Measures to Overcome Drug Abuse Unregulated by the Law:
The second group of measures to overcome drug abuse are those which are not regulated by the law. They are informational, analytical, organizational, educational, scientific, technological, medical and preventive, as well as other measures that bear no relation to compulsion.
It is the group of legal measures, which can be subdivided into law branches. Such norms, as suggested above, can be found in the civil, family, labor, administrative, and criminal codes.
The Level of Measures to Combat Drug Abuse:
Measures to combat drug abuse can be divided into the following four levels: international, social, special and individual.
Measures at the international level are applied by various countries throughout the world. They are particularly binding in the countries, which have joined international treaties by ratifying them. This category of measures may include any of the previously listed such as informational, analytical, research, technical, medical, economical, financial, preventive, control, and law-making.
Social measures are those used on a national scale and meant to influence society as a whole. They include preventive, law-making, criminal and other legal measures, as well as the ones embracing the entire society such as informational, analytical, organizational, managerial, medical, economical, and others.
Special measures aim to overcome drug abuse and influence, on the one hand, certain kinds of harmful activities linked to drugs, and on the other, restrain persons inclined to carry out such activities or drug addicts. Measures aimed against certain kinds of activities include, for example, actions to destroy illegally sown crops or wild drug-bearing plants, may include measures in regard to specific individuals, attempts to cure drug addicts; to reveal and record the names of people inclined to commit drug-related crimes, or persons already convicted for such crimes; to prevent such people from committing more crimes; and to help persons from high risk groups avoid situations which may induce drug use.
Measures in regard to individuals cover steps taken in relation to those persons who use drugs or those who have committed or tend to commit crimes or other law-breaking acts involving drugs. They include steps providing drug addicts with an opportunity to undergo treatment or making them, if necessary, to undergo treatment, instituting criminal proceedings or using administrative measures against persons who have committed crimes, as well as preventing or warding off potentially socially dangerous actions involving drugs, etc. Medical, preventive, administrative, legal, criminal, criminal procedural and criminal executive measures can also be seen as measures in regard to individuals.
The Subjects of Measures to Overcome Drug Abuse:
The measures to overcome drug abuse can be grouped by institutions implementing them. There are international agencies and organizations, medical institutions, law-making bodies, law-enforcement agencies, executive government branches, specially created agencies, groups and other organizations.
The Commission on Narcotics of the UN Economic and Social Council and the UN International Committee on Drug Control are permanently functioning international agencies. Various conferences and symposia on actions against drug abuse discussed and worked out conventions, programs, decisions, projects, and recommendations. These can be referred to as temporarily operating organizations. Conferences of member-states, i.e. of their official representatives, have the right to approve conventions and other normative documents subsequently ranked as international law acts. After their ratification, legal norms contained in them become part of national legislation. International bodies exercise all the above-listed measures to combat drug abuse, except for criminal measures and a few others.
Medical institutions have the authority to carry out curative and curative preventive measures.
By their nature, the measures to overcome drug addiction can be divided into suppressive and preventive.
This classification makes it possible to determine the importance of each particular group. It can also serve as the basis for building a system of measures to be used for the preparation and subsequent development of the national program of action to combat drug addiction.
Measures to Overcome Drug Abuse:
By evaluating the measures to overcome drug abuse from the study of the experience, it is possible to single out the following groups of measures: 1) control preventive; 2) research, training and educational; 3) medical; 4) legal; 5) economic and financial, and 6) organizational.
The control and preventive; research, training and educational; economic and financial measures are grouped together because they are closely intertwined. Legal measures in this national program should include law enforcement and law-making measures and organizational measures-informational, analytical, and technical measures.
Without referring to the contents once again it would be important, from the standpoint of their expression and place in this program, to draw attention to some points concerning certain groups of the proposed measures.
A method should be defined in this anti-drug program of applying control measures. It would need to be a legislative regulation of drug movements from the sowing of drug-bearing plants and their cultivation, to the consumption of drugs. Presently, conflicting rules regulating the production, acquisition, storage, stock taking, dispensing, transportation and the sending of narcotics by parcel post are in force. These rules were enacted by executive branch agencies rather than by lawmakers. For example, the rules concerning the production, storage, stock-taking, and dispensing of drugs were established by the orders issued by the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of the Medical and Micro- biological Industry of the former USSR. Transportation rules can be found in orders issued by the Ministry of the Medical Industry and coordinated with the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the former USSR. Rules for sending and shipping drugs by rail or any other kind of transport were determined by normative acts of various agencies. On the other hand, even if this is the prerogative of law- makers, the rules are scattered within various and quite numerous normative acts making it difficult to control violations of these rules by law-enforcement agencies. So, if a full and effective control over the circulation of narcotics is to be ensured, uniform rules for handling drugs should be worked out on the basis of the existing rules and should be made into law. These rules should envisage the procedures for the sowing, raising, producing, storing, stock-taking, dispensing and selling of drugs and for the acquiring, sending by parcel post, and carrying of drugs and their analogies, as well as raw materials, semi-finished products, chemicals and special equipment used in making drugs across national borders.
To implement research, training and educational measures in a national program it is essential to set up a single research and study center consisting of facilities capable to perform specific tasks of dealing with drug addiction. These tasks should be defined in the national program without overstepping their limits, so as not to squander means and resources on meeting other goals. For example, the tasks of the research facility should be to identify drugs, establish new types of drugs and study the most pressing problems of efforts aimed at stopping drug addiction. There is a need to establish how money obtained from the narcotics trade is laundered and determine methods for halting this process; a need to develop methods for examining controlled deliveries, documenting them and obtaining evidence which could determine guilt of the involved parties. The research center could work out methods for carrying out searches and other actions to uncover illegal drug operations and actions of those guilty, including sponsors, leaders and members of organized crime groups. The research center could summarize international experience in combating drug addiction, including school and out-of-school psycho preventive education for minors, preventive measures among population groups considered to be at a risk, and educational and preventive activity by means of mass media.
Special attention should be paid to law-making measures devoted to combating drug addiction. It is expedient to include in the national program provisions regulating legal drug turnover, regulations for the treatment, and rehabilitation of drug addicts. It is necessary to develop and pass the law on the responsibility for laundering drug money ensure and to treatment of drug patients grown drug-bearing plants for personal use at therapy centers or narcological hospitals, who have made, bought or kept drugs or have sown without selling them, rather than making them face criminal responsibility.
Economic and financial measures in the national program should provide for funding to actually put this program into effect. It should also ensure the functioning of the law-enforcement agencies engaged in the anti-drug programs, of narcological institutions and drug control services, as well as support for persons who use fields where drug-bearing crops had been cultivated earlier but later destroyed. Also the program should develop provisions about the application of financial measures against the laundering of drug money.
When it comes to organizational measures, it would be expedient to single out purely organizational and also informational, analytical, and material- technical ones.
It seems that priorities of the program should be to strengthen subunits of the law enforcement agencies, and of narcological centers, specializing in programs against drug abuse; to set up drug control agencies, encourage anti-drug programs by the greatest number of agencies, organizations, and mass media. The priority is promoting cooperation between all agencies and organizations engaged in combating drug abuse; in establishing a research center for studying problems of combating drug addiction, in training and up-grading the qualifications of specialists, expected to work in their field; and in setting up a data bank on drug addiction.
All of the above listed informational, analytical and technical measures should be included in the national program to combat drug addiction in the Russian Federation. A special fund needs to be started to support such projects as building medical institutions, a study center, and the law enforcement agencies furnished with the most modern equipment.
This system of measures to combat drug abuse examined here with the ranking of these measures, will make it possible to set specific deadlines for putting stipulated provisions into practice and will define the responsibility for their implementation, if this system becomes a part of the national program. The time frame for the implementation of this extensive program should be no less than 3 years with annual reports from all those involved. This will help ensure a more effective realization of all its provisions.
This system and the classification of measures against drug abuse indicate how difficult and complicated the job of combating drugs is. It calls for much effort, constant improvement and a considerable resources.
Chapter III. Drug Abuse in the International Law
Par. 1. International Fora and Legal Acts on Drugs
Legal measures figure prominently in the system of actions aiming to combat drugs. It is precisely the legal acts that determine the object, the subject of narco-crime and influence the shaping of measures of preventive-educational and curative interference, as well as the range of drug-related actions, considered dangerous to the public.
Measures against drug abuse rest, first and foremost, on a number of international law acts ratified by the Supreme Soviet of the former USSR. These acts have different names: treaty, pact, convention, agreement, protocol, declaration and so on. From the juridical point of view, the difference in names is of no principal importance. No clear-cut criterion for the use of these names has been worked out in international practice. In each particular case, this question is resolved by the parties (countries) to negotiations, who agree on the definition of relations between them in this or another special field.
Actions against drug abuse are regulated by international law because they involve international relations, as they touch upon the interests of not one but, sometimes, of many countries. As for narco-crimes, they encroach upon the international cooperation, violate human rights, and state interests.
All crimes bearing international nature and coming under the norms of international criminal law, can be divided into two groups by the degree of their danger to the public, and the forms of manifestation: crimes of international character.
International crimes are those posing the biggest threat to the development of peaceful relations and cooperation between nations regardless of their social, political and government systems. They include heinous crimes against peace and security of the mankind, such as aggression, genocide, biocide, ecocide or apartheid.
Crimes of International Character:
Crimes of international character are defined as those covered by the international law but not belonging to the category of crimes against peace and security of mankind, rather those infringing upon normal relations between countries and damaging their peaceful cooperation in various fields, as well as infringing upon relations between organizations and citizens. These crimes are much less dangerous and are hard to compare to crimes against the peace and security of mankind. They are punishable "in accordance with the norms covered by the international agreements (conventions), ratified in the proper order, or by the national criminal codes which conform to these agreements."
Various areas of inter-state relations are the objects of crimes of international character. This factor makes it possible to divide these crimes into four rather relative sub-divisions:
1) Crimes that infringe upon the peaceful cooperation and normal conduct of international relations (terrorism, hijacking and other crimes);
2) Crimes that damage in a variety of norms international economic, social and cultural development, such as smuggling, illegal emigration, counterfeiting and dissemination of narcotics through illegal trade;
3) Crimes that against property, moral values, and rights of individuals, such as trafficking, piracy, pornography and other crimes covered by international conventions and agreements;
4) Other crimes of international character, such as crimes committed on board of aircraft, damage to underwater cables, collision of ships and the failure to provide help at sea etc.
This classification rules out an identical approach to crimes that are crimes against humanity, and crimes that are of international character. This classification allows to examine them in conformity with the set of laws they infringe upon and in conformity with the extent of harm they do to international relations. Moreover, this classification largely helps prevent any broader interpretation of the notion of international crimes.
The categories - listed above of these are not something permanent, as these crimes are of the changeable and dynamic nature. The extent of danger they pose can move them from one category to another. At present any crimes encroaching upon the vital interests of all nations and countries can be considered as international crime or crime of international character.
Virtually all countries recognize the need to combat international crimes and crimes of international character, including the illegal dissemination of and trade with narcotics. The binding nature of this effort stems from the universally recognized principles of international law, including the international duty of all countries to maintain peace and promote security of all nations, as well as to hold persons guilty of committing crimes against the peace and security of mankind and other crimes of international character accountable for their actions.
All international legal acts against drug abuse can be divided into general and specific. General acts regulate various types of international relations, particularly, those formed in connection with actions against international crimes and crimes of international character, including the dissemination of and trade with drugs. Specific acts of international law bear direct relation to actions against drug abuse and its most dangerous aspect- narco-crime.
General Acts of International Law:
General acts of international law lay the legal foundation for cooperation among nations, in actions against international crimes and crimes of international character, the dissemination of narcotics among others. One of these acts is the UN Charter. Its Preamble urges all UN members to join in a common effort to maintain international peace and security. The UN Charter stresses the need to use international machinery for promoting the nations' economic and social progress and sets the goal "to practice international cooperation in resolving international problems of economic, social, cultural and humanitarian nature and in encouraging and promoting respect for human rights and basic freedoms for all regardless of race, sex, language and religion"