Introduction

In March 2009, the two of the reader were walking through the ‘Rotunda’ at the UN headquarters in Vienna. Mention of human rights within the UN drug control system was so controversial at the time that it was only possible to agree the most stripped-down version of the resolution during the year in which the rest of the UN system was celebrating the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Observers of drug policy understand that the same issues and controversies have been recycled over the decades. The concept of ‘drug policy justice’ suggests a move from a focus on policy reform in isolation and instead to the ‘intersection of the war on drugs with poverty and other forms of marginalisation’, in which drug policies are not merely a technical regulatory problem but ‘instruments of poverty, racism and the subordination of women’.