RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Among the 30 nations analyzed, Brazil is behind other much poorer nations, such as Uganda, with one of the world’s lowest HDIs; nations with a history of strong repression, such as Indonesia, where drug dealers are subject to the death penalty; or nations that have been at war for decades, such as Afghanistan.
At the other end, Norway, New Zealand, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Australia had the best rated drug policies. The ranking is a project of the Harm Reduction Consortium, which includes research entities in drugs and damage mitigation worldwide, among them the IDPC (International Drug Policy Consortium) – which comprises over 190 NGOs and is funded by the Open Society and UNODC (UN Office on Drugs and Crime), among others.
The analysis established a score from 0 to 100 for each country, according to criteria such as the existence or otherwise of the death penalty, decriminalization, and financing of damage mitigation policies. The ranking’s finding is that “the global dominance of drug policies based on repression and punishment led to a low overall score.”
Norway, the highest ranked country, scored 74 points; Brazil, the lowest ranked, scored 26. The global average was 48 points.
Four criteria were taken into account to determine the final score.
The first was the absence of harsh responses by the State, such as the death penalty, for drug crimes. Three of the 30 countries analyzed apply this penalty: India, Thailand, and Indonesia – although the first 2 countries have not executed a single prisoner in the past 5 years, while Joko Widodo’s government placed 214 people in the death row last year alone.
On the other hand, the prevalence of extrajudicial killings by law enforcement agents was recorded in a number of countries, such as Mexico. But only in Brazil was the issue considered endemic. The ranking also noted that compulsory institutionalization of drug users was common, present in 25 of the 30 nations assessed, in varying degrees.
Former director of the Rio de Janeiro penitentiary system and ex-police officer sociologist Julita Lemgruber says that “the war on drugs has been an excuse for the police to kill young black men in Brazil.”
“We look at the United States and are shocked by the number of black people killed by the police, such as the case of George Floyd, which drew attention and sparked a street protest,” she says. “Meanwhile, in Brazil the police kill 4,000 people a year, mostly black and young people, involved in the drug market.”
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On a rising trend, the number of deaths in police interventions in Brazil reached 6,416 in 2020, according to Brazilian Public Safety Forum data.
The second criterion in the ranking was the proportionality of justice, including abuses committed within the criminal justice system in the name of drug control – such as violence, torture, and arbitrary arrests -, the availability of alternative sentences to prison (present in virtually all countries), or efforts toward decriminalization.
Eight of the 30 countries have decriminalized the use and possession of drugs for personal consumption, among them Costa Rica, Portugal, Jamaica, and South Africa. Australia has such legislation in some regions, as does India, in the state of Sikkim – home to less than 1% of the country’s population.
In South Africa, the decriminalization of cultivation and private consumption of marijuana came in 2018, after nearly a century of prohibition. The plant had been popular among traditional peoples since before the first Europeans reached the region, used in traditional medicine and religious practices.
“Planting was a knowledge passed down through generations, on which whole communities depended,” says Philasande Mahlakata, an activist who advocates for the rights of small growers in Mpondoland in the east of the country. She says the ban has burned crops and destroyed land that can no longer produce food as it did before, and prompted migration and increased violence.
In the area of health and damage mitigation, the third criterion analyzed, the study identified that, “positively, most countries’ policies and strategies explicitly support damage mitigation.”
The challenge is to get these policies off the ground. Funding for services of this type was considered adequate in only 5 countries: Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. The index also notes the inequality of gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity in the access to damage mitigation programs.
Finally, the last criterion analyzed in the ranking considers the access to controlled-use psychoactive drugs for pain relief. The survey shows that wealthier countries have policies in place to distribute these drugs, while poorer nations lack access to them.
Although some of the world’s wealthiest nations are at the top of the ranking, the association between income and the effectiveness of drug policies is not direct. Brazil, part of the G20 and with one of the world’s highest GDPs, for instance, is behind Uganda, Nepal, and Mozambique.
“There is a link between income and drug policies in some aspects, such as access to medicines, but at some point the responses [to drugs] become disconnected from GDP,” says UK’s Swansea University Matthew Wall.
For Marie Nougier of the IDPC (International Drug Policy Consortium), “it’s not just a matter of wealthy versus poor countries, but how governments choose to allocate their funds.”
Source: Folha