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"Narcotics, Control of"
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Decolonizing drug policy
This paper reviews evidence of how drug control has been used to uphold colonial power structures in select countries. It demonstrates the racist and xenophobic impact of drug control policy and proposes a path to move beyond oppressive systems and structures. The ‘colonization of drug control’ refers to the use of drug control by states in Europe and America to advance and sustain the systematic exploitation of people, land and resources and the racialized hierarchies, which were established under colonial control and continue to dominate today. Globally, Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples are disproportionately targeted for drug law enforcement and face discrimination across the criminal system. These communities face higher arrest, prosecution and incarceration rates for drug offenses than other communities, such as majority populations, despite similar rates of drug use and selling among (and between) different races. Current drug policies have contributed to an increase in drug-related deaths, overdoses and sustained transnational criminal enterprises at the expense of the lives of people who use drugs, their families and greater society. This review provides further evidence of the need to reform the current system. It outlines a three-pillared approach to rebuilding drug policy in a way that supports health, dignity and human rights, consisting of: (1) the decriminalization of drugs and their use; (2) an end to the mass incarceration of people who use drugs; (3) the redirection of funding away from ineffective and punitive drug control and toward health and social programs.
Journal Article
Neo-colonialism and financing for the war on drugs: a review of current policy and recommendations for countries in the global north
Globally, punitive drug control upholds racist and colonial structures. Marginalised and racialised communities, including Indigenous peoples, are disproportionately targeted and affected by punitive drug policy in law enforcement, judicial and carceral systems, and policy implementation. Power imbalances also exist at the international level, with high income countries exerting influence over drug policy in low- and middle-income countries. This paper examines that influence through financial and material aid, technical assistance, capacity building, education and awareness campaigns and the interaction between the vested interests of the private sector and the State, specifically via the Prison Industrial Complex and land and resource grabbing in conflict and post-conflict contexts. The global war on drugs entrenches power imbalances and reproduces mechanisms of racial control and subordination. To begin to decolonise drug policy, the financial and material basis of these mechanisms must be illuminated and dismantled and this paper offers recommendations on how to move forward (Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, 1923; Carrier et al., 2020).
Journal Article
Asset forfeiture and inequality
Under the law of asset forfeiture, a person loses ownership of money and property that were used in or constitute the proceeds of a crime. Asset forfeiture is a significant financial consequence for people who have (in some cases, tenuous) contact with the criminal system. Asset forfeiture also is a crucial way that federal, state, and local governments generate revenue from criminal investigation and prosecution. In the federal system, the government's acquisition of forfeited assets (such as cash, electronics, cars, and homes) brings in around $2 billion in annual revenue. Every year, the federal government transfers hundreds of millions of these dollars to state and local law enforcement agencies, making asset forfeiture a lucrative federal-state enterprise. This article makes three contributions. First, it provides the first scholarly examination of how the federal government has engaged in asset forfeiture by using comprehensive data of the Department of Justice's roughly 1.2 million federal asset forfeitures between 1998 and 2019 matched to county-level population data over that period. Second, this empirical analysis reveals inequality in the government's use of asset forfeiture. Specifically, the government more actively engages in revenue-generating forfeitures in districts with larger Black and Hispanic populations. This disparity is partly driven by the government's extensive use of forfeiture in the districts that border Mexico - a phenomenon the literature has not yet recognized. The same disparity is not present in forfeitures that do not generate revenue. Forfeiture thus resembles a practice by which governments derive revenue from fines and fees in ways that unfairly burdens poor communities of color. Finally, I argue that by lacking the empirical scrutiny this article provides, much scholarly and public debate about asset forfeiture misunderstands both the harms and benefits of asset forfeiture by overlooking asset forfeiture's potential to make communities safer while important individual and distributive harms. This article concludes by considering avenues for reform.
Journal Article
A NEW PENAL POPULISM? RODRIGO DUTERTE, PUBLIC OPINION, AND THE WAR ON DRUGS IN THE PHILIPPINES
Drawing on evidence from the Philippines, this paper investigates the so-called penal populism thesis. Penal populism refers to an understanding of justice in which criminal and anti-social activity should be harshly punished. The paper tests whether support for harsh penal policies, including the use of extrajudicial killings, is associated with underlying populist attitudes and preferences for charismatic leadership. Since coming to power in 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte has waged a violent and highly popular campaign against drug-related criminality. Based on survey modules fielded in 2016 and 2017, the paper demonstrates a positive relationship between populist attitudes and support for the campaign against illegal drugs in general and the extra-judicial killing of suspected drug users and dealers in particular. It also demonstrates a relationship between belief in the charisma of Duterte and support for the campaign against illegal drugs. The implications of the theory and results for the fields of populism and penal populism research are discussed.
Journal Article
US drug policy does not align with experts’ rankings of drug harms: a multi-criteria decision analysis
Background
United States drug policy is primarily based on the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and largely contradicts scientific evidence about how to mitigate drugs’ harms. Expert consensus on drug harms could inform policy that improves the health of people who use drugs while reducing negative societal impacts of drug use. Therefore, this study adapted and extended the relevant 2010 United Kingdom multi-criteria decision analysis, rating drug harms by criteria comprising health and social impacts to people who use drugs and their families, communities, and society.
Methods
Seventeen experts on drug use in the US, including three with lived experience of drug use and recovery, assessed 19 drugs across 18 criteria. Drugs were scored from 0 to 100 points on each criterion. Then, criteria were weighted to represent the experts’ view of their relative importance, and each drug was assigned an overall harm score. We also created a numerical rating to represent Controlled Substances Act-defined harm.
Results
Fentanyl (scoring 90), methamphetamine (84), crack (83), and heroin (82) were the most harmful drugs. Cannabis (32) ranked in the middle, and mushrooms (3) were the least harmful. Drug-specific mortality and economic cost were the largest overall contributors to harm, while environmental damage was the smallest. The correlation between Controlled Substances Act-defined harm and experts’ harm ratings was − 0.26.
Conclusions
These findings add to the growing international literature highlighting how drug policy contradicts expert assessments of drug harms across nations. To reduce these harms, public health strategies informed by evidence and expert input should be prioritized over punitive approaches.
Journal Article
Buprenorphine Dispensing after Elimination of the Waiver Requirement
In the year after the elimination of a waiver requirement to prescribe buprenorphine, the number of prescribers increased above the anticipated value, but the number of persons who received the drug did not.
Journal Article
The drug war must end: The right to life, liberty and security of the person during the COVID-19 pandemic for people who use drugs
Since the start of the opioid epidemic in 2016, the Downtown Eastside community of Vancouver, Canada, has lost many pioneering leaders, activists and visionaries to the war on drugs. The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society (WAHRS), and the British Columbia Association People on Opiate Maintenance (BCAPOM) are truly concerned about the increasing overdose deaths that have continued since 2016 and have been exacerbated by the novel coronavirus (SARS-COVID-19) despite many unique and timely harm reduction announcements by the British Columbia (B.C.) government. Some of these unique interventions in B.C., although in many cases only mere announcements with limited scope, are based on the philosophy of safe supply to illegal street drugs. Despite all the efforts during the pandemic, overdose deaths have spiked by over 100% compared to the previous year. Therefore, we urge the Canadian federal government, specifically the Honorable Patty Hajdu, the federal Minister of Health, to decriminalize simple possession immediately by granting exemption under
the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act
. The Canadian federal government has a moral obligation under Sect. 7 of
the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
to protect the basic human rights of marginalized Canadians.
Journal Article
Filming Biblical Interpretations from the Ground: Anti-Empire Matthean Interpretations in Huwag Kang Papatay (2017) and the Philippine “Drug War”
Ditsi Carolino’s “Huwag Kang Papatay” (Thou Shall Not Kill, 2017) is an unconventional Jesus film. As a documentary, it presents the problems and the responses by members of the Roman Catholic Church in Metro Manila to the so-called “War on Drugs” (commonly known as Tokhang) of the Duterte government that resulted in thousands of extrajudicial killing (EJK) victims. From a biblical lens, this paper analyzes examples of grassroots recontextualizing interpretations of select Matthean passages like (1) Mt 6:9−13, the Lord’s Prayer, in the context of praying for an extrajudicial killing victim; (2) Mt 2:1−18, a street theater adaptation showing the massacre of the innocents, representing the beginning of the EJKs; and (3) Mt 27:27−50, a street theater adaptation of Jesus’ passion recontextualized in the plight of the victimized drug personalities. These episodes are examined using insights from biblical narrative criticism, performance criticism, empire studies, ritual studies and a liberationist approaches. The paper concludes that biblical interpretations from the ground in this documentary film demonstrate Matthew’s anti-empire message by recontextualizing Jesus’s story in the context of extrajudicial killings to advocate for political dialogue and action-response against human rights violations and development issues caused by the EJKs.
Journal Article
GREENING THE GREEN RUSH
The legalization of cannabis in the United States has focused on creating regulated, for-profit commercial markets modeled on alcohol to replace the prohibition regime that held sway for most of the 20th Century. Like the fabled gold rush of the 19th Century, this new market opportunity has been a magnet for entrepreneurs and prospectors of all kinds seeking to make their fortune. And just like its predecessor, this new rush—the green rush—has left many people behind. Those left behind in the green rush have come disproportionately from the communities most likely to have been harmed by cannabis prohibition and the broader War on Drugs. Poor people and people of color, in particular, who continue to make up a disproportionate number of those subject to marijuana enforcement, have been both formally and informally excluded from the opportunities offered by legal cannabis.
To remedy this situation, there has been a push to make social equity a central feature of cannabis legalization and market regulation. Proponents of social equity hold that those disproportionately harmed by cannabis prohibition should disproportionately benefit from legalization and that the current approach has been engineered to leave such people behind. In this Article we provide a brief overview of social equity and highlight its current emphasis on expanding industry access, criminal record expungement, and tax revenue allocation. We then highlight an issue that is currently not part of the social equity conversation but should be: cannabis legalization’s environmental impact. As we show, there is growing evidence that the commercialization of cannabis comes with a significant environmental cost. This cost is once again born disproportionately by poor communities and communities of color. It overlaps with longer histories of environmental injustice, including environmental racism and the inequities inherent to racial capitalism. As we show, integrating an environmental justice framework into the social equity paradigm holds the promise of addressing cannabis’ environmental impact in a way that remains mindful of equity concerns. It likewise has the capacity to enhance current social equity efforts by providing new pathways and mechanisms to remediate the harms of the War on Drugs.
Journal Article