Europe: UN Drug Chief Talks Nice on Monday, Not So Nice on Wednesday

As UN anti-drug bureaucrats, national delegations, and interested civil society groups converged on Vienna for this week's annual conference of the UN's Committee on Narcotic Drugs (CND), the head of one of the CND's sister organizations, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), was calm and reasonable on Monday, but may have gotten himself into hot water with some intemperate remarks Wednesday.

UNODC head Antonio Costa opened the CND meeting with a speech stressing the need for greater attention to alternative development, health, and harm reduction. Although he urged countries not to get caught up in semantic battles over harm reduction, he referred attendees to a UNODC discussion paper that supports pragmatic approaches like those in Australia and Canada.

Costa called health a basic human right and said the "health principle" should be the basis of drug control. Too many people were in prison and too few were receiving drug treatment, he said.

Costa was mealy-mouthed on the issue of the death penalty for drug offenses, suggesting but refusing to state outright that drug offenses are not serious enough to justify a death sentence, as UN human rights experts and outside critics have declared. "Although drugs kill, I don't believe we need to kill because of drugs," he said. Instead, he urged nations to "give serious consideration to whether capital punishment for drug-related crimes is a best practice."

While Costa's positions may not be in accord with those of ardent drug reformers, his presentation was professional. That wasn't the case on Wednesday, when he addressed a meeting of the Vienna NGO committee.

For reasons that so far remain unexplained, Costa used the event as opportunity to attack the very members of civil society -- drug policy reformers and activists--he was addressing, or at least their American cousins. Referring to his visit to the Drug Policy Alliance New Orleans conference in December, Costa took an unprovoked swipe at his erstwhile hosts.

"I attended the meeting of the drug alliance [DPA] in New Orleans last December," he said. "1,200 participants, 1,000 lunatics, 200 good people to talk to. The other ones obviously on drugs," according to a account of the speech made available by the British drug reform group Transform Drug Policy Foundation on its blog.

"By any standard this was an extraordinarily offensive, inappropriate and stupid remark for the head of the UNODC to make in any public forum, let alone an NGO forum in which many of those present were also present at New Orleans (including myself as it happens)," wrote Transform blogger Steve Rolles. "The audience in New Orleans were in fact very polite and respectful, both for the fact that he had made the effort to attend and engage and for some of his more conciliatory remarks (and in truth Costa hardly spoke to anyone in New Orleans that would enable him to form an opinion or label them). He has managed to offend a broad spectrum of opinion present at the DPA, the DPA itself, and indeed the drug user groups with whom the UNODC process is nominally engaging at a high level."

As for just who is the lunatic, NORML's Paul Armentano countered with a blog post detailing some of Costa's more sensational statements about marijuana. After reading them, it seems Costa would be well-served by not encouraging comparisons about who has the most preposterous notions about drugs and drug policy.