A message to the President

Barak Obama will come into office on 20th January with a hefty in-tray, not least a global financial crisis and a war on two fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is unlikely that international drug policy will figure highly in the pile, but here is a reason why it should.

Less than two months after President Obama takes up his post, the UN will be reviewing its ten year drug strategy. The political rhetoric of 1998 was a 'drug-free world we can do it', specifically a commitment to rid the world of coca, opium and cannabis. Not surprisingly, it has proved an 'aspirational' target; the $6n US investment to clamp down on coca production in Colombia, for example, has seen a 15% rise in cultivation according to a report requested by the incoming Vice-President Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Since around 2004, the language of international drug policy has been shifting; phrases such as 'proportionality' in relation to drug offences and 'the unintended consequences of international drug policy' have been creeping into UN official documents and public statements. The European Union has been increasing its contribution (and therefore its influence) to the UN drug control budget while at the same time offering a less fundamentalist approach than traditionally associated with the United States who have dominated the discourse since the first international drug conference a hundred years ago next year.

It is that history that President Obama should revisit because as many historians have pointed out, racism lay at the root of much of what became universally accepted laws against the use of drugs. Simply put, drug laws were crafted at least in part as a way of controlling minority communities. The laws against opium use targeted the Chinese community brought over to build the US rail network. Southern sheriffs demanded larger calibre guns to mow down 'cocaine-crazed' black men, the same cocaine given to slaves working the plantations and the docks to make them toil longer and eat less. And (again) 'drug crazed' Mexican migrants were cited as a primary reason for controlling cannabis use in the USA when most of the population had hardly heard of it, much less use it.

This is not a plea for wholesale and instant drug law reform; as unrealistic an aspiration as 'a drug free world' etc etc. But at least, the genesis of drug laws in America, a narrative of demonisation and stigma exported round the world, should give the President some food for thought. With the UN poised to review its drug policy, much of it actually at odds with the UN's own policy on human rights, he could use his considerable influence both as US President and as a declared champion of inclusion to shift the balance of drug policy away from a century of law enforcement and towards public health and human rights.