Commentary
Incarceration or mandatory treatment: Drug use and the law in the Middle East and North Africa

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Abstract

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), drug policies are embedded in the prohibition paradigm. Laws and legislation criminalize all types of activities related to illicit drugs. This article gives a detailed assessment of the provisions of Arab national laws to control the use of illicit drugs across the areas of punishment of drug users, penalties for drug dependence, legislation on use and dependence treatment, and the right of the convicted people who use drugs to confidentiality. It reviews the national legislations on drug control of 16 Arab countries as amended in January 2011.

Introduction

Since the passage of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961, complemented by the Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971, the international community has remained committed to eliminating the non-medical use of illicit drugs. The 22 Arab countries members of the League of Arab States (LAS),1 all parties to the conventions mentioned above, committed to eliminating drugs and to include the international drug control measures in their national legislations.

Representing the largest part of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA),2 Arab countries members of the LAS have taken regional legislative commitments to eliminating drug use by establishing the Permanent Anti-Narcotics Bureau of the LAS in 1950 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 1980), and by ratifying the Arab Convention against illicit trafficking in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances (League of Arab States, 1994). These countries also schedule substances in their national laws following the “Unified Table” or the Unified Arab Table for Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, derived from United Nations conventions.

These international and regional agreements constantly emphasized the need to embed their provisions in national laws, in order to eliminate the use of illicit drugs. MENA has a long history of drug use (Baasher, 1981) and has played a major role in introducing prohibition both nationally and internationally. As far back as 1879, Egypt introduced the first legislation prohibiting the use of cannabis (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2008). MENA is a production region for many substances, including cannabis, grown in Morocco (Afsahi, 2015) and Lebanon; small quantities of opiates produced in the Sinai; amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) produced in countries from Egypt to Lebanon and khat cultivated from Yemen to Somalia (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2013). But mostly, MENA is an area of consumption and transit. The region is at the geographic heart of trafficking routes: opiates transiting from the Golden Crescent to Europe, cannabis travelling from Morocco to the Gulf countries, cocaine from Latin America to Europe, methamphetamines from West Africa to Europe, and ATS from Eastern Europe to South Asia. In North Africa, the two most commonly used narcotics are cannabis and ATS, with rates of prevalence of use of 4.3% (2.2–6.6%) and 0.6% (0.2–0.9%) respectively (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2014b). The prevalence of drug injection in the Near and Middle East, of 0.08% (0.03–0.13), and the prevalence of HIV among people who inject drugs are both lower than the prevalence rates in the rest of the world (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2015). Nevertheless, the use and seizures of ATS have doubled in few years according to available data (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011).

This article provides a detailed assessment of the provisions of Arab national laws to control the use of illicit drugs across the areas of punishment of drug users, penalties for drug dependence, legislation on use and dependence treatment (even if they are undifferentiated in the law), and the right of the convicted people who use drugs to confidentiality. In MENA the conviction and punishment of drug users is the main tool used to combat illicit drug use. The article reviews the methodology used to collect and analyse the data of drug control laws in 16 MENA countries as of January 2011 (Table 1). We then describe the legislative provisions related to drug use and dependence, be it imprisonment or compulsory treatment convictions. The article focuses on drug use, dependence, possession and the rights and obligations of people who use drugs; and does not address legal provisions regarding drug trafficking or transnational organized crime. It aims at providing policymakers, researchers and civil society representatives with the tools to understand and fill the gaps in the legal provisions related to drug use in the MENA region. After the Arab Springs starting 2011, the legislations reviewed have not been amended; the Tunisian government submitted an amendment of its narcotics law to Parliament in July 2015 (Government of Tunisia, 2015).

Section snippets

Methodology

A systematic review of the national legislations on drug control of 16 Arab countries as amended in January 2011 has been undertaken between June and August 2015: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, UAE, and Yemen. We refer to these countries, covered by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime MENA regional Office (ROMENA), as the MENA region. Peer-reviewed and grey literature as well as policy documents and

Limitations

While every effort was made to identify all valid sources of information on the legal and political context for people who use drugs in Arab countries, data availability varied widely by country. Little data was available on the number of incarcerated convicts for drug offenses, with some available data on drug trafficking offenses but virtually none on drug use offenses and mostly a combination of both in the available data as the offenses are treated similarly. No data existed for the

Conclusion

Considerable efforts are put into controlling the possession and consumption of drug use in the MENA region. Being a production region for many substances, a traditionally consumption region of plant-based drugs, and a production and transit region for manufactured illicit drugs, the Arab countries of which legislations have been reviewed in this article have mitigated results. Whilst overall prevalence of use of all sorts of drugs is low compared with many other global regions, it is

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests. FS declares having produced a similar but more comprehensive published legislative analysis for the Global Commission on HIV and the Law in 2011.

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