Earlier this year, world leaders agreed on a landmark resolution to review the global drug policy regime during the 68th session of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna. For more than six decades, international drug policy has been largely shaped by the U.S.-led “War on Drugs,” which has prioritized strict controls and punitive enforcement.
Now, there is increasing global recognition that existing policies have failed. Both drug production and consumption are higher than ever. In 2023, 316 million people consumed illegal drugs worldwide, a 22 percent increase from a decade prior. Cocaine is the fastest-growing illicit drug market, and nowhere has it grown faster than in Colombia. Between 2014 and 2023, coca cultivation in the country—which supplies 67 percent of the world’s coca—surged by 266 percent, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
As the failures of prohibitionist policies have become more apparent, alternative approaches are gaining ground. Colombia, in particular, is trying to flip the script by spearheading global action for drug policy reform.
Yet whether Bogotá can transform the rigid U.N. drug system remains uncertain. Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first avowedly leftist president, has pushed a progressive drug policy abroad. But he relies on the United States for counternarcotics aid and security cooperation, and this week, Washington decertified Bogotá as a drug control partner for the first time in nearly 30 years, with U.S. President Donald Trump saying that it is “failing demonstrably” in its counternarcotics efforts.
Although U.S. assistance to Colombia will continue to flow for now, the decision marks a low point in bilateral relations and weakens Colombia’s credibility abroad. With just a year left in office, a poor relationship with his U.S. counterpart, and right-leaning candidates gaining force at home, Petro’s leadership on international drug reform could prove ephemeral.
The U.N. resolution, introduced by Colombia and adopted by 30 member states in Vienna in March, establishes a panel of 19 independent experts tasked with evaluating and developing recommendations for global drug control. World leaders will discuss the panel’s results at U.N. sessions starting in 2026—a potential inflection point for the current system. Drug policy experts hope the recommendations will lead to decriminalization of more drugs.
Petro’s government, for its part, has made statements in favor of the legalization of cocaine globally, and Petro has argued that the drug is only illegal because it comes from Latin America. His government has petitioned to remove the coca leaf from the U.N. narcotics list and advocated for more public health and human rights considerations in global drug policy.
Although Colombia has positioned itself as a moral authority on the issue, its petitions run up against prohibitionist states—above all the United States, whose status as one of the largest donors to the U.N. drug bodies gives it disproportionate sway. Colombia’s calls for global decriminalization and coca destigmatization have elevated its voice in the debate, but not necessarily its ability to set the rules.
Still, the resolution marks the most significant in a series of largely unsuccessful Latin American attempts to reform global drug policy. Bogotá has a long track record of such efforts. “For decades, Colombia has been at the forefront of challenging the international drug control regime, given the high cost it has paid for the global war on drugs,” said Ann Fordham, director of the International Drug Policy Consortium. She explained that thousands of Colombians have been killed in violence linked to the drug trade and the criminal groups it bankrolls.
Alongside Mexico and Guatemala, Colombia called for the 2016 U.N. General Assembly special session on the global drug problem. Last year, Colombia led a statement on behalf of 62 countries calling for reform of the international drug policy framework and ensured the inclusion of the term “harm reduction”—measures to reduce the health risks of drug use, such as access to treatment and clean syringes—in a U.N. resolution on overdose prevention.
Colombia now appears to have gained more traction. Petro has been more vocal on global drug reform than any other Colombian president while in office. Aside from the U.N. resolution, in April, Bogotá hosted the Harm Reduction International Conference—the second one held in Latin America since its start in 1990. As one of the few countries with a supervised consumption room, Colombia is charting the course for harm reduction in the region.
Former Colombian presidents such as César Gaviria and Juan Manuel Santos have also adopted more progressive positions on drug policy since leaving office; both have joined the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a body advocating for a human rights-based approach to the issue. “I learned from experience to change my stance from hard line to a more pragmatic stance on drugs,” Santos told Foreign Policy. “This global war on drugs, and Colombia’s war on drugs, is not working.”
According to Santos, “As long as the United Nations conventions are not changed, the problem will continue.” He suggested that “the market be regulated to strip the cartels of their profits, and that the state uses those resources to implement social policies and prevention policies instead.” He added that even with drug legalization, governments should continue to strengthen security cooperation and combat criminal groups.
“Petro’s discourse on this issue is the correct one,” Santos said, but “what this government says generally does not translate into what it does.”
Indeed, Petro’s drug agenda faces mounting challenges at home. At a personal level, the president is embroiled in scandal after his former foreign minister, Álvaro Leyva Durán, claimed that Petro has a drug addiction. (Petro denies the allegations.) Interior Minister Armando Benedetti has admitted to past substance abuse. And Petro’s offhand remarks, such as cocaine being no worse than whiskey, risk undermining the seriousness of his administration’s efforts. Petro’s approval rating, meanwhile, hovers around 30 percent.
Petro is also navigating conflicting domestic and international pressures. Despite advocating a progressive drug policy abroad, he has turned increasingly hard line at home. “If you’re looking for consistency in Petro’s drug policy, you won’t find it,” said Ana María Rueda, a drug expert at Fundación Ideas para la Paz, a Colombian think tank.
Until recently, Petro did not see hectares of coca eradicated as a measure of the government’s success. Instead, he targeted drug traffickers through seizures of cocaine and focused on negotiations with criminal groups through his “Total Peace” plans. In March, however, his government reverted to older methods by introducing a crop substitution program, offering farmers around $300 per month to replace coca with alternative crops. Similar programs under past governments have had poor results, sometimes even exacerbating coca cultivation. “We need to substitute economies, not just crops,” said Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s former environment minister.
In April, Petro announced plans to restart manual fumigation to eradicate coca crops—a practice he had promised to avoid. In early September, following the kidnapping of 45 soldiers in the coca-producing Cauca department, Petro went further: He said he may reinstate aerial spraying—which the Santos government ended in 2015—in places “where citizenry attacks the army.” Both practices come with significant health risks.
The inconsistencies between Petro’s domestic and international postures are largely explained by the United States’ leverage as Colombia’s top trade partner, aid donor, and military ally. With relations between Petro and Trump already strained—partly culminating in a social media fallout that implied threats of up to 50 percent tariffs on all Colombian imports and visa restrictions—the specter of U.S. decertification put further pressure on Petro. “The only thing they [the United States] want is eradication,” Rueda said.
The last U.S. decertification of Colombia in the 1990s only served to strengthen the criminal groups, consolidating their power rather than weakening it, according to Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, director for the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America.
As Santos put it: “These criminal organizations and multinationals are more powerful and more effective than many governments. And if there is no collaboration among governments and police—and in this the United States could help a lot—then organized crime will win the battle.”
As long as the prohibitionist global drug policy regime remains, Colombia will have to continue combating coca domestically, said Laura Gil, Colombia’s former ambassador to Austria and the U.N. Colombia may want a different global drug policy, “but we cannot do it alone,” she said.
Despite Colombia’s decertification, there is still hope for global drug policy reform. Having lost U.S. support, Petro may now pursue some of his more progressive drug policies at home, too. Even within the U.N., some organs and actors are becoming more critical about the current drug control system. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, has repeatedly asserted that the War on Drugs has done more harm than good. This week, the U.N. Development Program published a discussion paper highlighting how punitive drug policies negatively affect development. “It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to have this panel reevaluate the global drug system,” Fordham said.
Gil, a key architect of the resolution, also has high hopes. She recounted the behind-the-scenes diplomacy that made the establishment of a review panel possible. “We created a Rum Club,” she said, with drug experts from 12 countries discussing ways forward. Gil brought Colombian rum. She explained that there were no ambassadors at first, “because diplomats cannot brainstorm and think out of the box.” Over time, more countries wanted in. The group evolved into what she called “a small institution” in Vienna, formally known as the Alliance for Change.
Gil said that even the ambassador of Singapore, which has one of the world’s most stringent drug laws, told her, “You revolutionized Vienna.”
Yet drug policy continues to divide countries. European nations such as the Netherlands and Portugal have embraced less punitive models, but tensions persist between drug-producing and drug-consuming countries over what reform should entail. “European countries understand that this [the current drug policy] is not the way forward,” Gil said. By contrast, the United States, joined by Argentina and Russia, opposed this year’s resolution on reforming the drug control system. “The U.S. is silent or hard line, but never progressive,” Rueda explained.
According to Fordham, the diplomatic environment has shifted dramatically. Rising anti-U.S. sentiment has fueled new alliances, including those among China and European countries.
But while expectations are high, another possibility is that not much will happen. “This doesn’t mean that we’re ready for new regulation,” Gil conceded. She added that this is just the beginning of discussions and that there are no guaranteed outcomes of the review panel.
And any success could be short-lived. Rueda warned that progressive leadership “comes and goes,” and that next year, Colombia is likely to have a conservative government—in which case, she said, “it could all fall apart.”
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