Conceptual battles and reconfigurations within the global drug policy space since the UNGASS 2016

In 2012, Latin American presidents called for an “open, frank and global debate" on the future of drug policy, challenging the dominant model in place “to counter the world drug problem”, and with it, invited to reflect on how the “problem” of organized crime related to drugs and its “solutions” could be apprehended. This 2012 “dissonance” precipitated the convening of a Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on Drugs (UNGASS) in 2016 from which a more comprehensive roadmap towards a balanced and holistic approach to drug policy has been tempted. Yet, since this attempted so-called paradigmatic shift, the global drug policy landscape appears fragmented, at best in search of policy coherence and complementary, as stated by the 2019 CND and beyond, and challenged by emerging regulation schemes. Adopting a process tracing approach, and conjugating tools of the theories of problematization, agenda setting and idea transfer, this paper examines the “global debate” impacts on an international drug policy space that is highly constrained, routinized, and marked by a strong path and cognitive dependence to security-oriented appraisal of organized crime and drug trafficking, and repressive logics to illicit drug-related problems. It studies the recent evolutions of the global drug policy space from a cognitive, sociological and policy perspectives. Based on in-depth observations of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) conducted as part of a doctoral research, it further proposes to map out the contemporary conceptual and policy-making constellation of the ”drug problem”.