Stuck in Traffic: Conflicting Regimes of Global Drug Regulation

Since the late twentieth century, two United Nations organizations have monitored the global trade in drugs from their respective perches in Geneva: the Essential Drugs Program of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). In 1988, the Essential Drugs Program published the first edition of the World Drug Situation, which narrates the many barriers preventing “essential” drugs (antibiotics, antiepileptics, insulin, etc.) from successfully travelling from centers of production in the global North to arenas of potential consumption in the global South. The UNODC’s annual World Drug Report figures the opposite problem by policing “non-medical” drugs that are trafficked from centers of production in the global South to illicit consumer markets, some of the largest of which are in the global North.1.