The jungles of South-East Asia, forests of West Africa and the rainforests of central and South America are some of the planet’s largest carbon sinks and key to our climate future. This equatorial line also correlates to many of the key illegal production and trafficking routes in the global drug trade.
The prohibition of drugs is a failed policy paradigm tainted by a legacy of racism, corruption, police brutality and mass incarceration. The greatest burden of this generational failure has fallen on economically vulnerable and socially marginalised communities.
The original objective of the global drug control regime, to create a ‘drug free world’, has failed utterly. Illegal drug use and the markets that serve it have grown relentlessly for more than half a century.
But while Prohibition has failed to stop the ever expanding drug trade, its has succeeded in creating created a trillion dollar unregulated and untaxed economy controlled by organised crime groups, whose corrosive impacts are most acutely felt in regions key to our climate future.
This vast and destructive shadow economy created by prohibition has empowered and enriched organised crime groups across the globe. These OCGs have become enmeshed with both armed political groups, and state actors, facilitating corruption, destabilising state institutions and good governance that pose at threat to their business interests, and fueling staggering levels of violence and insecurity.
Why Drug Policy Matters for Climate Justice
The so-called ‘war on drugs’ has created a shadow economy so vast that it is now a threat, not only to health, development and human rights across the globe, but also - and perhaps most urgently - a serious and growing threat to many of the the most ecologically sensitive regions of the world, and any hope delivering Climate Justice.
The drug law reform movement, however, is gathering momentum and achieving successes around the world as policies pivot from the failures of punitive prohibition, to pragmatic approaches that center health, rights and sustainable development.
But how these reforms happen really matters. Not only to those who have been harmed by decades of failed drug policies but also for our collective ability to secure planetary health.
It is vital that key voices in the human rights, development and environmental justice sectors understand the consequences of this failed global policy paradigm for the achievement of their goals. They must meaningfully engage with, inform an guide the debate around alternative policy pathways they are to realise their potential.
Drug Policy Reform must become part of the wider Climate Justice agenda.
How does Drug Policy intersect with Climate and Environmental Justice?
Environmental Harm caused by Prohibition:
Illegal drug production in ecologically vulnerable regions
When plant based drugs are made illegal, it makes anyone involved in growing or trafficking them targets of punitive law enforcement. To evade capture, production and trafficking of drugs will often move to remote regions, including climate and biodiversity critical rainforests. This illegal economic activity is subject to zero regulation, resulting in deforestation to grow drug crops, and pollution of soil and waterways through dumping of chemicals used in drug production
Drugs enforcement amplifying environmental harms
Police and military enforcement against illegal drug production only serves to amplify its destructive impacts. Production is not reduced, but simply displaced, fueling further deforestation in ever more remote and sensitive regions, including national parks, protected indigenous lands, and conservation zones . Eradication methods - often using spraying with toxic chemical herbicides like glyphosate - are themselves a direct threat to biodiversity and human health.
Drug Profits invested into illegal extractive industries.
Vast organised crime group profits from the drugs trade linvested to finance other environmentally destructive illegal practices and industries such as logging, mining, plantation agriculture and cattle ranching. This fuels land speculation and threatens the land rights and conservation practices of peasants, indigenous peoples and environmental defenders
Prohibition as a barrier to Climate Justice:
Empowering organised crime groups, fueling corruption and violence. undermining state institutions and good governance:
Making a commodity illegal immediately increases profits for those who trade it. Drug prohibition has created an unregulated, untaxed and profit driven trade run by sophisticated International organised crime groups. These OCGs direct their growing wealth and power into undermining state and civic institutions that pose a threat to their profits - through corruption and violence. The harms of these corrosive dynamics are concentrated in fragile ecological regions that are key to our climate future, such as the rainforests of Central and South America and forests of West Africa.
This corruption and violence critically undermines the ability of state and civil society to govern and protect biodiversity, prepare for climate mitigation, adaptation and justice. Instead, corrupted institutions shape policy in the interests of organised crime groups, instead of protecting people and the environment, creating a climate policy deficit.
OUR MISSION
To include Drug Policy Reform into the Climate Justice Agenda
Our aim is to rethink drug policy and design new policies, institutions and laws that promote positive environmental change and sustainable development.
We need to design drug policies that leave no one behind, centering the people who have been most impacted by the harms of prohibition. New policies must protect fragile ecologies, biodiversity and forest communities through strong environmentally focused regulation.
We need to work together, internationally - as drug markets are global in their reach - and across different sectors of government and civil society to deliver a fair and equitable transition for all. This must include those working in new legal and regulated drug markets, as well as reparative justice for communities harmed by the war on drugs historically.
Responsibly regulated cultivation of plants such a cannabis, coca and opium poppy, can not only reduce environmental harms, but contribute to wider efforts for bioremediation, soil regeneration and carbon capture.
It is possible that the drugs market, legally regulated through a social justice and sustainable development lens, could support regenerative agriculture as well as deliver sustainable livelihoods and labour rights to all those working with in the trade. The transition to a post-prohibition future offers a unique opportunity to design a more just market architecture. To do things differently and better.
