This builds on what is apparently a growing concern at the UNODC. Last year, the agency released its first specific report on “environmental crime,” and we are seeing increasingly high-profile figures speaking out about it.

However, experts are warning that this latest UNODC report, along with much of the discourse around these issues, fundamentally misses the point in very dangerous ways.

“For many people, when they think of drugs and the environment, the picture is of rainforests being cleared to grow coca plants, and illicit labs dumping chemicals into rivers—but it’s actually much more complicated,” Kendra McSweeney told Filter.

A geography professor at Ohio State University, McSweeney is part of the International Coalition for Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Crime, a global network of academics, experts and activists seeking to highlight the links between prohibition, the illicit drug trade and the climate crisis.

“In fact, illicit cocaine production takes up a tiny amount of land, as compared to, say, agriculture or illegal mining,” she explained. “The problem of what we call ‘narco-deforestation’ actually has more to do with how the money from drugs is laundered and re-invested in other forms of crime.”

The extent to which manufacturing drugs is harmful to the environment is almost entirely due to the fact they are illegal.

This isn’t about poor farmers clearing small plots of land to grow coca, in other words, but “narco-capitalists” laundering billions of dollars by building huge cattle ranches, particularly, in drug transit countries like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

“These giant ranches are often situated near border zones and serve a dual function,” McSweeney said. “They are used to traffic product, but are also the perfect way to launder the vast amounts of money generated by trafficking.”

It should be obvious that the extent to which manufacturing drugs is harmful to the environment is almost entirely due to the fact they are illegal.

Farmers move into the rainforest in order to avoid law enforcement; labs dump chemicals because in the absence of regulation, there are no facilities to legally and safely dispose of them. This is entirely a function of the drug war. Legal pharmaceuticals are produced relatively cleanly across the world, and there is no scientific reason that couldn’t be true of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and the rest.

And when we speak about “environmental crime” in general, warn McSweeney and her colleagues, the complex links to global drug policy are routinely ignored.

“Increasingly, the focus is on issues like illegal mining in the Amazon,” she observed. “But what people often don’t understand is that it’s the drug trade which provides the capital for these activities.”

Huge profits—which would not exist, unchecked and at this scale, without the drug war—are financing the surge in illegal industries which is destroying vast swathes of the Amazon.

This warning of damaging illegal diversification is echoed by Daniela Dias of SOS Amazonia, an environmental NGO based in Brazil. Speaking from deep in the Amazon itself, Dias painted a picture of groups like PCC and the Red Command “moving from cities into the Amazon in order to control the drug trade.”

“But once they are here,” she told Filter, “they reinvest in illegal mining and timber, and smuggling wildlife.”

The huge profits from the drug trade, in other words—which would not exist, unchecked and at this scale, without the drug war—are financing the surge in illegal industries which is destroying vast swathes of the Amazon.

It’s a connection that the UNODC, a major supporter of global prohibition, conspicuously fails to draw.

So what can be done, from a drug policy perspective, to preserve the rainforests and other ecosystems which are so essential to mitigating the climate crisis?

Dias is emphatic that the answer is not more of the same. “The last thing we need is more militarization of this region. Sending the army to fight cartels in the Amazon would only drive more violence—and those commanders would soon become corrupt and part of the trade itself.”

This corruption, the entanglement of law enforcement and politicians with the drug trade they ostensibly seek to eradicate, is perhaps the greatest unspoken truth here.

“At COP 26 [in 2021], world leaders made a so-called ‘landmark pledge’ to end deforestation,” Neil Woods, chair of Law Enforcement Action Partnership UK, told Filter. “But what none seemed willing to discuss is how this could ever be enforced when in many of the key regions—from the Amazon to West Africa—governments very literally don’t wield executive control, because these areas are controlled by drug traffickers, who can intimidate or buy off soldiers and politicians at will.”

“It’s difficult to get environmental activists to think about how drug policy critically undermines their work.”

To many, the idea that legalizing drugs has an urgent role to play in fighting the climate crisis may take time to comprehend. It’s time we don’t have. When even the UNODC’s own report admits that decades of militarized prohibition has failed, it as disingenuous as it is dangerous to ignore the resulting destruction of the world’s most crucial, biodiverse habitats.

Meanwhile, even within the environmental movement, experts say, there has been a failure to fully comprehend this threat, sometimes with a reluctance to even talk about it.

“It’s difficult to get environmental activists to think about how drug policy critically undermines their work,” Dias said. “Some activists are literally scared of the cartels and corrupt police—but others don’t want to be associated with ‘druggies,’ and think this could dilute their message.”

As irreversible climate catastrophe becomes an ever more present danger, this head-in-the-sand squeamishness in the environmental movement has become untenable. The connection between saving the rainforest and ending the drug war’s damaging incentives, corruption and cruelty must urgently be made explicit.

Our need to confront both the destruction of our planet and one of its biggest drivers of human rights abuses demands that two movements form a powerful alliance.

Photograph by Wilson Dias/Agência Brasil via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 3.0 Brazil

The post If You Care About the Climate Crisis, Fight to Legalize Drugs appeared first on Filter.

Andy is a long-term heroin user who sleeps on the streets of Falkirk, Scotland. COVID-19 and the lockdown have obviously hit many different groups in different ways, but few as severely as street-homeless people who use drugs. There are the obvious health impacts that make them more vulnerable to any disease, the impossibility of self-isolating when you don’t have a home, and the constant need to source the drugs you rely on—or face the nightmare of going into withdrawal in the midst of a pandemic. But in fact, the problems are even more complex.

“I make my money by begging,” explained Andy. “But now there’s almost no people on the street, I’m hardly getting anything. People are afraid to even come near you to drop a coin in your cup. I know people who get by on shoplifting—but now most of the shops are shut, what are they going to do? If it goes on like this, they’re going to turn to robbing people or breaking into places. If this goes on a lot longer, crime is going to go through the roof.”

On March 27 much-publicized guidance came down from the UK government that local councils should house all rough sleepers. But implementation seems to have been patchy at best.

“There was an initial wave of people getting into hotels that really showed what can be done with a centralized approach,” said Melissa Kerschen of the UK homelessness charity Glass Door. “The worry now is that councils might be slipping back into their old habits of trying to shift homeless people on, amidst a lack of clarity from central government. There are particular worries around homeless migrants with no recourse to public funds, and about a new wave of homelessness, as people are unable to pay rent because of the lockdown and lose their places”.

For homeless people who use drugs, the problems are particularly severe. “People being moved into hotels is good,” observed Niamh Eastwood of the drugs and legal representation charity Release, “but we need to make sure there are the wrap-around services that people need. In particular we need to ensure access to harm reduction services and opioid substitution therapies. It’s been a massive task for the drug treatment sector—and there’s been some genuinely heroic efforts there.”

“I’ve been trying to get a prescription—of course I have—but they just won’t take me on.”

Just how massive a challenge the UK treatment sector has faced is made clear by Bec Davison of the service provider Change, Grow, Live. “We moved about 30,000 users from one-day [opioid substitution therapy] scripts to two-week scripts in four days,” she said. “It was extremely difficult, but necessary so that people weren’t forced to break social distancing at the pharmacy every day. But the real challenge is that we’re now seeing a surge of demand as people who were managing their own drug use are unable to beg or shoplift—so they are now coming into treatment for the first time.”

This is perhaps the main struggle that Andy has faced on the streets of Falkirk. “I’ve been trying to get a prescription—of course I have—but they just won’t take me on,” he said.

This experience is backed up by Peter Krykant, a Scottish drug-user activist. “There’s work being done with people already in treatment, but two thirds of problematic drug users in Scotland aren’t in treatment—and the bar is too high for them to even get assessed,” he said. “Most people can’t even getting assessed unless they’re deemed high risk, like they’re injecting in their neck or groin. So, many people are going back to injecting from smoking heroin, because they’re not getting help, the deals are so small, and the drugs are so badly cut.”

This increase in risky behaviors is an alarming aspect of the coronavirus-drug use nexus. “I’m trying to buy methadone from people with prescriptions,” explained Andy, “but if I can’t get it, then I’ll go back on the street Valium. There’s been more of that about now because it’s easier to get through. I try and stay off it usually, but if I need to now, I’ll have to take that. There’s also been more fentanyl around now to make the shit heroin deals stronger.”

“Street Valium,” usually referring to etizolam, is a benzodiazepine which has been involved in deaths of Scotland’s drug users for decades. In the case of fentanyl, Europe has thus far been largely spared the nightmarish situation of North America, where tens of thousands have been killed annually by the adulteration of heroin and other drug supplies. But the terrifying aspect of the coronavirus disruption of illicit drug markets here is that once these products arrive, they will not simply disappear again when the lockdown ends.

“In three months coronavirus has done what 50-odd years of drug policing failed to do—marginally interrupt the supply.”

Neil Woods of Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP*) UK, who spent 14 years as an undercover cop, posing as a homeless drug user, is all too aware of this. “In three months coronavirus has done what 50-odd years of drug policing failed to do—marginally interrupt the supply of certain commodities,” he said. “However, just as with drug policy more generally, users just move on to even more dangerous drugs.”

There are some causes for hope. “This is a massive challenge, but also a massive opportunity to do some joined-up thinking,” said Hannah Slater of the homelessness charity Crisis. “If we’re suddenly thinking in a new way about prescriptions, maybe we can think about other ‘impossible’ things like drug consumption rooms, heroin prescribing, etc. It’s now harder for things to go back to so-called normal.”

Yet those future prospects are cold comfort to Andy, who is still sleeping on the streets. “People on the street are scared and angry,” he said. “We’re scared of getting sick, and we’re scared of not being able to make any money to score. If this continues for [another] six weeks, it’ll be like hell—it’ll be a nightmare. We need help. We’re human beings. Don’t judge us—help us. That’s all we’re asking.”

*LEAP is the fiscal sponsor of The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The post “We’re Human Beings. Help Us.”—Drugs and Homelessness in the Pandemic appeared first on Filter.