The global drug war now stands in the way
not just of effective AIDS treatment
but it is in direct conflict with human rights.
When you are pursuing a policy
that treats somebody as a criminal
simply because of what they put in their body
that seems to me almost by definition a violation of human rights.
When you are depriving millions of people of their freedom
by incarcerating them that seems to me a violation of human rights.
When you are depriving indigenous people of the right to grow
agricultural products that they have growing and using
in traditional forms for hundreds if not thousands of years
that seems like a violation human rights.
We are seen as non-citizens
and because we are non-citizens
we can be scapgoated and it allows governments to say you are a criminal,
you are bad, you are evil and therefore we can lock you up,
we can take away your rights, we can torture you
to try to make you no longer a drug user and we can execute you if you sell drugs.
Drug user human rights are being violated, are violated daily
through mass incarceration,
through detention camps,
through denial of services,
through denial of HIV prevention materials
that means that people are left stuck with a virus
that will possibly kill them or may kill them.
About 80% of terminal cancer patients
develop saviour pain
and that pain can only be treated effectively with opioid medications
such as morphine or methadone,
many country's patients with cancer do not have access to the medications
because there are drug regulations
that make it very difficult for doctors to prescribe
so the end result is that there are millions of people worldwide
who die in horrible pain,
because they can not get access to a medication
that costs just a few pennies.
Police abuse and taking money from drug users, raping drug users,
torturing drug users, it has nothing to do with the conventions.
The conventions don't say, you have to do it, but the conventions
provide a certain framework or a certain discourse on drug issue
that puts it in the legal... you know... domain.
There are a lot of people inducted in compulsory drug treatment centres
and those drug treatment centres are gross exaggeration
of what they really are (I mean)
because often there are no medically assisted treatment.
What kind of human rights abuses happen in these camps?
First of all forced labour is a human right abuse in and on itself.
These people are not prisoners, they have never seen a lawyer or a judge,
they are put into torture rooms, hung by one or both arms,
made to kneel on glass or sharp objects,
forced to squat in water in rooms too small to stand up in,
starved and beaten.
In China we interviewed a former guard at one of the drug detention centres
and what we have found, you know we asked him,
why the centre was testing routinely everyone for HIV
and not giving them their results.
And the guard frankly said,
well we test people to find out, to find out which of the women are HIV positive
to know who we need to use a condom with.
And then you know, we have sex with them
and then we give them heroin to comfort them afterwards.
And we asked this guard also about physical abuse
about beatings of the drug users
in these centres and he said well yeah that happens
and we asked then how often does it happen?
And he said well about 10%. And we said well, how do you calculate 10%?
and he said well anything higher 10% would be a human rights problem.
Estimates are that around quarter of the world's prison population
is in prison for non-violent drug related offences,
the war on drugs has resulted in perhaps as much as 2 million people
being in prison who needn't be there.
Well there are people that all of us know
if you have lived in New York for any amount of time
that have gotten these
ridiculously long sentences for very small
possession charges or paraphenalia charges,
because as the law stood
judge did not have discretion and you could get a maximum sentence of 25 years.
Imagine a young person named Obama,
had he been caught with possession of marijuana
which he has openly said he smoked,
he would've had a felony conviction, he never could've run for public office.
He could not even work as a genetor (?!?) in a school
because of a felony conviction, he could not vote,
this is a huge issue and there is an ethical obligation for people like that,
for physicians, for scientist to start speaking out about it.
In many places prisons are overcrowded
because of the numbers of people who are imprisoned for drug related offences,
you see a whole range of human right violation piled up on top of that
because of overcrowded conditions,
because of extended waiting time in pretrial detention,
because of unfair trails.
There is at least 16 countries in Asia
that still implemented death penalties for drug related crimes,
Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, China.
China for example televises executions
of drug users and drug dealers on the 24th of June,
the international day against illicit drug trafficking.
In 2003 the Thai government implemented a very bloody war on drugs
where over 2200 drug users and petty dealers were arrested,
brought to police stations, released and shortly after released
someone was waiting in an alley
and they were essentially shot in the back of the head execution style
and then the government claimed the success
of getting rid of drugs in the country.
More and more the international human rights community
gaining consciousness of the ways in which the drug war
and drug criminalisation are in fact violations of traditional human rights.
Once you start locking people up or treating people
like drugs as something to be controlled or contained
rather then as someone to be valued,
then the costs are terrible,
you know whether you are talking about 2800 gunned down in Thailand
or you talking about 400000 people put in labour camps
and forced treatment centres in Asia
or you talking about hundreds of thousands of people jailed in Russia
for the residue and a used syringe,
and then put in places where
they have no choice but to share a syringe
or they have no access to condoms or anything that can protect them
the human rights costs are almost unmeasurable.