The Washington, D.C.-based Global Commission on Drug Policy recently released its 2016 annual report, “Advancing Drug Policy Reform: A new approach to drug decriminalization“, which details the destructive and harmful consequences of punitive drug policies and the need to reconsider reviewing current decriminalization models.

The report shows how implementing new models has helped to achieve more effective drug policies, with a greater emphasis on justice, dignity and human rights. Building on these successes, the report advocates ending all penalties – both civil and criminal – on persons who use drugs, and issues a call for market regulation as the next logical step.

“After years of denouncing the dramatic effects of prohibition and the criminalization of people that do no harm but use drugs on the society as a whole, it is time to highlight the benefits of well-designed and well-implemented people-centered drug polices,” said former Swiss President Ruth Dreifuss, Chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. “These innovative policies cannot exist as long as we do not discuss, honestly, the major policy error made in the past, which is the criminalization of personal consumption or possession of illicit psychoactive substances in national laws.”

César Gaviria, former President of Columbia and member of the Global Commission, said: “At the global, regional and local levels, drug policies are evolving. However, in order to build solid and effective policies to mitigate the harms of the last 60 years of bad policies, and to prepare for a better future where drugs are controlled more effectively, we need to implement the full and non-discretionary decriminalization of personal use and possession of drugs.”

The new report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy issues the following recommendations

1. Countries must abolish the death penalty for all drug-related offenses.
2. Countries must end all penalties—both criminal and civil—for drug possession for personal use, and the cultivation of drugs for personal consumption.
3. Countries must implement alternatives to punishment for all low-level, non-violent actors in the drug trade.
4. UN member states must remove the penalization of drug possession as a treaty obligation under the international drug control system.
5. Countries must explore regulatory models for all illicit drugs and acknowledge this to be the next logical step in drug policy reform following decriminalization.

“People who use drugs have paid a huge toll under the current drug control system; they have faced alone and without any legal protection the ravages of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, as well as many non-communicable diseases,” said Professor Michel Kazatchkine, former Executive Director of the Global Fund on AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. “Now we have the scientific and medical tools to provide all the services they need, but we largely lack the political leadership to implement an enabling legal environment. This starts by the complete decriminalization of drugs.”