Benito Díaz
The Harm Reduction International organisation launched a series of conferences that started on May the 26th. Under the title “Dismantling racism and colonialism through drug policy reform”, the speakers discussed the drug policies carried out in their countries, old colonial enclaves such as Kenya, South Africa and India, amongst others.
Harm Reduction International (HRI) is an ONG dedicated to reducing and mitigating the negative impact of psychoactive substance and drug policies over health, civil rights, and society in general. According to their website, they promote the rights of consumers and their communities, through investigation and promotion of safe drug policies that contribute to create healthier and more trusting communities. It is relevant that HRI has Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN.
This first session, offered via videoconference, reunited a group of experts to explain how the war against drugs is implemented in their countries of origin. Presented by Colleen Daniels, Deputy Director of the Public Health area of HRI, the act gave us the chance to listen to doctor Kojo Koram, law professor in Birkbeck, University of London; Aggrey Aluso, head of the Health and Rights Program of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa (OSIEA); Tripti Tandon, lawyer and Deputy Director with the Lawyers Collective, one of the oldest Human Rights Organisations in India; Imani Robinson, communication strategist at Release, a British centre of expertise on drugs and drugs law, who is a specialist in narcotics legislation; and Shaun Shelley, who manages Policy, Advocacy and Human Rights for TB HIV Care, an association in South Africa.
Lectures
The event, available through a zoom link, started off with the exposition by the conductor, who stressed that drug policies persecute people based on racist bias, imposed by unfair judiciary systems. “Global drug policy has been used to justify excessive vigilance, criminalisation, persecution and even murder of black, brown and indigenous people. Tolerance of the racist police behaviour is not acceptable anymore”, Daniels denounced. She added that, often, drug policies are on the hands of legislators who sympathise with white supremacist groups.
Dr Koram, on the other hand, analysed the reasons why we have come to see drugs as “bad” and the racist punitive policies as the only approach possible. “Africa has been the aim of all the possible colonisation attempts, through colonialist and imperialist tools. For instance, displacing local crops and populations for the benefit of big landowners dedicated to tobacco, sugar or coffee, but also opium, coca or cannabis. In the beginning, the intention of the British empire was to take the opium monopoly off the hands of China and control the international markets, like all European forces with colonialist projects”, Koram explained. “These imperial ambitions include influencing independent states, trying to control and eliminate local traditions and traditional medicine to impose the needs of the colony, an opium consumer. In this new age of civilisation, the exclusion of drugs was proposed, protecting the alcohol and tobacco industries. This vision they have of civilisation ignores completely how things were before drug prohibition, ignores the cultural heritage of peoples who have been using psychoactives since ancient times”, declared the academic, arguing that all of this translates to the soar of internal violence and the suffering of thousands of people because of restrictive international laws. Koram used Colombia and the glyphosate as an example of this.
Aggrey Aluso, from Kenya, signaled the familiarity of Koram’s description of the Establishment. “With colonisation the narrative changed, and drug consumption was stigmatised and punished by law”, Aluso said. “It is a matter of Human Rights, of the dignity of the human society. The Establishment had a big influence over Africa, and also did Christian morals, which promoted a point of view opposed to consumption of any type of substance, at the expense of traditional medicine and the doctors who performed it, along with other cultural and religious uses”, said Aluso, who also criticised the post-colonialism experience in that country, sentencing the population to obscurity as a consequence of the lack of information and the rejection of traditions. “Something that has been prohibited and punished in Africa is now medicine to these colonialist states”, Aluso concluded, pointing at the prohibition as an “historical mistake”.
Shaun Shelley used his speaking time to explain the South African case. “Here you can witness the perpetuation of the police apartheid and the continuation of Apartheid’s human rights abuse under the disguise of war against drugs. A critical examination can show us the degree of imposition that these drug policies reached”, claimed Shelley, reminding the audience of the persecution under the Sjamboks, the whips used by police in those times. Through a presentation, Shelley described the relation between repression and violence, united through an unfair drug policy, since “politicians bought drugs with the violence they themselves generated”. He added that the justification of unjustifiable acts was attempted using the war on drugs, not only in South Africa but in the whole world. To finish, he claimed that current policies perpetuate the colonialist thinking in that country: “drug control is a dystopian colonialist dream”.
Lawyer Tripti Tandon described the legal system facing drugs as “tools of the powers to directly oppose any person, focused on the poor and the marginalised”. She referred the case of permissiveness of alcohol in India, in contrast to other nations of the vicinity. “In Islamic and Asian nearby regions, the antidrug laws include alcohol. We find an interesting dichotomy, since drugs are bad and should be banned, but not alcohol”, the lawyer exposed. “The problem are not these laws, introduced by colonialism and neocolonialism. The problem comes from those who want to criminalise and make punishments even harder, harming freedom, as is the case of homosexual people’s rights, for instance. Poverty is not an attenuating excuse in rulings. A hard persecution is carried out and hard penalties are imposed on those who break the law”, Tandon commented. She concluded by saying that, many times, the origin of the problems does not lie in the colonialist laws, but rather in the firm belief in the prohibitionist discourse of the current population.
The concluding lecturer was Imani Robinson, who asserted that the UK would have never existed as we know it without the colonies support. “They did not only trade with resources, also the ideology was exported”, said Robinson in regards to the war on drugs. The punishment measures were the only way to confront people, under the logic of this conflict. “Communities who grow or use the substances are persecuted, but they are not helped rebuild themselves. I think we must be clearer this time since the danger of traditional reforms is we have tried to improve the technologies of power and limit the violence they produce, instead of trying to stop that violence in the first place”, Robinson observed.
Solutions
Before the Q & A, the conductor asked each participant to contribute some way out or agreement to this confrontation that has lasted for decades. Admitting that the current system does not work, quantifying and repairing the damages caused by prohibition, questioning those drug policies incompatible with respecting the human rights, more resources, more information, less punishment against recreational drug users, reviewing our relation with punishment and carcerality, confronting the internalised narratives of colonialism, rejecting demonisation of drugs and pathologisation of their consumption, changing the frame for the conversation that now lies on the populist discourse and politicising discussions in each continent were some of the proposals served by the conference.