ARO: Developments in Vienna


I don't mean to stomp on anyone's buzz, but our success in the run up to Vienna is far from complete.

While the State Department has instructed the negotiating team to accept language endorsing needle exchange programs, it is not yielding on other contentious points.

From what I've heard, the US will not accept references to "harm reduction" in the document, due to types of initiatives that this term can encompass on grounds that "the US opposes - and the UN Conventions do not endorse - injection rooms, heroin distribution, drug legalization, distribution of "safe crack kits," and other methods to facilitate drug use."

On the supply side, the US continues to insist that illicit crop eradication must take place BEFORE peasant farmers can receive alternative development assistance.  In other words, peasant farmers who subsist on a few dollars a day are supposed to destroy the only source of their food security and then hope some "development expert" will show up an ill-conceived aid project (arrogantly concocted without the slightest input from the farmers themselves) and hope that it will come to fruition at some point in the future.  Just how are they supposed to feed their families in the months or years it can take alternative crops to mature?  I guess our drug warriors think they should simply live off of their credit cards at the neighborhood Applebees or cash in their 401(k)s.

For most bureaucracies, the drug portfolio is considered a career killer because there is no victory to be had at the end of the day.  In the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL), it seems to me that people land there for three main reasons: 1) they've pissed someone off and are being punished; 2) they are incompetent and can't be trusted in sensitive diplomatic posts; or 3) they are true believers in the drug war.  I also think that these three factors are rarely mutually exclusive.

INL is stacked with some of the worst drug war zealots I've ever encountered.  The seem to be hermetically sealed in their own little echo chamber.  Until they receive explicit top-down orders to the contrary, they will continue with their agenda until they are dragged out of that office kicking and screaming.  We've had many drug reform success this past month, but it's going to take time and pressure for Obama and Clinton to identify and root out the dead enders who still populate the drug war bureaucracies.

-Sanho