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Governments used aid budgets to fund the global war on drugs: new report [1]
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Date: 2024-06
Tuesday, 12 September 2023 (London, UK)– Wealthy governments spent close to $1 billion from their aid budgets – intended to help end poverty and do no harm – on the global war on drugs, between 2012 and 2021.
New research by Harm Reduction International released today reveals how dozens of donors, led by the US and the EU, have used international aid funding for activities related to narcotics control in the decade from 2012 to 2021.
Beneficiaries have included police forces and prosecutors’ offices around the world. Funded projects have included some which increase surveillance and arrests. At least $70 million of overseas development aid was spent in countries that have the death penalty for drug-related offences, including in Iran (which executed at least 252 people for drug offences last year) and Indonesia. Using the death penalty for drug offences is a violation of international human rights law.
“International aid is supposed to help end poverty and support development, not fuel human rights violations,” said Naomi Burke-Shyne, Executive Director of Harm Reduction International. “Using aid budgets for drug control doesn’t help meet development goals. These funds are being used to increase policing, surveillance, and arrests of vulnerable people and communities. Drug control must have no place in the future of aid,” she added.
“The war on drugs has failed. Governments need to ensure that development assistance budgets are used to promote people’s health and human rights, and not to fund repressive drug control policies which have proven to be harmful and ineffective”, said Helen Clark, Former Prime Minister of New Zealand and current Chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. “It is particularly abhorrent that development assistance is applied to so-called narcotics control activities in countries which continue to execute people for drug-related offences”, she added.
The report, Aid for the War on Drugs, follows aid money for narcotics control including to specific projects around the world. It calls on governments and donors to divest from punitive and prohibitionist drug control regimes which undermine their other health and human rights commitments, and invest in evidence-based programmes such as harm reduction.
More than half of total aid funding for narcotics control over the past decade came from the US ($550 million), followed by EU Institutions ($282 million), Japan ($78 million), the UK ($22 million), Germany ($12 million), Finland ($9 million), and Korea ($8 million). While relatively small shares of overall aid spending, these funds still eclipse those spent on other areas of development assistance. For example, more aid globally was spent in 2021 on narcotics control ($323 million) than on school feeding projects ($286 million) or labour rights ($198 million).
In total, 92 developing countries are listed as having been recipients of aid funding for narcotics control. The largest single country recipient of this funding in 2021 was Colombia ($109 million), followed by Afghanistan ($37 million), Peru ($27 million) and Mexico ($21 million).
Such spending is out of step with health and human rights commitments. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) includes decriminalisation of drugs in its Global AIDS Strategy, with targets to repeal punitive laws and policies, as well as to “scale up comprehensive harm reduction”.
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[1] Url:
https://hri.global/news/governments-used-aid-budgets-to-fund-the-global-war-on-drugs-new-report/
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