Today, on the United Nations Universal Children’s Day, Anyone’s Child is heading to London to demand that the government controls and regulates drugs.

Please read Radhika’s blog below to find out the shocking statistics behind the human stories.

The idea of protecting children and young people has long been used to justify the drug war. Its supporters claim that punitive prohibition approaches keep drugs off our streets and act as deterrents to prevent kids getting involved in drugs.  However, the evidence collected in the last half century suggests conclusively that far from protecting young people, the drug war actively endangers and harms them.

“Far from protecting young people, the drug war actively endangers and harms them.”

These dangers are separate from problematic drug use, and are instead entirely related to the offshoots of unethical enforcement approaches and an unregulated criminal market – only made possible because of the illegality of drugs. As with all wars, the most vulnerable in society, including children and young people, suffer the most.

One consequence of prohibition that harms young people is the blighted opportunities that stem from a criminal conviction for drug possession, trafficking and other disproportionate laws. Mandatory minimum sentences often fail to distinguish between quantities carried so that even lower end sentences are excessively harsh. In 2009, 50% of those imprisoned for illicit drug sales in Mexico were selling products with a value of $100 USD or less, and 25% were making sales worth $18 USD or less.

Because of rigid sentencing guidelines, judges’ discretion is limited, and they are prevented from considering non-custodial alternatives for low-level drug abuse. This has meant many children find their parents or carers behind bars for prolonged periods of time: in US state prisons, 63% of women and 59% of men incarcerated on drug offences have children. Such circumstances immensely impact a child – many of whom will already be growing up in tough environments – including being at greater risk of suffering from depression and developing behavioural problems.

Some children may be placed in the care of the state and stats for this are staggering. Young people who grow up in UK local government care are 4 times more likely to require the help of mental health services; 7 times more likely to misuse alcohol or drugs; 50 times more likely to wind up in prison; 60 times more likely to become homeless; and 66 times more likely to have children needing public care themselves.

The upwards spike in women imprisoned for low-level drug crime, particularly harsh for so called ‘drug mules’ exemplifies the problematic criminalisation of vulnerable people that in turn, harms more vulnerable people. These women usually come from marginalised backgrounds and are commonly driven to drug trafficking by desperation, poverty, and a need to support their children – oftentimes their involvement may have resulted from exploitation by men further up the hierarchy. In Latin America, between 2006 and 2011, the region’s female prison population almost doubled, increasing from 40,000 to more than 74,000, with the vast majority imprisoned for drug-related offences. The UN Development Programme 2015 noted:

 “A substantial percentage of women in prison are incarcerated for drug offenses – an estimated 70 percent in some countries in the Americas and in Europe and Central Asia – a significant number for low level, non-violent drug offenses. Many of them are young, illiterate or with little schooling, single mothers and responsible for the care of their children or other family members. While more men are incarcerated for drug offenses, the consequences of criminal punishment fall differently on women, and often have greater impact on their children and their families. Yet women’s caring responsibilities are not taken into account at sentencing, nor recognized or met at the prison.”

Not only do children lose their parents to the prison industrial complex, they also lose them to the mass violence that has been caused by the war on drugs. From just 2006-2010, it was estimated that as many as 50,000 children had lost one or more parents in this violence – a figure that is certain to have increased significantly in subsequent years.

Children themselves become casualties as criminal organisations diversify their ways of implementing harm: in Mexico as many as 1,000 children were killed in drug trade violence in 2006-2010 alone and from 1980 to 2010, Brazil’s homicide rate for people aged under 19 grew by 346% – this not mentioning the significant trauma a child will bear living in war zone.

They also wind up in prison themselves, and implications of this range from vile abuses they are subjected to within criminal justice systems (such as is the case in Cambodia where children comprise around 25% of those in compulsory drug detention centres), to life chances being blighted by a criminal record and rehabilitation rendered impossible. Young people emerging with a criminal record, even for minor offences, will face obstacles in housing, employment, welfare and travel, making a return to drug use and the criminal economy more likely.

“The tens of billions of dollars poured annually into failed drug law enforcement each year could be re-directed into health and social development programmes for vulnerable individuals and communities.”

Young people are also commonly recruited among drug cartels: being easy targets and driven by poverty, many become drug-crop growers or foot soldiers for these violent organisations. In Mexico, from 2006 to 2011, more than 25,000 children left school to join drug trafficking organisations.

The war on drugs furthermore results in the trafficking and enslavement of children: in Afghanistan child labour is used extensively in opium production and smuggling, and according to Anti-Slavery International, of the potential trafficking victims forced to cultivate cannabis in the UK, 96% were from Vietnam and 81% were children. Oftentimes these children are treated as criminals not victims when discovered by authorities.

Moreover, rather than being offered health and welfare support services, children caught among even minor infractions are often suspended from school, which has serious implications for a child’s future. Reduced involvement in education is linked with a higher chance of getting involved in problematic drug use, and in the US, for example, many low-income students are denied access to federal aid for college tuition due to minor drug convictions. Vulnerable young people facing multiple oppressions (such as with class and race) are already disproportionately targeted in drug charges, and excessively punitive responses only serve to exacerbate the challenges they face and ensure social mobility is hindered.

Within schools, it is clear that current approaches to drug education for young people – exemplified by the ‘Just Say No’ programme in the US – are expensive, ineffective, based on politics rather than scientific evidence and focused on implausible visions of a ‘drug-free world’. A study in Michigan involving 76,000 pupils found no difference in levels of drug use among students in schools where drug testing was conducted compared with those where it was not. ‘Just Say No’ and fear-mongering, unethical random-drug testing style approaches also work to discourage vulnerable young people caught up with drugs from seeking help.

Besides, there is no evidence that tough enforcement leads to reduced drug use. A 2014 study by the UK Home Office, which reviewed evidence from around the world, concluded that the ‘toughness’ of a country’s drug laws had no influence on its levels of drug use. Conversely, the threat of criminalisation, and the associated stigma and discrimination, frequently pushes drug use into marginal, unsafe and unhygienic environments, further jeopardising the health of young people who use drugs. Tough enforcement forces young people to buy their drugs from a criminal black market, not doctors and licensed vendors, where the drugs are often mixed with adulterants, never labelled with information on potency or purity and supplied to people of all ages carelessly. This has led to the tragic deaths of thousands of young people worldwide from accidental overdoses.

“We should treat drugs as an issue to be pragmatically managed in a way that reduces harm.”

As we can see, many of the potential risks of illicit drugs are a product not just of their pharmacology, but of their being produced and supplied by an unregulated criminal market. Many negative effects of drugs are often confused or deliberately conflated with the harms of drug use, when they are actually the result of prohibition. To meaningfully protect children, new policy should move beyond narrow and counterproductive goals of abstinence and use-reduction. Instead, the analysis should be evidence-based and considerate of the actual wellbeing of children and young people.

Instead of populist political rhetoric and sensationalist media reports that exploit parents’ fears, characterising drugs as an existential threat to society’s youth to be fought and eradicated, we should treat drugs as an issue to be pragmatically managed in a way that reduces harm.

The tens of billions of dollars poured annually into failed drug law enforcement each year could be re-directed into health and social development programmes for vulnerable individuals and communities – including young people – that would reduce harms rather than fuel them.

This Universal Children’s Day, join us as we endeavour to create a world safer for young people through establishing humane, evidence-based and effective drug policy.

To find out more about the impacts of the war on drugs, read the detailed but easy to follow Count the Costs reports.