Top United Nations Health Official Calls On Countries To Replace War On Drugs With ‘Alternative Regulatory Approaches’
A United Nations expert on the right to health is urging member nations to end the war on drugs and instead enact harm-reduction policies such as decriminalization, supervised consumption sites, drug checking and widespread availability of overdose reversal drugs like naloxone—while also moving toward “alternative regulatory approaches” for currently controlled substances.
“Criminalization is but a single—and extreme—option within a regulatory system,” says a new report from Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to health. It instead calls for regulatory frameworks around substances to be “more or less restrictive depending on scientific evidence and considering power asymmetries” and notes that “regulation models may consider whether permitting and regulating access would reduce overall harms.”
Among the UN report’s recommendations is that countries “decriminalize the use, possession, purchase and cultivation of drugs for personal use and move toward alternative regulatory approaches that put the protection of people’s health and other human rights front and centre.”
The 19-page report from Mofokeng, who is also a medical doctor and professor at Georgetown University’s Law School, urges that leaders “move from a reliance on criminal law and instead take a human rights-based, evidence-based and compassionate approach to harm reduction in relation to drug use and drug use disorders.”
