Drugs in the UN system: the unwritten history of the 1998 United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs
Introduction
Kofi Annan gave this toast at the UN 20th General Assembly Special Session on drugs held from 8 to 10 June 1998: “excellencies and friends, allow me to raise my glass in the hope that when we look back upon this meeting, we will remember it as a time when the test of our will became the testimony of our commitment. The time when we pledged to work together towards a family of nations free of drugs in the twenty-first century.” In a video address a few days before the meeting, he had said: “Our commitment is to make real progress towards eliminating drug crops by the year 2008. It is my hope that this session will go down in history as the time the international community found common ground to take on this task in earnest.” The president of the Special Session, Mr Udovenko (Ukraine), said in his opening remarks: “The drug problem cannot be wished away by good intentions and the international community must be prepared for a long and gruelling fight.” And closing the summit he highlighted the sense of a “growing convergence of views” and a “spirit of togetherness”, hoping that the session would “go down in history as a truly watershed event” and concluding: “We have before us a well-designed strategy and we have a package of measures and goals to be achieved within precise time-frames” (A/S-20/PV.1–9).
The world is now looking back upon this event, at the mid-term review of the UNGASS, takes places on 16th and 17th April 2003 in Vienna. Will a review 5 years down the line confirm the optimism of Annan and Udovenko about a “watershed event”? Can we raise a toast to celebrate “real progress”? How much “common ground” was there in the first place? Will the delegates in April 2003 meet again in a ‘spirit of togetherness’? This paper reconstructs the unwritten history of the 1998 UNGASS and the troubled efforts to rationalise the drugs debate within the UN system.
Section snippets
A busy decade: 1991–2000
With the International Conference on Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, held at Vienna in 1987, the adoption in 1988 of the Vienna Convention on Illicit Trafficking, the General Assembly devoting in 1990 a first Special Session to the drugs issue adopting a Global Programme of Action and branding 1991–2000 to become the United Nations Decade Against Drug Abuse, and the establishment in 1991 of the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP), the stage was set for a new era in
The Mexican voice
A Mexican letter to the Secretary General set the tone for the 1993 meeting. A number of key issues were listed. Given the fact that despite all efforts that had been made, consumption was increasing and criminal organisations were thriving and expanding, Mexico saw the event as an unprecedented opportunity for international reflection, which had become imperative because of the seriousness of the situation. It wanted more attention focussed on the demand side because “drug consumption is the
Inherent imbalances
The Mexican letter expressed the tensions between the US and Latin America over drugs and the classical demand–supply divide in the global drug control system, a result of the unbalanced political power relations under which the three conventions were negotiated. The 1961 Single Convention focused on “narcotic substances” and was largely an instrument to control coca and cocaine, opium and heroin, and cannabis. The main targets were plant-based drugs at that point in time largely cultivated in
Questioning prohibition
It was the inherent imbalance in the global drug control system, which Mexico, voicing the frustrations of several Latin American producing countries, wanted to have corrected. Adding to this came the widespread realisation that besides being out-of-balance the drug control efforts had so far proven to be disturbingly ineffective, giving rise to doubts about the prohibitionist fundament of the system. The other document that greatly influenced the proceedings of the 1993 General Assembly
Making the system bite
This divide became increasingly apparent during the 3 days, with several delegates stressing the need to “restate commitment”, “reinforce” and “strengthen” the current system. In the words of the UK delegate, Mr Richardson: “We have the machinery; we need now to make it work better. In particular, we need a more solid international front in support of the 1988 United Nations Convention. This is an instrument with teeth, and we need to make it bite.” Any questioning of effectiveness was seen
Opening the debate
However, other delegates used terms like “review”, “overall evaluation”, “try new strategies”, and “redefine our actions”. No one pleaded for legalisation, but several defended a non-repressive approach to consumption, such as Mr Torben Lund, Minister of Health of Denmark, who said: “I believe that we have reached the point where we must realise that there is a need for new approaches to the drug problem… There may be a need to shift the focus of our efforts from law enforcement to prevention
INCB on cannabis and coca
As a follow-up to the General Assembly resolution, UNDCP convened an intergovernmental ad-hoc advisory group to recommend “appropriate adjustments”. The group was advised by Dr Hamid Ghodse, president of the INCB, on the effectiveness of the international drug control treaties (E/CN.7/1995/14). In a position paper presented by Dr Ghodse, the INCB declared: “It does not appear necessary to substantially amend the international drug control treaties at this stage, but some technical adjustments
The Advisory Group
The ten participants of the ad-hoc advisory group were carefully chosen. Miguel Ruiz-Cabañas, then at the Mexican embassy in Washington, who later became head of Anti-Narcotic Matters at the Mexican Foreign Ministry, represented Mexico. The other countries were the USA, India, Argentina, the Russian Federation, Sweden, Poland, Japan, Egypt and Nigeria, the latter represented by Philip O. Emafo, then working as a consultant for UNDCP, who in 2002 became president of the INCB. No one from a
End station CND 1995/1996
According to Robin Room, who analysed the general debate of the 1995 CND session: “The most notorious dissenter from the dominant rhetoric is the Netherlands. In the context of the CND, the role the Netherlands has taken on is roughly that of the small boy in the tale of the emperor's clothes: the role of knowledgeable truth-teller.” As an example he quotes the Dutch representative, saying: “The whole situation is correctly characterised in terms of ‘giant criminogenic multiplier effects’…
ECOSOC high-level Meeting 1996
Before this could be considered by the General Assembly, it had to pass through the ECOSOC under whose authority the CND operates as one of its functional bodies. ECOSOC devoted a 3-day high-level segment of its business to the outcome of the CND meeting (EE/1996/SR.10–15). Mr Schroeder, then president of the INCB made his point clear in the opening session: “Governments should keep in mind that experiments in the field of harm reduction currently taking place in several developed countries
WHO: ‘Six Horsemen ride out’
There was still one tail of this episode in UN drug control history, however, that had not been cut off by the CND. The World Health Organization (WHO) has a particular role in the making of UN drug policy, which is relatively separate from the triangle UNDCP–INCB–CND, the core of the drug control system. Its role is restricted to recommending in which schedule under the 1961 and 1971 conventions particular substances should be categorised, on the basis of health considerations, a task for
The WHO Cocaine Project
In 1992, the PSA launched the “WHO/UNICRI Cocaine Project” involving a group of well-known academic researchers and funded by the Italian government. Italy is the home of UNICRI, the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute. Research plans were developed partly as a response to the World Ministerial Drug Summit, held in London in April 1990, the aim of which was to formulate demand reduction policies and “combat the cocaine threat”. According to a WHO press release in
The WHO Cannabis Project
The PSA started the WHO Project on Health Implications of Cannabis Use in 1993. The last WHO report on cannabis had been published 12 years before and, in response to “many requests” for an updated study, WHO convened a group of scientific experts on the subject (WHO/MSA/PSA/97.4: 1). One of research topics agreed upon was to make a “Comparative Appraisal of the Health and Psychological Consequences of Alcohol, Cannabis, Nicotine and Opiate Use.” In August 1995 the report was released,
1997 World Drug Report
By the end of 1996, the most controversial views and recommendations of the previous few years had been effectively neutralised, so the ‘zero tolerance’ lobby must have been displeased to see some of them resurge in the official UN World Drug Report published in 1997. The report, prepared under auspices of the UNDCP, in many regards reflected the more open climate of the pre-UNGASS period and stands alongside the attempts to rationalise the debate undertaken by the WHO/PSA.
On the cannabis
Strengthen the UN machinery
The first of many conflicts in the run-up to UNGASS took place in Vienna at the very first ‘PrepCom’ meeting in March 1997. Under the agenda item ‘Implementation of the International Drug Control Treaties’ a resolution was tabled by Australia, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden and Thailand, on “strengthening the United Nations machinery for international drug control.” The draft resolution recognised that there were extraordinary and unrelentingly high levels of illicit use, cultivation, production
UNGASS: the compromise
The PrepCom in March 1997 had to decide about which country should hold the Presidency. Having played a key role in the lead-up to the Special Session, Mexico wanted the position and its candidacy was supported by the GRULAC group of Latin American and Caribbean countries. However, the USA, was concerned about Mexico's recent critical tone. It seized upon the resignation, just 1 month previously, of General Gutiérrez Rebollo the Mexican “anti-drug czar” over allegations that he had protected
Conclusions
The consensus-driven functioning of the UN drug control machinery has led to strange results. “There is something very special about illicit drugs. If they do not always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many non-users to behave that way” (Grinspoon and Bakalar, 1993). In private, “most authorities agree that it is unrealistic to expect to eradicate drugs” and that the present regime is ineffective. But as soon as they sit down in the conference halls in Vienna and
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the NEF European Drug Policy Fund for its financial support to the Transnational Institute's drugs programme in the period researching and writing this paper.
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