Revealing the missing links to climate justice: Drug policy

(…) It is increasingly being recognised that criminal actors are financing land grabs, deforestation, timber and wildlife trafficking and socially and ecologically devastating mining. And that authorities at all levels are often rubber-stamping and profiting from those illegal activities. However, this recognition stops short of naming the driver of these criminal activities.

Prohibition: the international drug policy regime – primarily devised and championed by countries of the Global North, and maintained by the United Nations – has created an unregulated and immensely powerful shadow economy.

That shadow economy is undermining environmental progress and governance in the world’s tropical forest frontiers. The jungles of South-East Asia, forests of West Africa and the rainforests of Central and South America are some of the planet’s largest carbon sinks and key to our climate future. This equatorial line also correlates to the world’s major drug trafficking routes. (International Coalition on Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Justice, UK, 05.10.2023)

https://idpc.net/publications/2023/10/revealing-the-missing-links-to-climate-justice-drug-policy