Quick hits: Why "but the children!" is a hypocritical justification for prohibition

"Quick hits" are brief rundowns of the latest drug related reports, studies and alerts

The Global Commission on Drug Policy released a report yesterday: "Making Children and Young People Visible in Drug Policy: A Child Rights-Based Agenda for Reform." They consulted with over 150 sources, including children, from nearly 50 countries, and analyzed UN resolutions related to drugs and youth. Here are five takeaways:

•Politicians love to invoke children when justifying prohibition and criminalization. But actual policy rarely takes their well being into account.

°From 2000-2026, only around six percent of the 300 United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs resolutions focused specifically on children and young people, and only 2% addressed issues aside from drug-use prevention.

°None of the resolutions explicitly recognize that punitive drug policies themselves harm children. These policies separate children from their parents, or lead them to be incarcerated themselves. Ironically, these are the exact conditions that can make drug use feel more like a survival strategy than a choice later in life.

°The resolutions also fail to adequately address issues like human trafficking of minors related to the drug trade, youth mental health, harm reduction and pediatric access to controlled medications.

•Children who use drugs globally face multiple, terrible double binds.

°Around the globe, people under 18 do not have the right to vote, but they can be placed within the criminal justice system. This means they can be punished by policies they had no say in.

°While children can legally be treated as criminals, they often do not have the same access to harm reduction and healthcare services as adults. The authors of the report put it well: "This creates a contradictory situation: in some settings, children can be held criminally liable for drug possession while being denied access to services designed to reduce drug-related harms."

°As I've reported in the past, doctors and parents alike are often uncomfortable with the idea of putting minors on medication for opioid use disorder, even though these medications are the most effective tool available to keep them safe from the risks of the illicit drug supply. The report emphasizes that minors who could benefit from access to controlled medications face unnecessary barriers.

•Drugs can negatively affect brain development in young people. But so can incarceration.

°Incarceration can take away access from quality education, family, and normal social development—and expose minors to violence.

°The fact that many of the children who wind up in juvenile justice systems have already experienced trauma makes them more vulnerable, not less. But the system does not recognize that. Participants in the study described the experience of "adultification" where they're assumed to be more adult-like and less vulnerable because of their race or economic background. Children in the system may have learned to act tough as a survival strategy. Adults who interpret this to mean they need less care are acting negligently.

•Neither parents nor schools are a good source of accurate information on drugs

°Lots of students sit through lessons on drugs and find them useless and absurd. For students who actually have experience with drugs, this is doubly true. Participants described finding the lessons "moralistic, unrealistic and disconnected from their lived experiences." This was a missed opportunity, because these students actually wanted the chance to learn how to use drugs more safely.

°As Anne-Marie Cockburn of Anyone's Child put it during the press briefing on the report, "Parents think that schools are teaching their children about this. Schools hope the parents have got it covered."

•Children and young people should have a say in the policies that affect them

°Ireland already involves children between the ages of 14 and 18 in its drug policy through its Citizens' Assembly on Drug Use.

°Globally, children do not have the same rights as adults. However, governments can draw from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to inform their drug policy.

°The UNCRC theoretically grants children the right to liberty, protection from avoidable suffering, and basic health and welfare. Punitive drug policies—and policies that treat children as perpetrators rather than victims of violence when they're involved in trafficking or organized crime—often do the opposite.

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