In my experience as head of my country's government and previously a health minister, as a former senior official at the United Nations, and more recently as a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, I've found debates on drug policy tend to be divisive and passionately ideological. On one point, however, there is a clear and growing consensus: Around the world, the so-called "war on drugs" is failing.
It has been estimated that globally more than $100 billion a year is spent waging this silent war, with over $40 billion of that spent in the United States alone. Yet, despite the huge amount of funding invested in drug control, the challenges are rising, not reducing, and the core objectives in the United Nations charter of promoting human rights, peace and security and development are being dramatically undermined by global drug policies. Unfortunately, there is even less consensus on the question of where we go from here.
This is all the more concerning as we rapidly approach a key inflexion point in the global debate, with the contours of the next United Nations strategy being negotiated before the crucial ministerial meeting in Vienna next March. As the situation stands, avoiding these critical questions no longer is tenable, and the first step to recovery from the collective "addiction to the war on drugs" is to accept that there is a problem.
A starting point for understanding better the political context is a new landmark report by the International Drug Policy Consortium -- a global civil society network of over 170 non-governmental organizations focusing on drug policy -- which has laid bare the drug war's failures in the starkest terms. The 2009 10-year U.N. drug strategy committed governments worldwide to creating a world free of drugs by 2019. But with each passing year, the world has moved further and further from this fantastical goal.
As the report highlights, drug use has not disappeared but instead has risen by 31 percent between 2011 and 2016. Illegal drug markets have expanded relentlessly to meet this growing demand, with opium and coca production rising respectively by 130 percent and 34 percent between 2009 and 2018.
