administration should focus U.S. support on fortifying civilian justice institutions and the rule of law and establish a strict zero-tolerance policy for human rights abuses by U.S. personnel and recipients of U.S. security aid and training.

3. Modernize the Global Drug Control System

  • Integrate Drug Control Policy into the Wider UN System. For decades, the UN drug debate and drug control machinery carried on in nearly total isolation from the rest of the UN system. In recent years, the drug policy silo has begun to crumble as evidence of the dire impacts of prohibition and criminalization on human rights, security, peace, biodiversity and the climate crisis has become impossible to ignore. Countries such as Russia and many others remain deeply committed to prohibition and to punitive drug policies, and they can be expected to resist reforms that center human rights and bring the outmoded UN drug control system into the 21st century. But many other countries–including Latin American and Caribbean nations hard hit by the drug war–are pressing for comprehensive review and reform of the UN drug control system. The next U.S. administration should use its influence to remove the blinders from the UN drug system so that drug policy aligns with human rights obligations and evolves to cope with today’s global challenges, rather than continue heedlessly to exacerbate them.
  • Harness Cannabis Legalization to Reform UN Drug Treaties. As the United States moves to create a federal regulatory framework for cannabis, the next administration should work with like-minded countries to modernize the UN drug system and strengthen international law. By making clear that cannabis prohibition has proven to be untenable, the U.S. can open the door to coordinating with partner governments to design a new set of international rules for cannabis, designed to protect public health, workers, and the environment. Crucially, such an agreement would allow for the creation of fair trade rules and equitable inclusion of traditional cannabis growers in the Global South who have been targets of the drug war for decades.
  • Support Legal Markets for Traditional Uses of the Coca Leaf. The new U.S. administration will have the chance to help correct the historic error of a global ban on traditional uses of the coca leaf, which is currently listed in Schedule I of the UN drug treaties, side by side with cocaine. Millions of people have been safely and beneficially consuming coca leaves for millennia, and the leaf has come to play a central cultural role in the Andean-Amazonian region. The World Health Organization (WHO) is currently reviewing coca’s status under the drug treaties, and may recommend placing coca in a less stringent category or entirely removing it from the treaty schedules. Changing coca’s classification would not affect countries’ UN treaty obligations related to cocaine. But ending the coca ban would vindicate the rights of Indigenous peoples, fortify Andean economies, and bring coca’s benefits to people around the world. The next U.S. administration should support a robust and inclusive WHO coca review and lift the coca ban. 

Read the full series

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