The goal of drug policy is clear, according to the United Nations, whose convention on narcotic drugs largely sets the framework for what individual states do. The aim, the UN says, is to end the ‘serious evil’ of addiction. This, it adds, is to be achieved by preventing public access to dangerous substances, while at the same time ensuring adequate provision of narcotics to meet medical and scientific need.
The challenge of these twin purposes – ensuring availability for medical use, preventing availability for recreational use –encapsulates the ‘dual use dilemma’ that has confronted drug policymakers for the past 150 years, as Julia Buxton, Professor of Justice at Liverpool John Moores University, explains in this episode of the podcast.
Julia reflects on how personal experience drew her into the field, why US power has played such a disproportionate role and what happens when countries attempt reform. The conversation explores not only the human costs of criminalisation, but also why it has proved so hard to shift drug policy towards a different, health-led future.
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Julia Buxton is Professor of Justice at John Moores University in Liverpool and British Academy Global Professor.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
What Is Drug Policy For? by Julia Buxton is available on Bristol University Press for £8.99 here.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
2:19 – Tell me about the challenge of talking about drug policy to such different audiences.
5:26 – Can you tell us about the story of how you came to study drug policy?
8:30 – Has the medicinal use of drugs improved in the past 25 years?
12:36 – When do you think it’s useful to start looking in the historical record for the first signs of what would become our current global policy towards restricting access to certain drugs?
19:28 – What is path dependency in the context of evolving drug policy?
22:05 – How influential is the US in this context?
30:55 – Can you tell us about efforts to decriminalise some drugs in some countries?
41:50 – Are there things that give you a little bit of hope for a better future?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: Hello and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast from Bristol University Press. My name is George Miller and I’m very pleased to have as my guest on this episode Julia Buxton, who is Professor of Justice at Liverpool John Moores University. Immediately before that, she was British Academy Global Professor in Criminology at the University of Manchester.
Julia has taught and trained on drug histories and enforcement impacts for 25 years, running courses for students, NGOs, the armed forces and policy officials. She is therefore very well placed to tackle the question posed in the title of her new book, What is drug policy for?
The goal of drug policy according to the United Nations is clear. Its convention on narcotic drugs largely sets the framework for what individual states do. The aim, it says, is to end the ‘serious evil’ of addiction.
This, it adds, is to be achieved by preventing public access to dangerous substances while at the same time ensuring adequate provision of ‘narcotics’ to meet medical and scientific requirements.
And as Julia explains, these twin purposes – ensuring availability for medical use, preventing availability for recreational use –encapsulate the ‘dual use dilemma’ that has confronted drug policymakers for the past 150 years.
Some of these substances, especially opiates such as morphine and codeine from the opium poppy, are extraordinarily effective for pain management. The problem is that the medical virtue of being in a pain-free ‘altered state’ can also become a vice.
Julia’s book, and our conversation, examines the results of vast international effort to suppress the trade in illicit drugs in recent decades, asking in essence, has it worked? A question to which you probably already know the answer. It also looks at the forces – cultural, historical, political – that have shaped these ongoing efforts.
When we spoke, I began by asking Julia to tell me about the challenge of talking about drug policy to such different audiences as students and the uniformed services whose job is policy enforcement:
Julia Buxton: Well, I think the main challenge that I’ve encountered is that so many professional services, uniformed public services, scientists who are interested in working on drug policy who are responsible for enforcement of criminalisation. A lot of the time when I talk to people involved in these areas, they have very little understanding of the historical roots of drug policy, our obligations under international drug conventions, and really where our national drug laws come from.
So what I try to do in my teaching and my training and with this book is to kind of explain these historical roots, the kind of cultural norms into which criminalisation and the history of these prohibition strategies. Why are police responsible for this level of enforcement? Why do we have so many people in prison making this an issue for those who work in the criminal justice system? So we can be remarkably talented scientists and we can be incredibly experienced police officers, but having had the time and the experience to better understand the nature of the drug laws and the drug policy that we work within can be really challenging for people.
So it’s trying to, I think, in my work, explain, contextualise and simplify really what strategy and policy is. With students, it’s usually a very different ball game. I find that students obviously tend to come to these kind of classes and teaching with a more informed contemporary view of drugs in current use, current drug trends. Again, the challenge for students is trying to better contextualise and conceptualise what drug policy is for. So very, very diverse constituencies of interest, all with very different ideas and understandings of what drug policy is for, but rarely with that historical background.
GM: And I guess from working on your book, I know that you would say that the history and that background isn’t just interesting to know. It’s not just, you know, sort of satisfying sort of cultural curiosity. It’s actually essential to understand how we got where we are. And that’s one of the aims of the series to kind of understand how we got to the present moment because without that lots of aspects of what we currently do will be mystifying.
JB: Yeah, absolutely I mean what a lot of people don’t tend to understand is, for example here in the UK, our main drug legislation dates back to 1971 and the Misuse of Drugs Act. I mean we’re talking about drug laws in this country which are over 50 years old, but these are rooted in a United Nations Convention which actually dates back to 1961, and all of our national drug laws flow from that convention.
So this is a very historically rooted policy approach, but as the book explains it goes back even further than the 1961 convention and we have to go right back to the turn of the 20th century to better understand the laws and the cultures and the arguments that frame contemporary drug control.
GM: Now I want to come back to that history and how these policies that we have today have evolved. Before we get on to that. You open the book with really quite a personal story about how you found your way into this field of research. And I wondered if you could just say something about that, because I think it sort of helps illuminate where you’re coming from and what sort of motivated you to spend all these years researching this.
JB: One of the challenges when you work in drug policy is that the common questions always involve, do you use drugs? What’s been your experience of drugs? And my experience of drug policy is very, very different from other people’s. Essentially, in 1997, as I discuss in the book, my family suffered a devastating loss of a young woman who died of cancer. She was the first member of my family to go to university, incredibly talented and skilled, and tragically left behind a one-year-old daughter.
And during the course of that family member’s treatment and care, palliative care, I have to point out, I was attending a hospital in London where I met with other people who were suffering similar losses and trying to deal with the similar loss of cancer. And what became really interesting in that conversation was that essentially the United Kingdom is very unique and unusual in having access to medical morphine. And in many countries around the world, governments simply don’t import morphine. There’s very pronounced opiophobia amongst clinical professions. They don’t want to prescribe morphine-based essential medicines because of concerns that this is going to cause addiction in the user, which obviously is a really problematic position to take when the user themselves, the patient, is terminally ill and at end of life.
So I became very interested in what these limitations were because some of these people who were at the hospital were coming from faraway countries to try and access this kind of care and medication that was available in the UK. And it really turned me on to understanding decades later the United Nations Office of Drug Control, of drugs and crime as it is today, the United Nations Drug Conventions and the whole purpose of the international system. And what’s profoundly important here and what so many people don’t seem to realise is that the system that we have today for preventing access to dangerous substances was originally intended and framed, including the post-war period, to enable access to essential medicines.
So the whole point was to try and set up a global opium monopoly so everybody could access medical morphine and substances like this. But the reality has been that the international system has completely swung over to repression of controlled drug access rather than facilitation. A focus on the illicit market rather than legitimate medical need. So my entry point into this was from a very personal perspective. It’s a difficult story to tell, particularly when I’m talking about drug policy in front of different audiences. But it was profoundly important for me in shaping my understanding of how drug control works and what it failed to do.
GM: And is that medicinal use of drugs something which has improved in the past 25 years that you’ve been working in this field or are we still in the same sort of position where access is severely restricted in many parts of the world?
JB: We still face very, very severe restrictions in many parts of the world. It’s really the high income countries, the UK, Canada, Austria, these kinds of places, the United States, which has the largest imported volumes of medical opiates. And it’s the developing world. It’s also middle income countries that simply don’t have the amounts of medical morphine, of medical opiates in country in order to address medical need.
And whether this is care for cancer, tumours, or just the pains of childbirth and leg injuries. I mean, this is a real deficit in terms of pain relief. And the challenge in so many of these countries is without access to medical morphine, for example, if you’ve been diagnosed with cancer, if you have HIV AIDS, is you’re not only very, very unlikely to have access to pain killing medication, you’ll probably have something really inadequate and insufficient, something simple as paracetamol, which is holy, holy. inadequate for treating the kinds of pains associated with cancer and HIV AIDS.
GM: So raising the other side of the equation, the use of drugs for pain relief and palliative care really opens up what a vast terrain it is that you are thinking about in this book, how many complex interacting parts there are to it. And I wondered, in such a short book, how do you convey this to the reader in a way that makes it comprehensible, helps them get to grips with the history that you alluded to earlier, when there are so many? And of course, it’s changing all the time. You know, we’re not talking about just a small group of drugs. You’re talking across a very wide spectrum of different drugs with different effects. So how did you approach this challenge of trying to make this all comprehensible to the reader?
JB: Well, when we talk about the issue of well-being and access to opiate medications in essential care, we’re not talking about a challenge in terms of medical access, which is only limited to the opiates. We’re talking about bigger debates, for example, over access to psychedelic medicines in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, about access to medical cannabis for a range of illnesses and diseases. So we are, as you say, talking about a significant number of substances.
The issue is very, very simple. These substances, if they are scheduled by the United Nations Drug Conventions, if they are listed in the 1961 UN Single Convention, which focuses on drug plants, a 1971 UN Convention on psychotropics, that’s the synthetics, the psychedelic substances, and a 1988 Convention, which focuses more on precursor chemicals. If the substances which brings you pain relief, mental relief or well-being, if it’s listed in this schedule of controlled drugs, you will not be able to access it. There will be very, very limited research on this substance and any transaction involving this substance will lead to very severe and draconian criminal penalties.
So what I try to do in the book, yes, we’re talking about a huge range of different types of substances. We’re talking about people who might use these controlled drugs for pain relief, but also for fun, for pleasure, for stimulation. We’re talking about very, very different types of behaviours. How do we squeeze it all under the single roof of a very, very small book? I think by trying to help the reader understand the nature of the restrictions, the history of the conventions and the cultures of criminalisation that have helped to support this policy and to embed it in our societies over the last 100 years. So a great deal of diversity, but actually very, very simple answers to some of the most fundamental questions of what is drug policy for.
GM: So, Julia, you’ve alluded to this issue of history a couple of times now, so let’s tackle the historical question. And I wondered if you could say, when do you think it’s useful to start looking in the historical record for the first signs of what would become our current global policy towards restricting access to certain drugs? What are some of the main things that sort of feed into it? Because it clearly didn’t just sort of come about out of nowhere when the UN conventions were drafted. There was a lot of cultural baggage that was being brought to bear in doing so.
JB: Yeah, absolutely. The importance of history really in understanding drug policy is that the post-war system, the 1961 convention, which introduces criminalisation, which makes it an obligation for all of our countries to have drug criminalisation laws, that system is actually rooted in an earlier regulatory framework, which was in operation during the interwar period. So from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War. And that was a system that aimed to regulate the trade and flow in these substances.
And at that point in time, and what’s really important and why the history really matters, is that at that point in history, you know, the turn of the 20th century, these substances were freely available and they were legally traded commodities. Because cannabis, cocaine and opiates, in particular morphine, heroin. These were essentially the key driving force of the Western colonial presence in many countries in the global south, the British in India, the Dutch in Southeast Asia, the Spanish, you know, the whole system of these legal commodities were traded globally. They have been traded for millennia. If you want to go back into far more ancient history and look at, you know, the early trading routes of the Silk Road, the trading patterns of indigenous communities in the Andes. So this is a long historical trade in substances that were legal and global.
What begins to change at the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century is a backlash against public access to these substances, against things like the smoking of opium. And there was a real focus on these new migrant communities that were coming into contexts and countries such as the United States, also to an extent into the UK, Canada, these kinds of places. These were overwhelmingly migrants from China, undergoing major collapse and decline of the imperial empire at that point in time. And what becomes increasingly seen in the language of drugs is this association with cocaine, cannabis and the opiates, with foreign communities, outsiders, with migrants, with threats to white Protestant communities and cultures.
So we begin to see the beginnings of a temperance movement, of a very powerful evangelical prohibition movement, which initially starts by a focus on alcohol in the case of the US, but then once achieving alcohol prohibition in America, moving on then to the prohibition of other substances that alter the mind, alter the mood, these kind of devil substances, which are seen to be an impediment to Christianity and to piety. So the historical context, it’s long, it’s challenging, but it’s profoundly interesting because you see the contours of drug policy and drug history shaped by the main ideas and ideologies of the day. Whether it’s eugenics, racism and social Darwinism through to these great power ideals, the American empire, the notion of carrying, as it was called at the time by Kipling, the white man’s burden and civilising missions around the world. These are all essential to the story of drug policy and none more so than the rise of the United States itself.
GM: So beyond the potential for some drugs to do harm to their users, there is a whole kind of web of cultural assumptions and fears and anxieties and desire for control that’s kind of woven into it. Am I right in saying that? And that then sort of fuels the way that later decades would draft law and seek to enact law in their local jurisdictions. So yes, there are potential harms, but also there’s all sorts of cultural baggage that’s sort of directing what substances are controlled in what ways and the ways in which particular criminalisation policies are put into practice.
JB: There are all kinds of social harms, but we need to be clear that the kinds of social harms with which we associate drugs today are primarily linked to the fact that they’re illegal. They’re unregulated. So we don’t know what’s in them. We don’t know the content. We don’t know where they come from or how dangerous they are. So those are contemporary harms which are specifically linked to a strategy of criminalisation.
When we’re talking about the harms of these substances, you know, back in the 1880s and the 1890s, the concerning contexts such as the United States, as I said before, this backlash against migration, this very, very strong evangelical mission, the harms of drugs at that point in time were seen to be aspects such as the potential degradation of the white race, emerging understandings of problems of addiction and dependence. And in the US, this was quite a significant problem. We’re talking about a period when women were basically prescribed opiates and morphine for what was called problems of the mind and the mood, which was things like wanting to vote, wanting autonomy, wanting independence, problems of menopause, these kinds of things. And so issues of, you know, kind of dependence in that period were really dealt with quite sympathetically.
But then the challenge becomes when these substances are less associated with the white consuming population and become linked to migrants, racial minority communities, the African-American community. So this kind of racialisation of drugs, which is led by the United States, this whole story of drug policy and the whole shape and identity of drug policy as prohibition fundamentally flows from the history, the tensions of the United States of America at the turn of the 20th century.
So when we’re talking about these harms, as I said, it’s more about trying to understand very, very basic early medicine and the idea that, you know, addiction and dependence could be treated, but that it had to be treated through things like abstinence and through prayer and through preventing access to these drugs. That becomes the beginning of the anti-opium movement and that becomes the beginning of the US acting on the world stage to try and compel global agreement restricting access to these substances.
GM: Now, I am grateful to you for introducing me to the concept of path dependency. I hadn’t encountered this sociological concept until I worked with you on your book. And having encountered it, it seems very relevant and a very useful kind of concept. So for people like me who haven’t encountered it before, can you say why it’s useful to understand what path dependency is in the context of evolving drug policy?
JB: What I use path dependence for is to try and demonstrate how societies, political communities reach a certain critical point of policy change or policy shift where we can either go forward with a particular path and policy direction or we can take another policy approach and these moments in path dependence are referred to as kind of critical junctures where all options are on the table.
The path dependency theory then goes on to argue, political science, social science, that the path that is chosen at a particular moment in history then kind of consolidates, embeds and becomes the standard approach. It becomes the status quo and then interests, strategies and group lobbies then cohere around that particular policy path and it becomes very very difficult to reverse that policy path once you’ve built up bureaucracies, institutions and constituencies of interests in that specific direction.
So the way I try and use the idea of path dependence is by saying at the beginning of the post-war period that was a critical juncture. The international community could have taken an approach to the regulation of substances that very much focus on legal regulation or they could have gone with prohibition and criminalisation. There are other options within that very, very binary position but the point is at the critical juncture of the end of the Second World War, the path that was chosen was criminalisation.
And in much the same way, I try and take that argument back in history to the 1880s, the early 1900s, and demonstrate how it was these early ideas that emanated largely in the US around identity, purity, evangelical ideas of anti-drug perspectives, how they come to be infused in the campaign initially for regulation, but then really, really influential in the post-war period and the development of a path of criminalisation. And the challenge, as the book details, is trying to reverse a policy strategy once it has become so embedded and institutionalised over essentially a century.
GM: And is it surprising that that became so embedded as a consensus, or given the power of the US in the post-war world, is it sort of almost an inevitability written into it?
JB: Well, obviously, as I discuss in the book, the power of the United States in the period after the Second World War was tremendously important in terms of the diffusion of drug criminalisation strategies. The US was remarkably positioned after the Second World War to really drive forward its vision of how the world should respond to this problem of drugs, drugs referred to by the US as narcotics, as an evil for mankind. So the US was able to build up these like core alliances.
It was the end of the Second World War. So, you know, obviously many countries were coming into the new United Nations framework. So the US was able to exercise its leverage in terms of access to money, to loans, to post-war reconstruction in order to influence countries to adopt this criminalisation consensus, which the US was developing in the 1961 UN Single Convention. So the US could leverage its post-war power, but at the same time, there were many countries around the world where it really suited their political purposes to have criminalisation strategies.
And I’m thinking here about many of the countries that were decolonising, which were experiencing tremendous political upheaval because there was post-war rebellions and protests and counter-revolutionary movements in the 1960s and 70s. So, you know, the criminalisation strategy worked well for the US in leveraging its position and influence on the international stage, but it also worked well for other governments, which were dealing with new problems of youth rebellion and secessionist and independence demands. So, yes, the US is influential, but this strategy works well for other countries as well.
GM: And then is there a step change in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, or is it just that’s when my own memory sort of kicks in? Or did that really sort of advance that enforcement criminalisation model to a new level? Or was it the public-facing part of it that just became especially prominent under Reagan and Nancy Reagan?
JB: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And if anybody kind of tells you that what Donald Trump is doing in terms of drug policy is radical or new, it absolutely isn’t. What we saw during the Ronald Reagan presidency, which I do strongly believe the current Trump presidency is essentially recycling, is that there was a real stepping up of two aspects of the US drug wars. Firstly, against domestic drug use.
So we saw under Ronald Reagan, incredibly punitive anti-drugs legislation introduced, for example, creating mandatory minimum sentences. So, you know, the circumstances or the context of your offence couldn’t be taken into account. There was a minimum sentence. You know, three strikes legislation where we could see people incarcerated for minor, low-level, non-violent possession offences because they had a previous record. But what was interesting also was US efforts then to start really limiting personal freedoms and liberties and, for example, restricting access to children, taking away access to student grants for people with drug-related convictions, and really stepping up and militarising domestic policing of drugs.
But what the Reagan period, Reagan presidency is also really, really important for is externalising and militarising the US drug war by taking the US drug war to the source countries. So what this essentially means is a stepping up of US military and defence assistance and training to the cocaine cultivating countries of Latin America. So in particular, focusing on places like Peru, Bolivia and subsequently Colombia. And the strategy, which is promoted by the Reagan presidency, which hugely increases the money which is going into, for example, the US Department of Defense, is to intercept and eradicate these substances at source. So going into Latin American countries and forcefully and violently eradicating, for example, coca and cannabis cultivation.
And the real problem with this militarisation and really the legacy that we have today is kind of blowback from that period of the Ronald Reagan presidency. And I’ll illustrate that very quickly in two respects. Firstly, Ronald Reagan emphasised, the Reagan presidency emphasised what was called kingpin strategies, which was essentially decapitating the leadership of drug cartels and mafia groups, very much like the war on terror and the focus on Osama bin Laden. So this kind of focus on kingpins.
And during this period of the Reagan presidency, we saw a focus on the Colombian cartels, the Mexican cartels trying to eradicate and eliminate these organisations. We saw, for example, subsequently the takedown of Pablo Escobar. And with his removal, that was then going to enable us a world free of cocaine. But the reality with the US kingpin strategies, the takedown of big cartel leaders, is that they didn’t eliminate the drug trade or these trafficking organisations. They simply fragmented and fractured them.
So rather than having these kind of hierarchical, disciplined, loyal cartel groups, what we had instead, I would argue, as a direct result of the kingpin strategy, is these incredibly violent, disloyal, disorganised cartelitos, mini cartels. And it’s these organisations which are now kind of central to current drug trafficking and distribution chains and the violence that we see associated with the trade. So the Reagan presidency took out kingpins and I think we’re dealing with that legacy today.
A second aspect of the Reagan presidency was the focus on eradication at source and what that simply did, as discussed in the book, is displace the issue of drug cultivation. So rather than simply having cocaine, sorry, coca cultivation in somewhere like Bolivia, eradication exercises then displaced that to other country contexts such as Colombia. So the result of the Reagan presidency, I would say, in drug control today is this deeply fragmented, highly diverse and geographically diffused drug trade. And that’s a direct response to the blowback of these counterproductive initiatives of the 80s.
GM: Yeah, because I mean, what we haven’t said explicitly, although I think anyone listening to you talking about the 80s would begin to form the view that criminalisation just hasn’t worked. So it’s not just that it’s harsh and it’s militarised and it’s punitive and all those things. It actually, despite the vast amount of resource and money poured into it, it hasn’t been a successful policy. I mean, that’s the sort of fundamental thing that cannot be got around. When you read the book, it’s clear that it simply hasn’t been a successful policy.
JB: Well, it’s a tremendous success in terms of bringing countries together, whatever their religion, whatever their level of development, whatever their political regime, criminalisation has been great in diplomatic terms for reasons other than addressing the drug problem or the management of potentially dangerous substances. So it’s helped to leverage US influence globally and it’s helped to build a very conservative social consensus.
And the whole challenge with criminalisation is that it reinforces other trends in societies, whether this is patriarchy, whether this is racism, whether this is other forms of social exclusion. Criminalisation is a fantastic tool for focusing policing and drilling down, incarcerating those groups in society with which you have challenges of social integration or social acceptability when you’re trying to build these kind of new conservative norms. So drug policy and criminalisation has been massively successful for reasons other than controlling substances themselves.
And if we look at the reports of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the UNODC, which collates all of the data on drugs from countries globally, we can see the evidence that criminalisation hasn’t worked in the very basic statistics that more people are using and consuming a greater diversity of cheaper and purer drugs today than they have ever done in any point under the control regime. Criminalisation has failed to stop drug use. It’s failed to deter drug crop cultivation and drug production. And it has failed to create a situation where drugs are not accessible. It’s completely the opposite. They’re cheaper, they’re purer, and they’re more widely available across the world than they have ever been.
GM: Can you situate for us efforts to decriminalise some drugs in some countries? Because someone listening to this might be thinking, well, but haven’t there been lots of initiatives to partially decriminalise drugs? And so just can you just within the sort of bigger global picture, can you just sort of situate that for us in terms of its impact, its results, its importance, whether it might suggest a different pathway, whether we are kind of going in a more enlightened direction or whether those are, you know, those are a sort of sideshow.
JB: Yeah, well, there’s no bigger confusion at the moment in discussion of drug policy than trying to assist people in understanding what’s legal and what’s not legal. We have since, you know, 2012, 2014 with the first cannabis legalisation. When I say legalisation, we mean the introduction of regulated and adult cannabis markets. The first country off the line there was Uruguay, subsequently followed by Canada.
So when we’re talking about these reform initiatives, essentially what we’re talking about is changes to national laws which allow either police to use diversion or other administrative penalties for low level, nonviolent drug related offences of essentially possession. So if you are carrying an amount of drugs below a certain threshold, then you will not be arrested, prosecuted and probably incarcerated. Police can use other mechanisms.
Now, second strategy is to essentially legalise and to create, you know, a regulated commodity market for these substances, which is what’s happened in places like Canada, Uruguay and also Malta, Luxembourg with their legalisation initiatives. Now, these are all important. The intention of these initiatives is to firstly address the illicit market, to take the revenues that are made from illicit cannabis sales out of the hands of criminals, to regulate, to introduce these organised markets that the state oversees and where taxes and contributions are paid.
So essentially, the aim here is to reduce the stigma which is associated with drug use and try and leverage reform of cannabis laws in order to influence, for example, access to treatment for other drug use amongst drug users. So it’s intended to have a rational, health-focused approach in cannabis policy. This includes through, for example, access to medical cannabis, which we do have in the UK, but this has not really been effectively rolled out. And unfortunately, the police have not been trained in new medical cannabis laws.
So these reform initiatives are attempting to address some of the worst excesses and negative impacts of criminalisation, but with a particular focus on cannabis. So trying to reduce the numbers of people going to prison, reduce the damage that long criminal sentences or arrest can cause. The problem that I have with these current reforms is that they are overwhelmingly focused on cannabis and they are overwhelmingly focused on consumers.
Now, the challenge here is that that still perpetuates these major inequalities. The producers of cannabis in the global south, they don’t have access to these new legal markets in places like Canada. Canada is domestically producing its cannabis. So this long history of countries like Morocco, India, Afghanistan, and their comparative advantage in cannabis cultivation has just been completely swept to the side. So there’s development implications for these kinds of reforms.
The other challenge with these reforms is, for example, with cannabis legalisation and regulation. What’s going to be the strength of the cannabis, the THC content? What’s going to be the price? What’s going to be the age at which you can access these drugs? So the regulations as well also create new challenges. Illicit markets continue to operate because if your legal market allows cannabis with low levels of THC, there’s still going to be illicit demand for cannabis with high levels. And that’s the illicit market.
So you’ve still got this challenge of trying to balance between the illicit and the legal market. And you still then have this division between drugs such as cannabis, very commonly used amongst white middle class people. But then other substances such as heroin, methamphetamine, where the kind of sympathy and the interest in addressing regulatory opportunities is completely overlooked. And the penalties still remain very harsh.
So we have a dualism in drug policy focused on cannabis, reforms that are quite moderate and which are undertaken from within the UN criminalisation model. So countries like Canada, Uruguay and Malta, these US states that have decriminalised or liberalised, Australian provinces which have followed the same strategy, they’re doing these reforms from within criminalisation. So for me, it is essentially a tinkering at the edges, which threatens to be rolled back by prevailing conservative opinion, which is in turn supported by the prevailing drug conventions.
GM: Yeah, because there’s a lot of, you mentioned Trump earlier, there’s a lot of political rhetorical capital to be made by people like Trump, people like Duterte. They instrumentalise the fact that people consume drugs in order to bring in policies, harsh authoritarian policies that play well to their base.
JB: Well, the whole idea of this kind of penal populism, of these tremendously long prison sentences, of depriving people of access to their children, education, employment, even taking away, in the case of the Philippines and a number of countries in Southeast Asia, people’s lives for drug use or low-level drug trafficking offences. But the challenge is that this response doesn’t address the structural drivers of either drug use or people’s engagement in the drug trade.
So criminalisation and incarceration doesn’t address problems of addiction and dependence. It doesn’t address problems of poverty and social marginalisation, which underpins a lot of problematic behaviours. And incarceration doesn’t address the vulnerabilities, which comes with what we call the necessity entrepreneurs, sex workers, people who are working at the margins of the economy in order to sustain drug use behaviours.
So the problem is that incarceration doesn’t work as a deterrent. It creates cycles of intergenerational poverty. And without access to treatment services or training, it just creates problems of recidivism. So we have this real problem at the moment of people going to prison at record numbers. I detail these figures in the book. Increasingly a large number of women who are being incarcerated for drug-related offences. But it’s having no overall impact on the numbers of people who are consuming or of the dangers that can be caused by unregulated drug use.
GM: And it absorbs, as we’ve said, so much in terms of resource and attention in the media that the other drivers really get, you know, they don’t get addressed. Because this is the so much rhetorical force is put behind this criminalisation policy that it would almost seem to be a distraction or a contradiction if a government announced it was going to put a lot more resource into treatment, rehabilitation, understanding, education, research. So it’s kind of not only is it not producing the desired result, it’s preventing other approaches being tried in a more thoroughgoing way.
JB: Absolutely and for research to be carried out on the medical, you know, advantages of some of these substances and the medical and clinical opportunities. So yes, 100%, you know, we’re not really putting ourselves in a position where the global debate enables us to look at health-led approaches.
And a big challenge here is that international drug control and the performance of countries, as judged by the UNODC, is based on a series of metrics that countries have to report to. So these metrics include things like numbers of arrests, numbers of drug seizures. These are essentially law enforcement focused metrics and that’s what countries are reporting to and police are performing to.
If we move to a system of health focused metrics that puts us on a completely different footing. It empowers and dedicates resources to different actors, health focused actors. We’re measuring improvements in health, we’re measuring reductions in problems of dependence for example and the challenge is that we simply can’t get this reorientation of budgets because strategy is so set on a law enforcement footing. So much of the resources go into incarceration and criminalisation and criminal justice processes.
So we’re trapped in a real cycle, which is very, very difficult to break out of, even with these kind of like small reforms of cannabis, which are tinkering at the edges, because we remain locked very much in a model of the global north essentially militarizing and attempting to eradicate source in global south countries. But the reality today, George, and what the book really ends on in terms of concerns is that these old paradigms are no longer relevant.
The drug market is no longer, you know, the kind of as we said before, the Pablo Escobars with disciplined organizations. It’s not producer countries in the global south trafficking to consumers in the global north. Globally, drugs are now a consumer habit. Synthetic substances have completely displaced these traditional raw plants, the cocaines, the opiums, the cannabis. Synthetics are the new real dynamic challenge.
And drugs are able to penetrate areas of the globe where they previously never reached. And insulation that was provided by things like right-wing military dictatorships, Soviet communism, that protection has completely gone. So it’s a global trend and it’s a global shift in funding towards things like incarceration, as we discussed, and towards the policing and securitisation of the drug problem.
The reality, as the statistics and the data demonstrate to us, is whatever the language, whatever the robustness of the penal populism and the government emphasis on eradicating drugs, the reality is markets have continued to boom. They boomed. You know, we had opium cultivation quadrupling during the period of US and US occupation in Afghanistan. Quadrupling. That’s an astonishing result.
And then during this period of lockdown where we had, you know, these tremendous and unprecedented limitations on our movement, on borders, on transportation, when we were at our most surveilled and most policed, illicit drug markets thrived. So we cannot police ourselves out of this problem and the language of policing ourselves out of this problem has got us nowhere in the last 60 years.
GM: Julia, this is not me inviting you to end on a sort of falsely rosy optimistic note but I just wanted to conclude, are there things that give you a little bit of hope or things that you think if this could be pursued with a bit more vigour or a bit more resourced, then perhaps we would learn things that might get us to, or get us started on the path to a better place? Accepting all you’ve said about path dependency, how hard it is, how sort of monolithically ensconced it is, are there nonetheless things that sort of keep you going and stop you feeling complete despair?
JB: No. I think we live at a very, very perilous moment. It’s very difficult to look around the kind of global geopolitical scene and be optimistic. In particular, because of, for example, cuts to disease prevention, to operations such as USAID, whatever your politics or views on that direction within the Trump administration. That has had quite a devastating impact on many of my colleagues who are working in drug policy reform, HIV and AIDS prevention across the world. So it’s a difficult moment.
We were very optimistic in the 2010s that the UN could be reformed. You know, people like Barack Obama, you know, kind of emphasising more flexible and liberal drug policy paths that created a lot of optimism, you know, in the advocacy world and in scholarship that we might be moving towards a more flexible and a more liberal UN regime where countries would have more space to develop hopefully more health focused approaches. But the reality is the United Nations system, I would argue, has snapped back. We have seen a very conservative reaction and response.
And while there might be opportunities for some countries to push forward, we’re seeing, you know, interesting, important reforms in country contexts, such as Colombia, such as Canada. The counterweight and the counterbalance to that is the persistence of these incredibly authoritarian and repressive states, which use populist discourse and penal populist measures to maintain repressive and highly authoritarian regimes.
So it’s a difficult moment. We face quite extraordinary and unprecedented challenges from these rapidly changing drug markets. And the challenge going forward is how we educate our young people and our professional services to prepare for the challenges ahead and to also address many of the implementation gaps that we have in existing drug policies.
GM: Julia Buxton, thank you very much for talking to us today on the podcast.
JB: Thank you for having me.