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What is the News?
The inaugural Global Drug Policy Index 2021 has been released.
About Global Drug Policy Index:
Released by: Harm Reduction Consortium
Purpose: It is a unique tool that documents, measures and compares national-level drug policies, providing each country with a score and ranking that shows how much their drug policies and their implementation align with the UN principles of human rights, health and development.
Parameters: It is composed of 75 indicators running across five broad dimensions of drug policy: criminal justice, extreme responses, health and harm reduction, access to internationally controlled medicines and development.Based on these indicators, each country is then given a total score ranging from 0 to 100 with 100 as the highest score.
What are the rankings of the index?
India: India’s rank is 18 out of 30 countries.It has an overall score of 46/100.
Topped by: Norway has topped the Index with a score of 74/100.It was followed by New Zealand, Portugal, the UK and Australia.
Lowest Ranking Countries: Brazil, Uganda, Indonesia, Kenya, and Mexico.
What are the observations made by the report?
The median score across all 30 countries and dimensions is just 48/100.(48 out of 100 is a drug policy fail in anyone’s book).
Inequality is deeply seated in global drug policies, with the top-ranking 5 countries scoring 3 times as much as the lowest-ranking 5 countries.
Drug policies disproportionately affect people marginalised on the basis of their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and socio-economic status.
There are wide disparities between state policies and how they are implemented on the ground.
Source: This post is based on the article “Telling Numbers: A ranking of countries on drug policies and implementation” published in Indian Express on 9th November 2021.
