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This chapter provides a critical exploration of the European Union’s impact on the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) proceedings and Outcome document. It demonstrates that the ability to produce a European ‘common position’ ahead of the UNGASS debates represents a significant step forward in the ability to ‘speak with one voice’ in the global illicit drug policy arena, and has played an important role in ensuring key issues such as human rights and public health remain on the agenda. In highlights, however, a European failure to engage with issues such as the continuing suitability of the international drug conventions to preside over the current climate of drug policy innovation and experimentation, and the unintended consequences of a ‘war on drugs’ approach. Ultimately, therefore, it argues that these failures will hamper the development of a more progressive and effective global drug policy.

The Swiss drug policy once was very progressive in the 1990s when the harm related to drug use was most visible to the public. Failure of repression opened the room for more innovative harm reduction approaches. In 2008, the four-pillar model including the legal basis for substitution and heroin-assisted treatment of opioid use disorders as well as for other harm reduction facilities was approved by the population that had learned about the success of these measures. Less violence, better health outcomes among people who use drugs and less stigma supported the change of attitudes in the population towards a public health-based approach when dealing with drug use. Switzerland first received heavy criticism for the autonomous policy change at the international level while it is nowadays often cited as best practice example for dealing with people with an opioid use disorder. Otherwise, the country has usually been quiet in drug policy discussions at the UN level. Nevertheless, Switzerland’s reappointment to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the central drug policy-making body within the United Nations for a period of four years starting in 2018 is promising, given their unblemished recommendation for human rights-based drug policies including the abolition of the death penalty for drug offences, among other things. Alongside cannabis policy changes at the international level, Switzerland witnessed an unexpected development in cannabis availability and sales. However, the country is still rather conservative with regard to current cannabis policies, although cannabis with less than 1% of THC can be sold legally and the possession of up to 10 g will be followed by a fine only, if at all. Switzerland is open to experiment with new regulations but only if the law allows for that. To conclude, the strong sense of connectedness with the international community may support Switzerland’s next steps towards public health and evidence-based harm reduction.

The intersection between drug control and the death penalty represents a key nexus for human rights and drug reform advocacy and constitutes one of the most visible examples of the link between abusive law enforcement and drug control in the current period. The issue has emerged as a flashpoint of international debates on drugs and is one that raises important questions and challenges for both ‘abolitionist’ countries that oppose the death penalty and ‘retentionist’ States that continue to execute people. The death penalty for drug offences cannot be dismissed as simply an internal matter for States. Not only do executions for drug offences violate significant international human rights legal protections, domestic capital punishment laws in many cases cannot be separated from the influence of the international drug control treaty regime. This chapter will explore the question of the death penalty for drug offences and the challenges it presents for the international drug control regime more broadly.¹

The landscape for international drug policy is shifting rapidly as the tensions between the objectives, assumptions and activities that are being introduced at local level are tearing apart the assumptions on which the system was founded. Countries are divided into camps that pursue different aims with drug policy. In addition to an established distinction between those that seek to reduce drug harms and those pursuing a vision of a drug-free world, some UN member states have established licit markets for products that the conventions hold are available for medical and scientific purposes. This incongruence is matched by states in the other camp who apply capital and corporal punishment ostensibly in pursuit of a public health objective. These differences over underlying values, but also in the use of evidence, and interpreting the purpose of the drug control system are no longer reconcilable. While there is pressure on maintaining the system, it no longer serves an organic function and continues mainly for the benefit of constituent members. With the dissolution of US leadership, drug policy is no longer operating within an effective international framework.

Many years ago, the amazing literary giant and social critic James Baldwin was never more profound when he noted that “Color is not a human or a personal reality in America, it is a political reality” (Baldwin, 1963, p. 139). If we ever had any doubts about the currency of Baldwin's commentary, we have only to remember the remarks by Senator Trent Lott (R-Mississippi) and his subsequent resignation as Senate Majority leader, in the U.S. Congress. Lott was under criticism for his remarks at a party celebrating the 100th birthday of Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina), who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform. At the birthday celebration, Lott said the nation would have been better off had Thurmond won that election. The damages in Senator Lott's comments are not simply that they are offensive as a characterization of our national past. The damage is that his words imply an intention or acceptance of racial segregation as the continuing reality of America's future. Lott's remarks are but reflective of the Southern Manifesto or the Nixonian strategy, often called the ‘bubba factor.’ The strategy was to reclaim the south by appealing to the fears of southern white men. This blatant Confederate viewpoint was furthered and joined by conservative scholars and activists who developed the counterattack programs to dismantle the civil rights agenda and social programs, aimed at equalizing educational opportunity. The code word was “reverse discrimination.”

This chapter introduces a simulation model to estimate the social costs of problem drug misusers in England and Wales, and how policies to increase the number of drug users in treatment may impact on both social costs and government expenditure. Consequences are divided into five domains – health, crime, social care, work, and driving. Social costs are estimated to be between £12 and £12.3 billion, and the total cost of government expenditure is around £3.5 billion. Increases in the numbers in treatment, are estimated to reduce social costs across a 5-year period by between £3.0 and £4.4 billion.