On this edition of Free Culture Radio: Drug Policy, Environmental Protection, and the Rights of Indigenous People
Efforts are ongoing around the world to better align national and international drug policies with other crucial areas of concern including protecting the environment, conserving nature, tackling climate change, and upholding the rights of Indigenous Peoples. To date, only limited steps have been taken to illuminate the intersections between drug policy and the environment, and even less to bring global regimes into alignment. In fact, many national drug policies and the international drug control system often operate at odds with these other issue areas.
So on this edition of Free Culture Radio, we take look at the environment, specifically at Aligning Drug Policy with Environmental Protection. That was the title of a side event that was held at the sixty-sixth session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, which took place recently in Vienna, Austria.
The event, which was organised by the Transnational Institute, the governments of Brazil and Colombia, the Global Drug Policy Observatory, Health Poverty Action, the International Drug Policy Consortium, Open Society Foundations, Viso Mutop, and the Washington Office on Latin America, explored how punitive drug policies have empowered organised crime and accelerated environmental degradation. Importantly, participants proposed concrete recommendations to ensure that the UN and national drug policies can support, rather than undermine, efforts made by the international community to protect the environment.
On this edition of Free Culture we hear from some of the panelists including Kendra McSweeney, Professor of Geography, The Ohio State University; David Bewley-Taylor, Professor of International Relations at Swansea University's School of Social Sciences and the founding director of the Global Drug Policy Observatory; Jhon Alexander Rojas Cabrera, the Governor of Nariño, Colombia; and Marta Machado, National Secretary for Drug Policy, Brazil.
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