THE WORLD MINISTERIAL DRUG SUMMIT

To Reduce the Demand for Drugs and Combat the Cocaine Threat

London, England 9 - 11 April 1990

A report by MIKE ASHTON Editor of Druglink the journal on drug misuse in Britain.

On the eve of the Great Drug Summit in London, UN world anti-drugs coordinator Margaret Anstee stooped to address an audience of street-level drug workers in Britain. Workers who walked into the meeting thinking they were autonomously pursuing their own agency's objectives were addressed as cogs in the global drugs war.

We have a strategy, she explained, supply reduction on the one hand and demand reduction on the other. You are our front-line troops on the demand reduction front. Like guerilla/undercover forces everywhere, these foot-soldiers need a degree of real independence and, in this case, to be seen to be independent in order to operate effectively behind enemy lines - in the pubs, youth clubs, and on the streets among disaffected young people who would run the other way at the sight of a uniform.

The audience may have thought they were 'on the side' of drug users, helping them survive and mature in a hostile environment, but they should have left knowing this perception was essential to their global role in sustaining this hostility.

However, there was resistance. One faction didn't see themselves as in the business of demand-reduction at all, but harm-minimisation - not stopping drug users being what they are, but helping them survive unscathed and, in particular, uninfected with HIV. Spontaneous applause - the only burst of the day greeted their statement. Signs of mutiny that Anstee unfortunately missed.

As the Summit unfolded, it became clearer just how the global drugs war jigsaw was constructed. UN-co-ordinated international efforts to achieve a reduction in the supply of drugs from producer countries had been dogged by mutual recriminations between producer and consumer nations, with the producers complaining that the antidrugs burden fell disproportionately on their impoverished economies. While they were expected to make huge sacrifices to eradicate the coca labs and plantations, the developed nations of the West had failed to act to cut the demand that drives the illicit market, accused President Barco of Colombia.

The latest twist in international pressure for supply reduction - the 1988 UN anti-trafficking convention required signatories to confiscate traffickers' assets and extradite them abroad for trial. Fully implemented, such requirements could create massive social unrest in countries such as Colombia, where extradition is probably the most sensitive foreign policy issue.

Exercising sufficient moral leverage on producer nations would mean consumers showing they accepted the "shared responsibility" to do their bit on the demandreduction front. With drug use problems developing in traditionally producer or transit countries, and recently acknowledged in the 'Eastern Bloc', the West can now do this without spotlighting their own populations as uniquely degenerate and vulnerable to addiction. Holding the individual consumer responsible for the world's drug problems also fits in with current US demandreduction policies, which seek a rationale for an increasingly comprehensive array of civil and criminal punishments.

The time was ripe for the UN to find willing partners in its attempt to open up the demand-reduction front. But this economic conceptualisation of the drug trade requires demand reduction policies to hit casual users of cannabis or cocaine as hard as - or, US policy makers argue, even harder than - they hit the addict. All are consumers creating the demand that feeds the drug problem.

Even in the USA, undiluted, aggressive deterrence policies aimed at large sectors of its own population are politically unacceptable, at least without a balancing human face involving educational activities and access to treatment and caring services. Elsewhere, in countries such as the UK, the trend has been away from demand-reduction through imprisonment as judicial systems and prisons start to collapse under the throughput of convicts.

Deterrence and supply-reduction are implemented largely by the state's own enforcement authorities, as a user- friendly image is hardly a requirement in these situations. But delivering other demand-reduction initiatives to people who, by using drugs, have already shown their willingness to ignore the authorities, requires a different strategy. This, as Anstee explained, is where the non governmental organisations (or NGOs) come into their own. 'NGO' is UN-speak for voluntary and community bodies not directly run by state or local government.

'Community participation', 'non statutory agencies' and 'voluntary effort', are now the watchwords of US and UK policy makers seeking to show they are doing their bit on demand reduction without having to double the size of the prison population. Hence the new found importance of NGOs on the international scene.

But there were clear signs at the Summit that it would take a lot more to get the world's drug producer nations to risk their leaders' lives and their countries' economies by cracking down on the drug trade. With refreshingly forthright honesty, Margaret Anstee explained how a world economic order which disadvantaged the poorer south by denying it an economic price for its raw commodities lay behind illicit drug production in Latin America and Asia.

She explained how Bolivia would be even more unable to repay its massive foreign debt if it acceded to demands to eradicate the coca plantations that draw in the narcodollars. The West could not have it both ways - foreign debts repaid and drugs uprooted. It had to choose. "Adequate prices and assured access to markets" for legal exports were needed if the peasant farmers were to give up the only crops that can currently guarantee them a living, Anstee told Summit delegates.

It was no accident that UK Home Secretary David Waddington used her own words in explaining that, "of course", the West could not "assure" drug producing nations that a good market price would greet their alternative crops. Neither was there any response to Bolivia's call for protectionist policies in industrialised countries to be relaxed, giving the producer countries a chance to get into the market.

Industrialised countries are keenly aware that without protective subsidies and price supports, their own agricultural (and ultimately manufacturing) industries are vulnerable to competition from cheap labour in the Third World. Wiping out foreign debts owed to Western banks and guaranteeing high prices for currently cheap raw commodities would be another shot in the foot for Western economies. If this is the price of defeating their drug problems, some Western leaders are not prepared to pay it.

Neither are there any signs of an acceptance that, at least in some cases, the internal economic structure of Western nations helps create their own domestic drug problems. UN documents circulating at the meeting unashamedly declared that "it is certainly true that despair born of impoverishment is a powerful motivation towards drugs, either... as a means of psychological escape or as a source of income".

For the British Home Secretary there was a "grain of truth" in this line of thinking - but "only" a grain, while US demand-reduction supremo Herbert Kleber managed to complete his address to the Summit without a single reference to poverty or deprivation. Regular crack use is increasing in the US urban ghettos whose primarily black and Hispanic residents have litfle to lose from zerotolerance threats to punish drug use by loss of job, home, education or career opportunities. As drug prevention initiatives hit home in the health-conscious suburbs, the result is that today's average US cocaine user is "younger, poorer and less well educated" than those of previous generations, Dr Mark Gold admitted.

Just as turning round the world economic order may be too high a price to pay to beat drug trafficking, so too may be the reversal of internal economic policies in Western nations which deny employment opportunities and adequate living conditions to significant sections of their own populations. Poverty in Peru and Bolivia is at least now recognised as a source of drug problems, but back home in the West such a recognition for our own countries is too close to the political bone.