Events

Back

Drug Policy in the New South An Expert Debate

From

08
3:00 pm February 2022
Add to Calendar 2022-02-08 15:00:00 2025-05-02 18:02:58 Drug Policy in the New South An Expert Debate Description Location Policy Center Policy Center Africa/Casablanca public

The Policy Center for the New South, the Global Commission on Drug Policy and the West Africa Commission on Drugs are pleased to organize an expert debate under the theme “Drug Policy in the New South” on Tuesday, February 8th 2022, starting 3:00 pm GMT+1.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the declaration of the “war on drugs” by President Richard Nixon. Since then, law-enforcement responses are primarily used to counter the production, trafficking and consumption of illegal drugs. The international control regime based on the prohibition paradigm, and grounded in the three international drug conventions (1961, 1971 and 1988), consolidated national and regional fights against illegal drugs and supported the focus on drug elimination in national laws.

In parallel, and while the regime focused on its main objective and countries implemented international agreements, the “unintended consequences” –as they are referred to by the UN since 2008–  of this same regime became more dire, to the point of slowing other global development objectives.

Public health efforts have been destabilised by current drug policies. For people who inject drugs’ (PWID), access to services has been impeded by the criminalisation of their behaviour. As a result, today, 17.8% of PWID live with HIV, 52.3% are infected with hepatitis C, and the prevalence of tuberculosis among this population is 9.1%.  Another unintended consequence is that access to controlled essential medicines, including morphine for pain relief, is inadequate for 80% of the world’s population, affecting mainly low- and middle-income countries (the New South).  

Drawing on the poorest populations for its workforce, the illegal drugs market creates enormous profits to criminal organizations, with an estimated annual turnover between USD 426 and 652 billion. The high market value of this illegal market and its attractiveness to people with few economic opportunities then feeds mass incarceration, with one in five of the eleven million prisoners worldwide incarcerated for a drug offense.  The result is a complex situation that undermines, in turn, the achievement of just and fair societies as part of sustainable development.

Other issues include the inadequate collection of data directly related to the international drug control regime. In 2018, 269 million people were estimated to use drugs globally.   Yet that figure represents only people who were arrested or sought treatment. It is therefore not currently possible to have disaggregated and effective data on problematic drug use. The use and conditions referred to as ‘problematic’ have the potential to undercut health, social integration, economic prosperity, and all other development indicators.

Within that perspective, this event will serve as a platform for experts to discuss common approaches to drug policies, appreciate current policies’ interactions with the rule of law, health, and the fight against organized crime, and to discuss pathways to address contemporary and emerging challenges related to drugs.

The objectives of this expert debate are three-fold:

- To discuss drug policy in the New South and in Africa, and attract attention to its cross-cutting economic, social, and cultural challenges; and to reenergize the debate on drug policy control as the policies on the ground are taking diverging directions;

- To facilitate the exchange of experiences, lessons learned, and good practices between countries that have been reforming their policies in the last decade;

- To provide a space where emerging solutions for the next decade are discussed and defined by experts and global leaders.

 

15h00 – 16h30   

Drug Policy in the New South: An Expert Debate

 

Moderator

- Khalid Tinasti, Visiting Lecturer, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

 

Speakers: 

Adeolu Adebiyi, Member, West Africa Commission on Drugs

Asmin Fransizka, Senior Human Rights Lecturer, Atma Jaya University

- François Patuel, Research Officer for West and Central Africa, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

- Isabel Pereira, Drug Policy Research Coordinator, DeJusticia

- Yong-an Zhang, Professor, Shanghai University

 

 

Speakers
Khalid Tinasti
Director of the Global Commission on Drug Policy; Fellow at the GSI at the University of Geneva
...
Adeolu Adebiyi
Member, West Africa Commission on Drugs
Adeolu Adebiyi (he/him) is a public health expert who has worked on wide range of issues such as HIV/AIDS, Sexual Reproductive Health, Drug control response and Youth Development. His leadership and work have gained several recognitions. He is a member of the West Africa Commission on Drugs, convened by the late Kofi Annan and facilitated the formation of the West Africa Drug Policy Network, a coalition of over 300 CSOs and was also the founding executive director of YouthRISE Nigeria. He served on the Johns Hopkins-Lancet Commission on Drug Policy and Health and on the expert reference group of Amnesty International. He has also worked with multilateral agencies such UNODC, UNICEF and ...
Asmin Fransizka
Senior Human Rights Lecturer, Atma Jaya University
Asmin Fransiska is a Senior Human Rights Lecturer at Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia. She holds LLM in International Human Rights Law, from Northwestern University with scholarship from Fulbright. She obtains her Ph.D. in International Public Law from Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany ...
François Patuel
Research Officer for West and Central Africa, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
...
Yong-an Zhang
Professor, Shanghai University
Yong-an Zhang is Professor at Shanghai University. He received his B.A. in history in 1995, followed by M.A. in American history in 2002 from the Northeast Normal University, and Ph.D. (2005) from Fudan University. He has worked at the Department of History of Medicine of Yale University (New Haven, USA), and he was Visiting Fellow at the Center for East Asia Policy Studies of Brooking Institution (Washington, D.C., USA), and at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH) (Glasgow, UK). His research has addressed the social history of narcotics, medicine and health, as well as global health history and the international history of the Cold War. His publications include: Policy Choice in Changing Society: A Study on American Marijuana Policy (2009), and ...