Drug consumption rooms, pill testing, assessing human rights of drug users and evaluating cannabis social clubs – EU adopted a new progressive Action Plan on Drugs.
Although it was without much fanfare that the European Commission, in July 2017, published the new Action Plan on Drugs (2017-2020), the drug policy community should celebrate it as a great achievement both for its progressive content and for the meaningful involvement of civil society in its preparation.
If there is a sign that the European Union is getting through difficult times, it’s the limited attention its new public policy initiatives receive. While the adoption of previous EU drug strategies and action plans has been well covered by the media, now, two years after the great migration crisis and one year after the Brexit vote, almost nobody noticed the adoption of the new EU Action Plan on Drugs. There was no press conference or press release. It seems drug policy is not a priority for decision makers these days – there are other topics occupying public attention. It’s a shame, because this is the most progressive drug policy document the EU has ever adopted. It is most needed, at a time when European drug markets have been undergoing cataclysmic changes, with the emergence of new drugs and new risks which require new responses and interventions.
The three-year Action Plan translates the goals of the seven-year EU Drug Strategy (2013-20)into concrete actions with clear responsibilities and performance indicators. This is the second action plan relating to the current drug strategy, the previous one (2013-16) having been evaluated by external evaluators, RAND and EY in 2016. The evaluation report, which also included civil society views, highlighted some very significant shortcomings of EU drug policies. It pointed out that among the five pillars of the EU drug strategy, demand and harm reduction significantly lags behind in terms of progress made in the period of the previous Action Plan.
