I first smoked marijuana
when I was thirty years old. I found it to be more fun than alcohol. And more spiritual. It reminded me why I became a Quaker. It
helped me see the inner light in people.
The next
realization was that it was insane to make this simple plant illegal. In reading books on the subject I learned a
surprising fact: the legal prohibition of cannabis, coca and poppy plants is determined
at the highest level, not by God, since after all it is reported that Jesus used
a cannabis extract in healing, but by the UN’s Single
Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961.
In 1970, Richard Nixon signed the legislation implementing national
prohibition in compliance with the Convention: the Comprehensive Drug Abuse
Prevention and Control Act.
So just to make
that clear, US drug policy is determined by a United Nations Convention.
A potentially
momentous reconsideration of that Convention will take place next week in New
York City at the second United Nations General Assembly Special Session on
Drugs (UNGASS).
I attended the
first UNGASS in 1998 as part of the effort by the Women’s International League
for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) to change policy and especially to assert our
position that ending the war on drugs is a women’s issue. Why? There are many
things wrong with this war – its racism, its reliance on military solutions – but
one not frequently mentioned is its impact on women.
The War on Drugs condones
a form of macho violence. In earlier decades, that violence was played out
between cops and robbers, then cowboys and Indians, and now the DEA and narco
traffickers. The war allows men to find an excuse to be violent and to
militarize societies. Women lose in time of war, no matter what George Bush
says.
And what are the results
of criminalizing a natural human desire to change consciousness? A massive
international slush fund of illegal money funding brothels, gun running, bribes,
and casinos: all endeavors that are not much fun for women.
The legal
enforcement of prohibition leads to racism and punitive incarceration. On the
supply side, the chaos caused when Latin American governments, bullied by the
US, agree to spray farmers’ land to destroy coca crops – without asking their
permission of course – in the middle of a civil war, has been an ongoing
environmental tragedy and political disaster.
I accompanied a
WILPF delegation to Colombia in 1996 and documented our meetings with the
courageous but melancholy victims of the war: women heartbroken that their sons
were forced to join a paramilitary group to kill other women’s sons who had
joined the guerillas. A high point of our visit was a meeting with the
secretary of the Small Coca Farmers Cooperative. Olmyra Morales arrived at our
meeting at a human rights center in Bogota carrying a small suitcase. Like an
Avon door-to-door saleswoman, she set out the healing lotions and teas made
from the coca plant and described their beneficent uses.
Olmyra Morales, secretary to the Small Coca Farmers Cooperative, Colombia
A year later, WILPF
US, under the leadership of executive director Marilyn Clement, got a grant
from the Drug Policy Foundation for a US tour of women survivors of the War on
Drugs: North and South. Olmyra Morales came from Colombia, joining a coca
farmer from Bolivia and Peru and an African-American former cocaine addict who
was HIV positive – Marsha Burnett from Montpelier VT.
On one of the
stops on the tour we met with the staff of a anti-drug abuse programme in
Baltimore. It was an amazing but gentle
confrontation between women who grew the crops whose product was destroying the
communities in the inner city of Baltimore, and those who had to deal with the
effects of this epidemic. Who was to blame?
Who was ‘evil’? New insights were gained that day.
The next year
Olmyra came back to the US to testify at the first UNGASS on Drugs in 1998, sponsored
by the Transnational Institute from the Netherlands. She and Marsha Burnett
were chosen from amongst civil society participants to address (from the
balcony) hundreds of diplomats making up the UN Committee of the Whole. They
spoke as victims of the supply and demand side of this war. They held hands
aloft and said “We together, representing the
two criminalized extremes of the drug problem, say that we are united in
seeking a sustainable way of life for our communities…”.
Marsha Burnett, Vermont US.
It was moving to
hear poor women speaking the truth in those august halls. But did anyone really
listen? What was the outcome of that first UNGASS? President Clinton cajoled
the rest of the world into increasing the military response to drug use: the US government was happy to assist Latin
American countries in acquiring high speed motor boats for interdiction and low
cost loans to build prisons for drug offenders (and anyone else who offended
the state).
A lot of drugs
have passed under the bridge since that time. Next week in New York, UNGASS II
will take place in a much changed atmosphere.
According to the Transnational Institute, UNGASS 2016 is an unparalleled
opportunity to put an end to the horrors of the drug war and instead prioritize
health, human rights, and safety.
WILPF’s attempt to
speak truth to power before UNGASS 1 was a low profile, grassroots effort. By
contrast, this time, survivors and victims of this war, north and south, will
be travelling as part of a much more robust caravan
for peace, life and justice, starting in Honduras, to present their case to the
UN. Sponsored by Global Exchange, with a
large grant from George Soros’s Open Society, this movement for freedom from government
oppression has a chance to be a game changer.
