UNGASS 2016 and beyond: Seizing the opportunity to improve drug policy
Past Event
Vanda Felbab-Brown explains UNGASS 2016
Vanda Felbab-Brown explains UNGASS 2016
UNGASS 2016 and beyond: Seizing the opportunity to improve drug policy
As the world prepares for the April 2016 Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS 2016), there is an emerging “dissensus” among states on how best to address the costs, harms, and risks associated with illicit drugs. An increasing number of countries in the Americas and Europe are now opposed to punitive counterdrug policies and are experimenting with reform, even as major powers such as Russia and China continue to defend a prohibitionist interpretation of the international counternarcotics regime. And the United States, once the global regime’s chief enforcer, is now itself a hotbed of experimentation as nearly half of its states have implemented medicinal or legalized access to cannabis.
On April 7, the Brookings Foreign Policy and Governance Studies programs hosted a conversation on what we can learn from drug policy reforms now being conducted in the United States and across the globe and what flexibility will exist in the global counternarcotics regime for implementing improved drug policies after UNGASS 2016.
For more on this topic, check out:
Brookings Project on Improving Global Drug Policy
The new Brookings Essay “The medical marijuana mess: a prescription for fixing a broken policy” by John Hudak
Agenda
UNGASS 2016 and beyond: Seizing the opportunity to improve drug policy
On April 7, the Brookings Foreign Policy and Governance Studies programs hosted a conversation on what we can learn from drug policy reforms now being conducted in the United States and across the globe and what flexibility will exist in the global counternarcotics regime for implementing improved drug policies after UNGASS 2016.
Harold Trinkunas
Former Brookings Expert
Interim Co-Director and Senior Research Scholar, Center for International Security and Cooperation - Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
Vanda Felbab-Brown
Director - Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors
Co-Director - Africa Security Initiative
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
John Hudak
Deputy Director - Center for Effective Public Management
Senior Fellow - Governance Studies
John Walsh
Director for Drug Policy and the Andes - Washington Office on Latin America
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The goal of UNGASS 2016 should be to inject realism into the global discussion of drug policy objectives, instead of once again setting an unattainable goal of a drug-free world.
