 Okay, so today we are going to explore why the so-called war on drugs is a barrier to locally led adaptation and climate justice. And we are gonna have a look at how regulation could be a solution to mitigating some of these barriers and some of these risks that we're facing with this illicit drugs trade. So while I'm gonna introduce the session to you, what I'd love to invite you all just to put your cameras on, introduce yourselves in the chat, maybe your name, your organization. And if you feel like it, perhaps writing why drugs and drug policy, climate justice is of interest to you and to your organization. We only have two participants, so we should maybe call out Aki and Theresa by night. Ah, great. Hi, Aki and Theresa. Okay, great. So I'm just sort of seeing who I've got in the room. Okay, so let me introduce myself and Patricia. So next slide please, Sam. So Patricia Chulva is the founder and executive director of Fundación Asmila, a not-for-profit organization that specializes in drug policy, human rights, and the co-co-leaf in Bolivia. And my name is Clemi James. I'm the drug policy lead and campaigner at Health Poverty Action. And the way we're gonna do this session, we might sort of adapt it a little bit, depending on how many we are. But I'm gonna give a little overview on the history of drug policy and how it impacts people and the planet at the moment. Then we're gonna do an interactive jam board to look at drug policy in your own countries and maybe drug policies that you have heard about how or have personally been impacted by. Then we'll do a second jam board looking at how drug policies are impacting the most vulnerable in your communities. Then we will have a presentation by Patricia on regulation of the co-co-leaf in Bolivia and the journey towards regulation. And then I will conclude the session by looking at reforms that are happening around the world and how legal regulation could play a role in strengthening sustainable development and climate justice. So let's begin. I will just give you a little history of drug policy. And I'm gonna take us right back to the basics and just assume that we're all sort of starting and forgive me if you know quite a lot about drug policy but sometimes it's helpful just to go back and really describe what we mean by this. So global drug policy has been dominated by prohibition and sometimes these two words sort of mean the same thing, global drug policy, prohibition. And essentially that means the global prohibition of growing, producing, moving and consuming drugs. And this is globally known as the war on drugs. And when we talk about drugs in health, poverty, action and with a lot of Patricia's work, we often talk about plant-based illicit drugs, co-co-leaf, cannabis and opium. But of course there are many, many synthetic drugs that are also illegal. And all of these illegal drugs are classed in different levels and the sort of punitive response to producing or consuming depends on what class that drug is. But it's probably safe to say that the dominant world response is criminalization of illegal drugs. So next slide please. The war on drugs is indeed enshrined by the UN. So while many of us understand that the UN is sort of the body of protecting and safeguarding human rights and sustainable development around the world, it also has a body that looks at crime and security and that entity has three conventions on prohibition. And so the UN is underwriting and overseeing and enforcing prohibition around the world. Unfortunately, the aim of the global drug policy has been the opposite. And so in fact it has failed in its own terms. So the UN's tagline or yeah, has been a drug-free world for the last 60 years. It couldn't be further from the truth. So growing, producing, moving, consuming of drugs has only increased in the last 60 years. More than a quarter of a billion people use drugs every year. And a record number of drug-related deaths are happening each year and that is rising. So trying to combat drug-taking and producing with criminalization has proven to be in fact a war on people and the environment and we'll explore why as we go through this session. And next slide please. Oh, I think we missed one. Yeah, okay, so prohibition. Oh, go back one, sorry, sorry, sorry, thank you. Prohibition has been, its legacy is in neo-colonial, yeah, neo-liberal doctrine has been just sort of designed in the United States and has been pushed around the world and tried by the UN law and has been a successful tool of control and oppression by governments in particular for certain groups of people. So different drugs perceived to be taken by different groups of people and those groups have been targeted resulting in police and criminalizing mass incarceration that is disproportionate in both scale and approach towards communities of color, indigenous people and marginalized groups. Next slide please. So just for a moment, I just want us to think about things that have been deemed perhaps from a moralistic perspective or a religious perspective at a certain point in history has been deemed wrong and has been made illegal. Often that has rarely got rid of the service or the product. In fact, what that's done is that's pushed the trade underground and just another example is abortion services. Abortion services, so making abortion services illegal did not and has not ever got rid of people trying to access abortions. In fact, what it's done is it's made abortions deeply dangerous for women, shrouded in stigma and it but it has not made them go away. This is the same thing that's happened with drugs. So while prohibiting it has made it go underground and what that has meant. Next slide please. Is that it has created a multi-billion dollar trade approximately worth $650 billion a year that makes it approximately the fifth largest trade in the world. This is an unregulated, untaxed and profit driven trade. There are no mechanisms currently along the supply chain to prevent violence, exploitation, corruption, extortion and harm. And that is like I just said along the supply chain but also from a consuming perspective. So wherever you are in the world it is rare that you are legally allowed to test what you're consuming. That people who grow and move drugs are not able to have labor rights, organise themselves. They are at the mercy of groups that use, due to the risk of criminalisation, they use methods that cause extreme harm and that is unaccountable and unmeasured around the world. Next slide please. So organised crime groups control the market. Companies don't control the market and governments don't control the market. These huge profits bribe, intimidate and control public institutions such as the police, order security and judiciary as well as whole governments to maintain their share, spelling mistake, apologies, of the profit leading to corruption and weak governance and a lack of public resources and finances. Next slide please. So prohibition is a drive for poverty and inequality and is a barrier to social justice. It threatens gender justice, undermines democracies, undermines public services, destroys livelihoods, stops people accessing essential healthcare, criminalises poor and marginalised communities, creates years of stigmatisation and shame, cause institutional racism and diverts money away from sustainable development. As countries begin to prepare for the climate emergency, we health poverty action and similar and other organisations around the world are beginning to be deeply concerned about the role the drugs trade will play and is playing in enabling communities to prepare and mitigate the ongoing climate crisis. And we, everyone in this space will understand that to prepare and be ready to roll out adaptation plans and strategies and change, we need governance, whether that's locally led governance, community led governance, indigenous governance or state led governance. We need a mutual responsive relationship between people and leadership that is trusting and prepared to change and prepared to adapt. And I've written here accountable, transparent, democratic, financially stable forms of governance to deliver climate mitigation and adaptation and justice. Our concern is that while there is this multi-billion dollar industry that is underscoring this landscape of needing to safeguard and protect and prepare the full climate change, are we going to be able to do this while this trade currently exists and is very much an intersection between drug policy and climate change that is overlooked and not named as something that needs to be reformed to be able to deliver the climate requirements. Next slide, please. I'm sure many of you know this, that the planet's largest carbon sinks that are key to our climate future follow the equator. These are the jungles of Southeast Asia, West Africa and the forests of Central and South America. And these equatorial landscapes, also the world's trafficking route of the illicit drugs trade. So like I've just said, governments don't manage these landscapes, these forests, organized crime does. And the profits that are made by organized crime from the illicit drugs trade is poured into corrupting public institutions to maintain the status quo, but also money is laundered into other deeply destructive forms of farming, cattle farming, mining and illegal logging that is destroying large parts of our planet. And so there is the immediate and then the wider consequences of this illicit drugs trade. So there's two things really. There's the impacts of the trade itself and then there's the controlling and fighting the war on drugs. So the amount of money that goes into fighting the war on drugs, the amount of money that goes into aerial spraying and destroying large parts of landscapes and land to eliminate crops. We are trapped into a cycle of environmental harm simply by prohibiting these plants. We have created a ticking time bomb. Next slide, please. Okay, so the good news is that change is starting to happen and countries around the world have realized that we have been harming communities and we are harming our planet by prohibiting a trade that it's proven that people will continue to need and to use drugs, whether it's for recreational purposes or cultural and spiritual purposes or indeed medicinal purposes. People do use drugs and we need to find ways of mitigating the harm of prohibition. So these are some of the examples that are happening around the world. Harm reduction, diversion. The harm reduction, just to give you a quick understanding of harm reduction, harm reduction would be like being able to take drugs and safe spaces, take home methadones, safe syringe spaces, being able to test your ecstasy before you go dancing, being able to be informed about what you're consuming. Harm reduction could also look like environmental regulations that are imposed on supply chain. Diversion is instead of criminalizing people, diverting them to public health support. Decriminalization is not criminalizing people who consume, produce or move drugs and legal regulation would be all of the above plus making the trade, bringing the trade, transferring the trade from the illegal to the legal market, which would mean that people would be able to have labor rights, they would be able to self-organize, they would be able to unionize, they would be able to benefit from all the mechanisms that we have available to us to ensure that they are safe and they can have a thriving livelihood and that their livelihood is not at risk of destruction and they are not at risk of criminalization. And these reforms are happening all around the world from Canada to America, South Africa, Malawi, Ghana, Thailand, Uruguay, Columbia has recently got a new president who is now publicly talking and addressing the UN and looking at legally regulating cocaine. And now very shortly after our interactive session, we will look at the reforms that happened in Bolivia and the impact on the Bolivians with the coca leaf. So thank you very much for listening. I hope that's given you a little whistle-socks tour of sort of drug prohibition. And now I'm gonna pass over to my colleague, Patricia. I'm just gonna jump in, Glemmie, just so you know, we had one participant, but he jumped off. I don't know whether it's a connection issue. So it's just us at the moment. I'm not entirely sure, quite how to do. I don't know whether you want to carry on. I thought it was fascinating and it's been recorded so you can keep it if you wanna keep it for your own purposes. But we don't really have much of a discussion at the moment. Why don't we just go on to Patricia's presentation then? Okay, and then you'll have the recording and you can use it and edit it down as you want. Yeah, and I think it is a really interesting presentation. So maybe we just do Patricia's presentation and then wrap up. Let's do that. Okay, if that's okay with you, Patricia. Yeah, of course. Thank you guys. Let me share the screen. Thank you very much. Okay, all yours. Well, I'm here to talk about social control and coca leaf in Bolivia. I would like to start with the historic context. Next slide, please. Yeah. Well, when we talk about the rock polis in Bolivia, we are talking about a political history in my country that could be not understood without understanding the development of its rock polices regarding specifically about coca leaf. Those derived from oppression, conflict and vindication of this sacred plant. These processes were determined by social organizations as an organized trade union force in a context in which North American policies demanded a frontal fight against the coca leaf from the state. It was between the 70s and the 90s. Next, please. So in Bolivia has been a coca leaf prohibition like in the whole world. And the first antecedent in international rock laws are the single convention on our copy tracks on 1961. It is a document that in four lists brings together a set of easily extracted plants, substances and opioids. Those who use on production are regulated by international control system. On the other side, we have the convention of psychotropic substances of 1971. This convention against illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances of 1988, which in the early sleep room for therapeutic uses of some substances, but require their prohibition for recreational and non-medical uses as you can see on the screen. On the next slide, we can see that while in the 1971 convention, while it speaks of the elimination of traditional cultural and ceremonial uses of coca, in 2007, United Nation Declaration was issued on the right of indigenous people. Although there was a first diplomatic stage for coca in Bolivia and Peru, among 1988 and 1986, it was only in 2006 that the revaluation policies emerged. So we can see that in 2009, we have a new political constitution of the state that contemplates that coca leaf is a matter that the state protects as original and ancestral coca as cultural heritage and it sees it as a renewable natural resource of Bolivian biodiversity. So in the next one, please, we can see that in 2013, Bolivia exits the single convention of 1961 and re-evaluates its re-adherence with the reservation of the consumption of coca leaf in its natural form. So those action marked a milestone in international policy. And we can see that in March, that on 2017 March, the first coca regulation law in Bolivia and the world was approved with 1,300 hectares for the Yungas region, that is the region located in La Paz and 7,700 hectares for Cochabamba for the tropical of Cochabamba. So going to the next slide, please, we can talk a little bit about the social control, the community social control that it has been promote a lot like an alternative to the white and green sparks that is commonly used around the world. This policy of integral development with coca of Bolivian state achieves productive socioeconomic programs and projects executed in those coca production regions regarding to La Paz and Cochabamba. So it's important to mention that this implementation of these community social control is exercised by the producers themselves. So it has allowed them to be rational and reasonable in the amount of coca leaf production. It is based in the framework of the 906 coca leaf law. And well, next one, please. We can see that in 2008, the producer of Los Yungas with their social organizations were direct participants in their participants in the rationalization of their crops in traditional areas, meaning that the social community are directly involved into this process through agreements and consensus with the producers. And in their case, with the eradications of surplus crops with the agreement of both parts, meaning that the coca growers work with the government in this process of rationalization of their crops. So this agreement was signed in September of 2008. Next one, please. This agreement was signed with the support of the program for social control of coca leaf production that was financed and signed with the support of the European Commission and the government of Bolivia. So the general objective was supporting the government of Bolivia in the implementation of coherent policies to fight drug trafficking under a set of actions carried out within the framework of a strategy to fight drug trafficking and revaluation of coca leaf. Next one, please. So the tropic federation guaranteed that the concept of mechanism of social control are accepted by the producers and their respective organization. The tropic federations are located in the Cochabamba region and their mechanism where, first of all, the verification and measurement of the plantations do not exceed the coca price. The social control communication and a dissemination strategy, both at the level of the organizations and also at the level of the public opinion. Also, we have the capacity building of social organizations in conflict management in the application of social control. And finally, we have this sufficient training infrastructure equipment and technology because if you don't have the training, all this gets lack of power, right? So next one, please. The implementation of social control was much more difficult to apply as a state policy in those young guys because they have their own way of community control. They have a powerful institution named Adepoca, which controls production processes and marketing from the community to the legal market. And C's interest affected by social control measures, making the implementation of sectorial policies much more difficult. But it shows that the social control outside Cochabamba was, it has its limitations. So it's time to talk about alternative development. Well, we can say that these alternative development in Bolivia was a strategy that meant alternating or substituting coca-crux with agricultural tourism and craft projects that would be more profitable than the option of producing coca leaves. So for this purpose, repression and interdiction, which brought more violence and brought more towards the center of the drug traffic conflict, there was kind of the main policy before the social control was applied. Next one, please. So on the other side, we have, next slide, please. So on the other side, we have this integral development with coca that was developed on the frame of the 906 law on coca leaf. And this is the new national strategy for comprehensive sustainable development with coca. It was applied for Bolivian coca leaf regulation and it explains the process by which policies are developed and implemented to replace the previous alternative, development policy until 2005 and proposes the consolidation of under lessons learned from the previous two policies. Next one, please. So we can see that the national strategy for comprehensive sustainable development with coca states that the political constitution of the state recognized the coca leaf as cultural heritage, renewable natural resource of Bolivian biodiversity and as a factor of social cohesion. Next one, please. So in this context, the comprehensive sustainable development strategy with coca for the young as on the past and the tropical of Cochabamba, it reaffirms the political will of the Bolivian state to prevent the diversion of the coca leaf towards easy activities to control and supervision of the cultivated crops in outer areas, deprivation of the cultivation in areas at risk of crop expansion, the marketing control and well based on these measures that fight against poverty. So it's fundamental for the light hope opportunities and provides to the most vulnerable communities and groups affected by coca crops in authorized and authorized areas. So next one, please. Integral development constitutes a policy of common and shared responsibility generated in the internal sphere but which presents the international sphere. So it's effectiveness will depend on the institutional strengthening of the state, the strengthening of the legal framework, the participation of the local communities and social organizations, providing economic support, technical assistance, investment and the recognition of property rights, including access to land. So we're going to talk about the relationship with the principles for locally led adaptation. Social control is related to these principles by developing decisions making to the lowest appropriate level by giving local institutions and communities direct access to finance and decision making power on their own progress and evolution of the community objectives, regulating the expansion of illegal coca-crops. It also addresses structural inequalities faced by women, young children and indigenous people and ethnic groups who are completely marginalized. It also integrates gender-based economic and political inequalities. There are roots of the bringer ability and we can say that the role of women and it is fundamental in the productive and market change as we see as our leadership in the community by participating in the decision making process during the meetings, the community meetings that they have. So they get to occupy a power position as mayor or leadership positions. Finally, next one, please. One before. Yes, we can see that it ensures transparency and accountability and regards also in a making process of financing, designing and delivering programs more transparent and accountable toward the local stakeholders. So the point eight also is regarded to this when you talk about the collaborative action and investment. And finally, we can talk about a collaboration across sectors, initiatives and levels to ensure that different initiatives and different sources of funding like humanitarian assistance, development, disaster relief reduction, green recovery funds and so on, support one another and their activities avoid duplication to enhance efficiencies and good practices. What is really important about this policy is what is important of the regulation is that it helps the development of the community in the development of the wellbeing that it produces from community control of its own objectives. It regards also in the reduction of poverty, reduction of violence and territorial and economic sovereignty. So regulation of coca leaf in Bolivia has a really powerful acceptance on their communities. And I think this is a model that could be also exported and works on like a good experience for other countries related to a drug conflict. That would be all and thank you very much.