A decade ago, the United Nations General Assembly held a Special Session on drugs (UNGASS) that was hailed in some quarters as a turning point for international drug policy. Community organizations and people who use drugs were part of the process, and the outcome document finally brought human rights and public health narratives to the conversation. Yet that same document still clung to the objective of a “society free from drug abuse.”
On February 3, the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), a global network of almost 200 NGOs, published a report—The UNGASS Decade in Review: Gaps, Achievements and Paths for Reform—documenting how any promise of UNGASS remains largely unfulfilled. The global response to drugs remains rooted in repression and prohibition. And where real reform has been accomplished and advances observed, that’s been “despite the drug control system, not because of it,” writes former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in the foreword to the report.
Despite the health and human rights framing of UNGASS, global drug control has inflicted catastrophic harms on individuals and communities in the decade since. During that period, the report notes, more than 2.6 million people have lost their lives to causes related to unregulated drugs, and mass incarceration has increased. Marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted and targeted. Unrealistic UNGASS aspirations to reduce drug use have been met by an estimated 28-percent increase in the worldwide number of people using unregulated drugs.
IDPC’s report calls for a drastic overhaul of global drug policies, which, it says, must be genuinely “oriented towards human rights, health and development.” Yet the community groups capable of leading such change “continue to be sidelined, underfunded, and increasingly exposed to threats and attacks.”
The report is published at a moment when the world and the UN system itself are at a critical juncture.
As IDPC Executive Director Ann Fordham put it in a press release, “punitive approaches are costing lives, undermining human rights and wasting public resources, while silencing the very communities that hold the solutions … [G]overnments must move beyond rhetoric and commit to real structural reform.”
The report is published at a moment when the world and the UN system itself are at a critical juncture. In 2025, an independent panel was tasked by the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) to review, by 2027, the international drug control machinery, providing a historic opportunity to rethink the global drug war.
At the same time, drug-war narratives have been building momentum in different parts of the world. The United States—with its strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific and recent abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro under the guise of combating “narco-terrorism”—is the most visible example. But in many places, the rise of extremism and shrinking civil-society spaces threaten any scarce gains, compounding the vulnerabilities of people who use drugs.
The report provides detailed evidence of the devastating consequences of repressive drug policies in 10 areas of focus. Among them are human security; development; climate and environment; and civil society engagement, including the rights of Indigenous peoples.
The most damning part of the report focuses on massive human rights violations in the name of drug control.
Drawing on existing evidence, the report also gives examples of how law enforcement strategies aimed at disrupting the illicit market lead to more violent competition among drug-trafficking organizations. The failure of these strategies in turn leads to further repression and militarization. By rejecting evidence-based reforms, the system effectively perpetuates itself and strengthens existing power structures.
The most damning part of the report focuses on massive human rights violations in the name of drug control: from killing campaigns led by former President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, to militarization of drug enforcement in Ecuador, to mass incarceration in El Salvador, to the preventable deaths of millions of people as a result of the toxic drug supply created by toxic drug policies in North America.
The report further denounces the problematic role of the world’s “drug-control bureaucracy”—including the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the CND Secretariat—in sidelining or ignoring human rights and health. It meanwhile attributes any progress made in recent normative guidance on human rights in drug policy to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and other UN special mandate holders.
Unsurprisingly, the role of the US is evident throughout the report, where it is referenced more than 50 times. The country’s influence is most clearly exercised through dollars, and recent US decisions to suspend funding through mechanisms such as USAID, PEPFAR and the Global Fund have had disastrous consequences for worldwide harm reduction services, which have long been underfunded, and the people who need them.
Without far-reaching changes to the UN system, it seems likely that the current CND review process will see a repeat of the failures of the 2026 UNGASS.
These funding choices are accompanied by an increasingly militarized international posture. Framed as necessary to stem the flow of drugs into the US, such actions revive drug-war norms of force and exception.
US actions epitomize a rapidly changing world where the influence and role of the UN are increasingly in doubt. In this light, the IDPC report calls for “urgent modernization” of UN drug control treaties, “in order to respond to new realities and remain fit for purpose.” While regular drug-policy discussion at the UN is “essential,” it continues, “the agenda and working methods of the CND must change to enable meaningful progress.”
Without far-reaching changes to the UN system, it seems likely that the current CND review process will see a repeat of the failures of the 2026 UNGASS—merely repackaging reform narratives while allowing criminalization, exclusion and repression to persist.
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