Transform News - March 2011

"There are some fundamental structural contradictions in this war on drugs . . . We in Colombia have been successful, but our success is hurting the whole of Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, Africa, and eventually it will backfire on us again. So are we pursuing the correct long-term policy? I don't object to discussing any alternatives but if we are going to discuss alternatives, let's discuss every alternative… what is the cost, what is the benefit of each alternative?”

President Santos of Colombia , Washington Post, Dec 2010

Contents

1. Transform News

• New project: Count the Costs
• Blueprint Translated into Italian

2. UK News

• Interesting article in the Telegraph
• Call for amendment to Misuse of Drugs Act to include a call for an Impact Assessments

3. International News

• New report calling for alternatives to the War on Drugs

4. Past Events

• Wellcome Event - Evidence Based Policy Making

5. Upcoming Events

• Events at King's College
• Policy Exchange Event - Drugs: Time to Legalise?

6. What You Can Do

• Help us disseminate the Spanish version of Blueprint
• Publicise and submit resources to the Count the Costs Campaign
  

1. Transform News

New Project: Count the Costs

This week the new Count the Costs campaign was launched at a side event at the Commission for Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna. The launch was well attended by representatives of the European Commission, ONDCP, and various country missions. Steve and Martin have been in Vienna all this week participating in a number of meetings and side event with country delegates, NGOs and UNODC officials.

Speakers at the Count the Costs launch event included:

• Simona Merkinaite: Policy and Advocacy Program Officer, Eurasian Harm Reduction Network (Lithuania) - The health and human rights impacts of drug law enforcement in the Eurasian regions
• Aram Barra: Drug Policy Programme Director, Espolea (Mexico) - Counting the costs of Mexico’s 'war on drugs'
• Damon Barrett: Senior Human Rights Analyst, International Harm Reduction Association (UK) - Drugs and human rights: is drug law enforcement proportionate? The case for Impact Assessment

• Chair: Martin Powell: Count the Costs Project Coordinator, Transform Drug Policy Foundation (UK)

Read the press release for more details. The new website has also been launched, at .

The first Count the Costs briefing outlining the seven unintended costs can be read

This new campaign will bring together interested parties from around the world, including NGOs, policy makers and others whose work is negatively impacted by international drug enforcement. Together they will call on governments and international agencies to meaningfully evaluate the unintended consequences of the war on drugs and explore evidence-based alternatives. The results of this campaign will be presented to the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs in 2012.

Here is the full text of the

"The global 'war on drugs' has been fought for 50 years, without preventing the long-term trend of increasing drug supply and use. Beyond this failure, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has also identified the many serious ‘unintended negative consequences’ of the drug war. These costs result not from drug use itself, but from choosing a punitive enforcement-led approach that, by its nature, places control of the trade in the hands of organised crime, and criminalises many users. In the process this:

1. Undermines international development and security, and fuels conflict

2. Threatens public health, spreads disease and causes death

3. Undermines human rights

4. Promotes stigma and discrimination

5. Creates crime and enriches criminals

6. Causes deforestation and pollution

7. Wastes billions on ineffective law enforcement

The 'war on drugs' is a policy choice. There are other options that, at the very least, should be debated and explored using the best possible evidence and analysis.

We all share the same goals – a safer, healthier and more just world.

Therefore, we the undersigned, call upon world leaders and UN agencies to quantify the unintended negative consequences of the current approach to drugs, and assess the potential costs and benefits of alternative approaches."

You can sign up to the statement
In addition Transform cosponsored read out at the CND plenary

A fuller report from Vienna will be included in next months’ newsletter.

Blueprint Translated into Italian

We now have a full translation of Blueprint in Italian which is scheduled to be published next month

Events

Wellcome Event - Evidence Based Policy Making

Staff attended this interesting event at the Wellcome Trust as part of the High Society exhibition. Speakers included:

Julian Critchley, former Director, UK Anti-Drug Coordination Unit.

Alex Stevens, Professor in Criminal Justice, University of Kent.

John Marsden, Reader in Addiction Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London and founding member of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.

Upcoming Events

Events at King's College for 'How the world's view of the drugs 'war' is changing'

King's College are running a series of events which might be of interest. The first in the series; ‘Drugs: breaking the taboo’ is taking place on March 30th at King’s College, London. Key speakers include Ian Gilmore, Peter Hitchens and David Blunkett.

Transform's senior policy analyst, Steve Rolles, will be amongst the speakers at the second event in the 'Ceasefire in the war on drugs?' debate series organised by the University of Bedfordshire, joining former chief constable Tom Lloyd, and the UK's Colombian Ambassador Mauricio Rodriguez Munera. Titled 'How the world's view of the drugs 'war' is changing', the event is at King’s College London at 6pm on the 6th of April. The event is free and open to all (but space is limited).

Policy Exchange Event - Drugs: Time to Legalise?

On 17th May Rt Hon Bob Ainsworth MP, Tom Lloyd QPM, will be debating with Dr Hans-Christian Raabe at an event organised by Policy Exchange.

Further information on the event is available  

2. UK News

Interesting article in the Telegraph  

In an article entitled this Monday 21st March, Martin Beckford writes about a new All-Party Parliamentary group on Drug Policy Reform. Formed by Peers and MPs, the group is calling for new policies to be drawn up on the basis of scientific evidence, and could possibly lead to calls for the British government to decriminalise drugs.

Call for amendment to Misuse of Drugs Act to include a call for an Impact Assessments

On Thursday 17th February Dr Julian Huppert MP initiated a debate calling for an amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act to include a call for an Impact Assessment. The full debate can be read

An extract from the discussion can be read below:

"There have been a number of discussions over many decades about how successful has the approach in the 1971 Act been. Has prohibition worked? Opposition Members raised concerns about that in yesterday’s Delegated Legislation Committee. The original idea of the 1971 Act was that it would not take long until the drugs were not around, and that the supply of such classified drugs would simply stop. That has definitely been a failure: there is no doubt that there are illegal drugs and large black markets around. I therefore believe it is time to start thinking about whether we are going in the right direction

A lot of work has been done. One of the previous incarnations of the Select Committee on Home Affairs produced an extremely good and detailed report, which suggested that more work should be done to look at alternatives. Someone called Cameron even sat on that Committee and supported its conclusions. [ Interruption. ] He was younger at the time. There is a time to start looking at what is happening. I accept that there will be many different opinions in Committee and outside on what a better solution could be and on how well the 1971 Act is working.

The new clause aims not to push the debate in one way or another, but to say that there should be an independent assessment. We regularly assess and review all sorts of aspects of legislation. I think the Minister referred earlier today to the fact that all legislation is kept under review, and that should apply to this matter as well. An independent assessment of the issue might be helpful to understand some of what is happening.

I am pleased and delighted that, during the debates in the previous couple of days, the Government made it clear that they are committed to an evidence-based drugs policy. That has to be an extremely good way to go. The new clause would reaffirm and strengthen that commitment. It would put regular reviews on a statutory footing and ensure that they happen independently. It would also reflect the speed of change in this policy area. Two days ago, there were comments on the fact that the Misuse of Drugs Act dates back to 1971, and that various other provisions are simply outdated. An independent assessment would enable us to find out and check that the legislation is fit for purpose and that we have learned from what has happened in the years since 1971.

An independent assessment would give the Secretary of State a firmer basis on which to base policy judgments, which would be helpful. We have had a commitment to evidence-based policy in, for example, advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, but it is harder to do that on a wider spectrum without large-scale measures. As a result of the assessment, I hope that we might be able to come up with something that works better. We might come up with something that would be cheaper in terms of police and medical support time, and hopefully something that may further reduce harm. We might not, but it would be worth at least starting to think about how we could assess the Act to find out whether we are on the right lines and whether there is a better alternative that would help more people around the country."

3. International News

New report calls for alternatives to the US enforcement-led attitude 

A new report from the US based Council on Foreign Relations titled makes a powerful critique of the ongoing enforcement-led US response, before calling for a more pragmatic approach built more around development and public health interventions. The report specifically calls for a Government inquiry into the potential costs and benefits drug legalisation, and for the Federal government to allow state level experimentation with the legalisation, taxation and regulation of cannabis/marijuana.

Click for our blog on this report.

4. What You Can Do

Help us send Blueprint to Spanish readers  

We are in the process of translating 'After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation' into Spanish. If you have any recommendation of where we could send it and who might want to read it, please contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Publicise and submit resources to the Count the Costs Campaign

Please take a look at the Count the Costs website and tell your friends and family about this new campaign.

We also welcome submissions of resources so as to help make this website an information hub that is useful and interesting to anyone who cares about effective, evidence-based drug policy.

Please include:

• Title
• Author(s)
• Date of publication (day/month/year)
• Publisher/publication (eg name of journal)
• Countries/regions covered
• Costs involved
• A short (approx 50 word) summary of the resource

Send submissions to: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it