Rise and stand up

The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and its follow-up treaties establishing the UN drug control regime would prove to be an outright attack on the text and the spirit of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the disavowal of the multiple life enhancing properties of the many substances included in its schedules and henceforth prohibited to mankind, even though the use of these substances, determining the quality of human existence, should have been protected when measured according to the stated objectives of the new universal human rights order.
However, the victorious WWII powers of the industrialized West imposed a rigorous punitive prohibition system they legitimized with the examples of the ravages caused by their own chemical drug warfare in former colonies, the ill-advised mass production of addictive drugs for their own home markets and the total lack of understanding of consciousness enhancing processes other than as an escape from their own mind control.

In the beginning years of the new 1961 regime the first substances selected were plants mostly from developing countries, many freshly independent, all vulnerable to foreign pressure. By focusing the interdiction on the supply side, especially the societies of these countries, where these substances originated, were the first to be punished in case of the inescapable non-compliance. Even though precisely their peoples had learned throughout their existence to use these substances to their benefit and often depended of them for their cultural survival. And that’s how the political decolonization of the 1960s immediately was replaced with the worldwide ideological colonization of the mind, not only of sovereign nations and sustainable societies, but of all world citizens who might dare to think out of the prohibitors box. A sublime coup de force: by extracting the support of both the former colonies -newly independent or ruled by former colonizers-turned-independents-, unfamiliar with geo-political freedom, and of the former colonizers -heroes of the Age of Reason and of millennia of the abstinence of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, unfamiliar with the freedom of the spirit, the new prohibitor forced them all to allegiance to the words of the strongest, translated into policies implemented by their own United Nations, the unsuspected advocate of human rights. A universal colonization in the shadows of the UDHR, under the guise of protecting public health and fighting the evil. In the end, only murder and genocide were thought sufficient to deal with the millions of criminals prohibition created. History will come to view the Single Convention as the ethnocide of the indigenous societies that had their culture based on the communion with their gods through the consumption of their plants so that the youth of the industrialized world wouldn’t get infected with the wisdom of the nature peoples. The past had to be erased for the future to correspond to the imperial wishes of the mind.

The scientific justifications for the 1961 prohibition scheduling provided overt exercises in deceit. The 1949 Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf was a racially biased, unqualified party of professional lightweights, their 1950 report had been highly selective and random in its choice of available scientific literature and conclusions and was perceived by all the Andean coca chewing nations as a short-sighted and willful insult to their cultures. It would become clear in the subsequent decades that addictionism, a pseudoscientific movement launched by Washington DC, had taken hold of the United Nations. As a result, science became discarded. Thus, although during the last half century dozens of new clinical cannabis applications were evidenced by research (1), no scientific review of the classification of the plant and its compounds was undertaken and it is still scheduled today as a substance liable to abuse and highly addictive, with particularly dangerous properties and little or no therapeutic values. Only this year, in 2018, and for the very first time, the World Health Organization assesses the medical uses and harms of cannabis. The horrible thing is that the Vienna-based UN-drug control bodies seem not to care about the ravages the war on drugs produces, like the government killings of users and the torture presented as rehab in compulsory drug detention centres, nor about the successes obtained in the field, like the needle and syringe programmes (NSPs) and the opioid substitution programmes (OST). In a blistering critique of the 61st Commission of Narcotic Drugs (CND) session, ANPUD (2) described the function of its Committee of the Whole as the big drowning pit of positive developments and ideas. Bias and abdication of responsibility (3) have become the rule, stigmatizing of users the social norm, harm infliction proof of treaty compliance. Although the prohibition of cannabis, coca and opium poppy therefore is absolutely legal it equally is profoundly illegitimate.

But the world was told that only zero tolerance could ensure a drugs free world, clear of any debilitating drugs exploitation of youth and the weak for the benefit of third parties. This political dictate was proclaimed although one of the foremost architects of the 1961 Single Convention, Mr. Harry Anslinger, who oversaw a previous failed prohibition of alcohol in the USA, knew better. Back home he had personally experienced how such an interdiction would turn the greedy into Mafiosi and in the end corrupt all those with no existential interest in the prohibited commodities and flood the market with dangerous adulterated products. As the difference between medicine and drug, use and abuse, is dose and as the medical world was ousted as dosing actor by the 1961 Convention, a black market of drugs was offered to numerous mafias that logically concentrated their activities on the most profitable, addiction creating demand. It made the most somber predictions come true as not the scientifically embedded but the socially rejected and unaccompanied use, controlled by a criminal segment of society, dictates habits and procedures of consumption under prohibition. Instead of promoting the highest attainable standards of health, prohibition produces crime, creates disease and fosters death.

The seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights celebrates an astounding number of victories of discriminated causes over ignorance, prejudice, egoism, fear and hatred. The responsible use of mind altering substances may not participate in the celebration. Not only are the human rights of their users systematically violated, as countless studies report, but this violation itself seems justified in the opinion of many of even the most liberal policy makers and academics. It appears that prohibition logic has accomplished a feat that the UN was supposed to ban from the world community: the creation and promotion of a man-made criterium setting some humans apart from the remainder of mankind and relegating them to a parallel universe where the law of human rights is not applicable and arbitrariness reigns. And let it be clear: it is not that the human rights of drug users are violated by mistake in the implementation phases of laws and regulations, no, it is rather that treaty arrangements and their applications in national laws themselves are human rights violations, as is the administration of justice based on these laws and regulations. The fight against ‘the evil’ of drugs use has made of the United Nations the godfather of gross violations of the human rights order she is by her Charter called to protect.

The absolute denial to humanity of the communion of man with the universe through nature’s own biodiversity, as man sees fit, is the denial of the right of each person to invite the universe to come to his help for his happiness and his health in the complete individual relationship (s)he wishes to establish. The DPI wishes to stand up for the right of freedom of use of mind altering substances, a right to life, and to specifically fight, out of the sheer unlimited range of human rights violations prohibition entails, the most gruesome imaginable committed in our name, the universal incitement to genocide.
The DPI invites to this endeavor all those who understand the being of consciousness alteration, the attack on human sovereignty by prohibition, the essence of respect of human rights and above all, the blessings of human solidarity under a system of unending individualization.

#Standup4humanrights is Safeguarding the seeds of humanity’s future.

(1) See http://faaat.net/cannabis/
(2) See http://www.anpud.org/the-cnd-is-dying-people-who-use-drugs-evidence-and-human-rights/