Here's Why the United Nation's Big Meeting on Drugs Matters to You James Carli - Drug Policy Alliance
go to original February 26, 2016

Have you ever wondered why ending the War on Drugs isn't as simple as passing a few laws in Congress? Well, it has to do with some pretty bad pieces of international law that tie the hands of national governments to policies that even they know kinda stink. Fortunately, there's a coalition of really smart people working at the highest levels to untangle what is a really bad knot. Here's what I mean...

This April 19 to 21, many of the world's countries, together with human rights and advocacy organizations from around the world, will meet in New York at the United Nations to discuss global drug policy in an event called the "UNGASS," which is UN-speak for United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs.

See, the reason so many drugs are harshly criminalized is because there are three international treaties - the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971, and the Convention Against the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988 - that require countries who sign the treaty (including the United States, Canada, Mexico, and most of Europe), to "establish as a criminal offense" the "cultivation, production, extraction, possession, sale, distribution, purchase, and delivery" of several drugs and to "prosecute and punish," "particularly by imprisonment," individuals or groups who violate the terms of the treaties.

These treaties have thus established drug criminalization and the drug war as an "international norm," or a commonly accepted international standard of behavior, which means that because they signed the treaties, governments have to pass national laws in line with the treaty or face damage being done to their reputation on the international stage. Because of a principle in international law called pacta sunt servanda, which is Latin for "agreements must be kept," going against the treaty would, in theory, damage their "soft power," their ability to use their reputation and influence to achieve their foreign policy goals, without having to rely on hard power threats of military force. And because countries don't want to become known as not being good on their word when they sign treaties, they therefore enact the drug war at home.

For more than two years, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs, which are advocacy nonprofits), like my organization, the Drug Policy Alliance, and allies from around the world, like the International Drug Policy Consortium, Transform Drug Policy UK, the Open Society Foundations, Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), Harm Reduction International, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and dozens more, have been meeting with each other and with officials from several governments to get them to agree to ways to change or improve the three treaties.

The global campaign we're all a part of is called Stop the Harm, referring to stopping the harm done by the war on drugs. And at April's UNGASS in New York, we will spend a week in meetings championing for reform to end the failed drug war.

Read the rest at HuffPost Politics

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