ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic – and efforts to contain it – significantly exacerbated the pre-existing harms caused by drug prohibition, making people who use drugs more vulnerable to arrest, putting them at risk of death in prison, disrupting health and social services, and exposing them to even more unsafe drugs as the pandemic disrupted drug markets. While many countries took some steps to address the immediate drug policy effects of the pandemic, they almost uniformly neglected to critically examine the root causes of the vulnerabilities COVID-19 exposed and thus failed to see how inextricably these are linked to drug prohibition. If we are committed to creating a more equal and sustainable world post-COVID-19, a fundamental change in the approach to drugs is essential. We should stop using criminal law in a doomed chase after an unachievable drug-free world and build a new global drug policy agenda around principles of health, social well-being and human rights.
