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A woman lays out coca leaves to dry in San Francisco, a town in Peru’s Ayacucho region.
A woman lays out coca leaves to dry in San Francisco, a town in Peru’s Ayacucho region. The drugs trade has destroyed 10% of the country’s rainforest over the past century. Photograph: Mariana Bazo/Reuters
A woman lays out coca leaves to dry in San Francisco, a town in Peru’s Ayacucho region. The drugs trade has destroyed 10% of the country’s rainforest over the past century. Photograph: Mariana Bazo/Reuters

A war on drugs? We'd be better off paying for a war on hunger

This article is more than 8 years old
Natasha Horsfield

Deforestation, limiting access to pain relief, forcing farmers into poverty: we need to wake up to the fact that prohibiting drugs causes more harm than good

Global drug control policies, much like tax or climate change, impact heavily on many areas of development and inevitably on efforts to meet many of the sustainable development goals that were launched by the UN last year and came into force on 1 January.

Since the mid-20th century, global drug policy has been dominated by strict prohibition and the criminalisation of drug cultivation, production, trade, possession and use, with the intention of creating a drug-free world.

However, far from achieving its goals, drugs trade and use is growing, while the war on drugs undermines efforts to tackle poverty (pdf), improve access to health and protect the rights of some of the world’s most marginalised communities and fragile environments.

Involvement in drugs is frequently a sign of poverty rather than wealth. Small-scale farmers who grow drug crops such as opium poppy or coca leaf often do so because they lack other opportunities to earn a living and are unable to grow alternative crops – they either don’t own their land, or it is too small or unproductive.

Prohibition has serious consequences for these farmers. Forced crop eradication programmes by aerial or manual spraying with chemicals kill both the drug crops that families and communities rely on, plus any food crops growing alongside, while polluting land and water.

These farmers are pushed further into poverty, and become more dependent on growing drug crops to recover and survive. The SDGs aim to end poverty (SDG1) and hunger (SDG2). Yet it is unrealistic to expect to achieve these goals while the crops poor and marginalised people rely on are repeatedly destroyed as part of targeted policy.

The prohibition of drugs also contributes to deforestation, the destruction of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity – directly, as chemical spraying with pesticides indiscriminately kills crops, forests and rare species of plant, and indirectly, by pushing the growing and production of drugs (processes that are environmentally destructive themselves) along with the chemical eradication, into more remote areas, such as protected national parks.

In Peru for example, the illicit drugs trade was responsible for 10% of rainforest destruction over the past century (pdf). It seems unfeasible that we will achieve goal 15, to sustainably manage forests and halt biodiversity loss, while this extensive environmental damage created by drug policies continues.

Policies to control drug use harm the health of people who use drugs as well as those who do not. The criminalisation of drug users acts as a barrier to accessing medical care, since they fear arrest or legal punishment if they seek support. Drug users are at high risk of contracting tuberculosis and HIV. These problems are made worse by the lack of treatment for drug users who are HIV-positive – only 4% of people living with HIV among those who inject drugs (pdf) can access anti-retroviral treatment. Ending the Aids and TB epidemics by 2030, one of the SDG targets, seems impossible without addressing the way these policies limit access to healthcare for people who use drugs.

Prohibition restricts the availability of essential medicines for all, such as morphine. Although international regulation is designed to make sure these drugs are available for medical use, in reality they are heavily restricted in favour of fighting illegal markets. Half the world’s cancer patients and 90% of Aids patients (pdf) have access to only 6% of the world’s morphine for pain management: 5.5 billion people live with limited or no access to morphine and other essential medicines because of drug policies.

The “war on drugs” costs at least $100bn each year, just short of the $130bn spent on aid. The Overseas Development Institute estimates that achieving universal access to water and sanitation (SDG6) will cost an additional $26.8bn annually, and eliminating hunger by 2025 (SDG2) an additional $50.2bn (pdf). Reallocating funds from fighting drug use would go a long way towards achieving the SDGs, and eliminate funds for projects that are counter-productive to meeting the goals.

Many organisations and politicians are waking up to the fact that prohibition has caused far more harm than good. In April, the UN general assembly special session on the world drug problem, the highest-level meeting on the issue for 18 years, will assess the achievements and challenges of the war on drugs and discuss reform.

However, the development sector is late to the party when it comes to understanding and engaging with the multiple impacts of these policies on our work. Until a significant part of the sector starts to recognise and act on the links between drug policy and development, achieving the SDGs while “leaving no one behind” will remain out of reach.

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