International Perspectives at United Nations Drugs Session
The Cannabis Elephant in the Room
I have spent the week in New York City covering a few different events centered around the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (It’s an UNGASS!) on Drugs & Crime.
The three-day session was called for by Latin and South American countries (or as they’re called here, member states) that are forced by international drug treaties to persecute and prosecute their people for growing cannabis. They’re not too happy about the death and destruction that prohibition is wreaking in their countries while people doing the same thing in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Washington, DC, are completely legal. And with the South American country of Uruguay becoming the first nation to legalize marijuana, the international cannabis prohibition is untenable.
But if you thought a three-day summit meant countries coming together to discuss these matters and work on a resolution, then you don’t know how the UN works. At the beginning of the summit, the member states agreed to what’s called an “outcome document” on how the international community will handle the three “drug conventions” – treaties from 1961, 1972, and 1988 – that was decided behind closed doors in Vienna, Austria, before this UNGASS even began.
That’s right – the “outcome” was predetermined and the three-day session functioned as an opportunity for most countries to complain about it.
Since the document had to reach international consensus, it doesn’t change much in the way the international community reads those three treaties. The United States, Uruguay, and soon, Canada and maybe Mexico are still or will be in violation by legalizing cannabis. Meanwhile, in places like Singapore, Indonesia, and China, you can still be executed for drug crimes.
So all that countries as diverse as The Netherlands and Spain (cannabis tolerant) to Saudi Arabia and Qatar (public floggings for possession) could agree on is to change focus from the 1998 drug session’s “A drug-free world; we can do it!” (seriously, they believe this) to this year’s “a world free from drug abuse.”
But as much as cannabis legalization drove the convening of this session, it was barely mentioned on the floor of the UN. Aside from the Jamaican delegation proudly arguing for flexibility in the treaties to recognize cultural and religious use of ganja, there wasn’t much mention of herb at all.
“The death penalty is a primitive measure in a modern society”
One subject mentioned repeatedly by member states was the need to end the application of the death penalty worldwide for drug crimes. Nation after nation rose to condemn the outcome document for not even addressing this violation of human rights and international law. “The death penalty is a primitive measure in a modern society,” said one delegate.
But even ending the death penalty was impossible for the United Nations. Indonesia and China repeatedly warned the other countries that their countries have the sovereign right to administer justice as they see fit. They threatened severe political ramifications if the UN anti-drug summit was seen as a tool to enforce an anti-death penalty requirement on their countries.
Another subject brought up repeatedly was the problem of NPS – new psychotropic substances, or what we usually call “designer drugs”. These range from the bath salts and Spice/K2 that you find in some head shops to the alphabet soup of psychoactive chemicals with names like 25I-NBOMe, β-Methoxy-2C-B, and 3-MeO-PCE.
Many of the nations are upset with the scheduling process involved in making these chemicals illegal. It seems that once they make something like 25I-NBOMe illegal, the chemists just tweak the formula a little and now it’s something like 25iP-NBOMe. That tweak remains legal until they ban it, and then the chemists make another tweak.
It’s an ever-escalating arms race, if you will, between chemists and lawmakers. But the chemists are winning, according to the countries that say the scheduling process and lack of international co-operation and communication means only ten or so new molecules get prohibited annually versus the hundreds or more that are invented. These countries call for a fast-track process and more international co-operation to identify and make illegal these drugs.
Note that harm to user and society doesn’t enter the conversation here. If it’s a brand new drug, how do we even know it’s harmful enough to ban? No, the default in this discussion is that if it makes you high, it is harmful per se and must be banned.
What these countries really need to be successful in the fight against NPS, if I may offer a modest proposal, is to declare that all ingestible things are banned until they’ve been added to the legal substances list. That way, all new drugs are automatically banned. Of course, so would a new recipe for tuna casserole, but at least psychonauts wouldn’t be tripping, because banning all drugs has worked so well in the past.
21st Century Reefer Madness is Alive and Well
It was in the side sessions organized by civil society (what the UN calls non-profit organizations working for public benefit) that cannabis got its due. While I attended the main UN sessions, other activist friends tell me of side sessions packed to standing room only.
In one session, I’m told, prohibitionist David Evans from the Drug-Free America Foundation, got booed out of the room and seriously chastised by the Jamaican delegation. I regret not making it to that one with my recorder.
I did sit in on the final side event of Day Three. It was entitled “Alternative legal regimes for cannabis” and was presented by Kevin Sabet, the CEO of the anti-legalization group Project SAM. If you have the stomach for it, listen to the “Big Marijuana” scare tactics the prohibitionists are pushing to the international community about what’s happening in Denver and Washington, DC.
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Cannabis Isn’t the Only Indigenous Use Plant
Outside the United Nations there were numerous protests and demonstrations. Native activists from the Andean Region of South America came dressed in traditional garb, burning ceremonial herbs and clutching coca leaves as they called for recognition of the rights of indigenous people to use the plants their people have used for thousands of years.
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Many gatherings happened at the Dag Hammerskjold Plaza, just a couple of blocks from the UN. Students for Sensible Drug Policy gathered there along with the Caravan for Peace and Justice. Displays were set up highlighting the terrible human toll of our drug war in Mexico, Latin America, and South America.
Dana Beal and Aron Kay headed up a rally there for 4:20pm on 4/20. Adam Eidinger from DCMJ (the group that recently paraded a 51-foot mock joint in front of the White House) brought the mock jail cell for the protest. There was an open mic where activists called for legalization of iboga, the root that produces ibogaine, a substance shown to help people addicted to heroin.
I recorded much of the celebration / protest and got to speak with wonderful activists like Mikki Norris from California, Doug Fine from New Mexico, Jodi James from Florida, and more.
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“We’re not going to be the sugar slaves again!”
My favorite moments at the UN, however, happened in the basement cafeteria. It was there I had to set up my laptop to record my podcast each day. There I would meet various delegates and engage in great conversations. I talked to a Moroccan about kif and how it’s harvested. I talked to a Dutchman about the political factors affecting the cannabis trade in coffee shops. I met a Brit who’s a friend of the Brit I let couch-surf at my place in Oregon as he toured the United States.
While I was working yesterday, a delegation of three Jamaicans was sitting next to me. We struck up a conversation, with me telling them about my first trip to Negril last year for the Cannabis Cup. That led to this fantastic interview where I asked them about the UNGASS and the short-shrift given to traditional ganja use and what they thought about “Marley Natural” and the capitalization of cannabis.
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“We’re the Dagga Couple!”
No sooner had I finished my interview with the Jamaicans than did a white couple approach me and tap me on the shoulder. “You’re ‘Radical’ Russ, aren’t you?” the man asked with a British accent. I introduced myself and met the man, Jules, and his wife, Myrtle. “We’re the Dagga Couple!” he told me.
Dagga is the South African term for marijuana. These two are well-known South African activists who got busted for possession of dagga and are fighting it all the way to the supreme constitutional court as a violation of their civil rights under that constitution.
Jules told me that it was rare for people like him to try to fight these charges. Like the US, there is a racial disparity for incarceration of black people over white people for cannabis crimes. But oddly, the racial disparity in arrests works the other way around.
Jules explained that bribes are one of the ways people get out of cannabis crimes in South Africa, and if you’re white and well-off like him, the police know they can go after you and have an easy day making an easy bribe. But if they go after the poor blacks with no resources, it becomes a work day of hauling someone off to a jail cell. Thus, whites get prosecuted more often for dagga, but since so many get out of the charges, there still ends up being more blacks in jail.
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Don’t Fear the Blue Helmets
All-in-all it was an enlightening experience at the United Nations. Not for what transpired in the building, but for the amazing people I met inside and outside it. The session itself was a waste of time, as nothing done here these three days is going to impede the progress of nationwide and global cannabis re-legalization.
But the United Nations did convince me of one thing: my redneck cousins in Idaho terrified that the UN Blue Helmets are coming to install the “One World Order” have nothing to fear. This organization couldn’t all even agree that the sky is blue if you polled them.
