Striving to live in peace with drugs: Colombia’s efforts to shift drug policy
Arriving in Bogotá at the Harm Reduction International Conference, I felt the threads of my life weave together in a way I hadn’t expected. I’ve spent years working in harm reduction in Canada while maintaining deep ties to Colombia, where much of my family still lives. But I saw something revolutionary during my recent visit: a nation once synonymous with the war on drugs now leading the global charge toward a more compassionate and pragmatic approach.
The cost of failure
Colombia has had a long and complex relationship with drugs, one fraught with pain and grief. For decades, the U.S.-backed war on drugs prioritized military force over public health and punishment over prevention. Coca farmers were treated as enemies and people who use drugs as criminals. Aerial fumigations of crops poisoned land and water, displacing rural communities while failing to curb drug production. Military crackdowns fueled violence, leaving hundreds of thousands dead or disappeared, and millions more internally displaced, with little effort to dismantle the criminal networks that profit from trafficking. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities – already marginalized – have borne the worst of it: their livelihoods destroyed, their leaders targeted.
The Harm Reduction International Conference drove home a hard truth: prohibition didn’t just fail, it made everything worse. Claudia Lopera, a social activist, spoke about the ecological and reproductive violence experienced by campesino communities in the interior as a result of aerial fumigations of coca production, leaving lands uncultivable, disrupting livelihoods and damaging ecosystems. Women from these communities face long-lasting health and fertility issues. Luz Mery Panche Chocue, an Indigenous Nasa leader, highlighted the cultural importance of the coca plant in Amazonian Indigenous communities, calling it a gift of nature that should not be criminalized. She condemned the racialized war on drugs for disproportionately targeting Indigenous communities – who have long protected their land through collective land agreements – and the right to traditional cultivation, which was disregarded during the war on drugs. “If there is no peace with the land, there is no peace for anyone,” she told us. The message was clear: the war on drugs was never about safety, it was about control.
Reimagining drug policy
But Colombia has made unprecedented strides to break away from this failed approach to drugs. In recent years, it has pioneered a new model – one that increasingly treats drugs as a public health and economic development issue rather than a military or criminal one. Personal consumption of substances has been decriminalized for 30 years, but that was just the start. Today, as part of the post-conflict reform with the implementation of the peace agreements, the country’s national drug policy framework explicitly prioritizes life over punishment, focusing on harm reduction, rural development and racial justice.
What does that look like in practice?
- Pioneering harm reduction programs: Colombia is the only South American country with needle syringe programs, opioid agonist therapy (OAT) and drug checking programs. In 2023, Bogotá opened the continent’s first supervised consumption site, where people can receive harm reduction information and supervision to help them use drugs more safely.
- Decriminalizing farmers: Instead of eradicating coca crops, part of the Colombia post-conflict reform is to offer farmers legal livelihoods, by developing voluntary eradication and substitution of coca crops, recognizing that poverty is what drives participation in the criminal networks that profit from trafficking.
- International leadership: At the United Nations, Colombia pushed through a landmark resolution in 2024 recognizing the importance of harm reduction – a first in global drug policy, and has since called for an independent review of the international drug control system.
From prohibition to harm reduction
One of the most striking moments of the conference came from former President Juan Manuel Santos, a man who once escalated the drug war as defense minister, before his presidency where he led a multi-year process leading to a peaceful resolution to the armed conflict. Now a Nobel laureate and advocate for reform, he didn’t just admit failure on the war on drugs, he has dedicated his leadership at the Global Commission on Drug Policy towards full legal regulation. “We paid the highest cost in deaths and sacrifices,” he said. His transformation mirrors Colombia’s: from blind adherence to U.S. dogma to a homegrown, evidence-based approach.
Lessons for the world
Colombia’s journey matters far beyond its borders. In Canada, where I work with CATIE, more than 50,000 people have died from opioid toxicity since 2016. This is a crisis fueled by the same prohibitionist thinking that ravaged Colombia.
Colombia shows there’s another way. By centring human rights and public health over punishment, and by listening to affected communities instead of silencing them, it’s proving that real peace isn’t the absence of drugs, it’s the presence of justice.
As I left Bogotá, I thought of the mural I’d seen in Acción Técnica Social (ATS), a local harm reduction organization which opened South America’s first consumption room and led advocacy efforts for national drug policy reform. The mural says: coca regulada, paz garantizada (“Regulation of coca guarantees peace”). It isn’t just a slogan; it’s a roadmap. For Colombia, for Canada, for every nation trapped in the cycle of criminalization and death, the path forward starts with one idea voiced by Colombia’s Ambassador to the UN Laura Gil: “We must learn to live in peace with drugs.”
If not, we will keep dying at war with them.
Melisa Dickie is director of hepatitis C and harm reduction knowledge mobilization at CATIE.