Special Section: Health, Rights, and the Future of Global Drug Control

Eric D. U. Gutierrez and Pedro Arenas 

Introduction: Starting with the people who live from prohibited crops

The 2029 global review of the international drug control system should begin where the system’s consequences are felt most sharply: in rural territories where legal markets have failed. Many peasants, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, and other rural producers would prefer to grow legal crops. But the reality they face is exclusion from secure land, credit, infrastructure, state protection, fair prices, and reliable trade. Under these conditions, coca, cannabis, and opium poppy can become among the most viable livelihoods available. They require less land, capital, inputs, weeding, and water than many legal alternatives; they can be processed locally, moved on foot, and sold to buyers willing to come to them. They provide what legal economies often deny, including cash, credit, dependable demand, and a way to survive abandonment, debt, hunger, and uncertainty.

The creation of a multidisciplinary expert panel for the review offers a rare opportunity to examine the issues from the ground up. As the panel considers enforcement, trafficking, public health, and treaty implementation, it should also ask how the international system can support people who live in, work within, or depend on the cultivation of prohibited crops, especially in developing countries where legal rural livelihoods remain fragile, underfunded, and unequal. A review that leaves these realities at the margins will repeat the system’s oldest error of treating prohibited plants as the problem while overlooking the social conditions that make them viable, necessary, and hard to abandon.

The panel now has an opportunity to shift the terms of debate. For decades, international drug control has measured crops, seizures, arrests, and enforcement outputs far more carefully than it has measured people’s lives. Hectares of coca, cannabis, or poppy are counted with technical precision, while rendered less visible are hunger, debt, displacement, land insecurity, market exclusion, militarization, and the everyday labor through which rural households keep themselves alive. A credible review must ask how a system built around control can meaningfully support people surviving on prohibited crops. It must also distinguish among growers, brokers, armed actors, financiers, transporters, and downstream beneficiaries. Above all, it must place rights-bearing rural communities at the center of reform.

The review could begin by identifying the deep misunderstandings that have too often steered the international system to punish the rural people it should have supported. We set out eight of these misunderstandings below, followed by possible responses.

Mistaking adaptive livelihoods for criminality

The first and most persistent misunderstanding is that the cultivation of illicit crops is told mainly as a story of criminality, when it is also, and often more fundamentally, a story of livelihood, survival, and adaptation in places where secure land, viable markets, infrastructure, and state protection are absent.[1] Even the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime acknowledges that illicit crop cultivation often helps small rural farmers cope with food shortages and unpredictable agricultural markets, while human rights guidelines backed by the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights insist that eradication should not proceed before viable livelihoods are in place.[2]

The phrase “drug crops” already pushes policy toward a criminal vocabulary of illicit substances, interdiction, and eradication before asking who grows it and why. A shift in language—to “prohibited crops”—situates these crops instead in rural economies generating livelihoods, while recognizing that it is prohibition that connects them to illicit markets, violence, and risk. Many poor and displaced cultivators are moved by need, not greed—choosing prohibited crops not because they are illicit or illegal but because they solve practical problems that legal markets leave unresolved. Prohibited crops are durable, mobile, high-value, and convertible into cash. Buyers often come to the farmgate. Brokers may provide credit when formal finance is absent. Transport may be organized through illicit networks where roads and legal trading channels are weak. For households on the brink of hunger, these features matter more than abstract legalities.[3] And prohibited crop economies are not just household economies; they are gendered household economies where women absorb shocks through unpaid care work, reduced meals, extra petty trading, wage labor, debt management, or migration decisions.

A review that treats prohibited crops as criminal supply before seeing rural livelihoods and the women in them will keep mistaking necessity for intent. A review that starts with rural livelihoods can ask better questions, including what makes prohibited crops dependable, what makes legal crops fragile or more logistically difficult, and what forms of support would allow families to leave illicit markets without falling deeper into hunger, debt, or displacement.

Excluding and routinely making growers invisible

The second misunderstanding is around the invisibility of the people behind the crop. Many are undocumented and unbanked and are therefore excluded from official records, programs, and protections. The growers are not an undifferentiated base—they include peasants, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, migrants, displaced families, women-headed households, land-poor tenants, and rural workers whose legal recognition and political voice are often weak. Many lack standard documents—birth certificates, IDs, voter registration, or driver’s licenses—because of extreme poverty, stigmatization, dispossession, or displacement.

Drug control programs, particularly alternative development, often work through household registration, producer associations, or formal beneficiary lists. In many cases, women are not recognized as cultivators, workers, land users, debt managers, community leaders, or rights-bearing subjects and therefore disappear from the policy frame.[4]

Naming these communities connects drug policy to human rights, peasant rights, women’s rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, territorial rights, food security, land tenure, and democratic participation. It also changes what support means. Support cannot be reduced to a crop-substitution package delivered after eradication. It must include the conditions that allow rural people to live as rights-bearing citizens, including access to land, protection from violence, infrastructure, legal markets, health care, education, participation, and freedom from criminalization for survival-based cultivation.[5] And because livelihood systems are gendered, it must be asked: Livelihoods are for whom, through whose labor, and under whose control?

Confusing state absence with selective presence

Drug policy often describes illicit crop regions as places where the state is absent. The deeper problem is selective presence: Coercive institutions arrive before roads, land titling, schools, clinics, credit, irrigation, justice, storage, extension services, and reliable access to legal markets.

Tumaco in Colombia illustrates the point. It is one of the country’s most important coca-producing areas, and it has experienced a strong state presence in military form. Yet military presence has not filled the socioeconomic and institutional vacuum many rural communities face. Security operations can destroy crops but cannot, by themselves, create a viable economy, rebuild trust, provide land security, or give farmers bargaining power in legal markets.[6]

Colombia’s experience with aerial glyphosate spraying shows the limits of coercive drug control. From 1994 to 2015, authorities sprayed glyphosate over coca-growing territories. Yet the results were never self-sustaining. Maintaining reductions required repeated spraying across vast areas, while rural communities bore the punitive social, environmental, and health costs. The lesson for the 2029 review is that a policy that must be endlessly repeated has not resolved the conditions that make prohibited crops viable.[7]

The review should therefore replace the language of state absence with a sharper diagnosis of selective presence and institutional abandonment. More enforcement cannot compensate for missing institutions; eradication cannot substitute for citizenship; development cannot be credible when it arrives after the crop is destroyed and the household is already pushed deeper into debt or hunger.

Relying on metrics that flatten social realities

A key misunderstanding lies in how success is measured. The international system still relies heavily on hectares cultivated or eradicated, quantities seized, makeshift drug laboratories destroyed, arrests made, and numbers of households enrolled in substitution schemes—figures that are easy to count but also hide the most important questions.

A human-centered review would ask whether households are more food secure after intervention, whether legal incomes have become dependable, whether women’s unpaid labor has increased or decreased, whether children remain in school, whether communities are safer, whether land tenure has improved, whether local organizations have gained voice, and whether former cultivators have real access to legal buyers.[8] These questions are harder to measure, but they are closer to what success should mean.

If the system continues to treat eradicated hectares as achievement, it will reward actions that can make poor communities more vulnerable. Destroying a field before a viable livelihood exists is not development. It transfers risk from the international system to the rural household. The burden of proof should therefore shift. The question is not about how many crops were removed but whether the people who depended on those crops are now better protected, better fed, less indebted, less exposed to violence, and more able to decide their own futures. A credible review should measure success by the security, rights, and bargaining power rural communities gain, not by how quickly prohibited plants disappear from the ground.

Seeing criminal actors only as external predators

Another misunderstanding concerns the actors who organize illicit markets. Traffickers, financiers, brokers, armed groups, and corrupt officials are often predatory. They use violence, debt, and intimidation. Yet in many crop-producing regions, they also become socially embedded. They provide credit, buy harvests, organize transport, settle disputes, employ labor, fund local commerce, and connect remote producers to wider markets.[9]

This social embeddedness does not make them benign or legitimate in a moral sense—it simply explains why they endure. Their power grows because they perform functions that licit institutions fail to provide. Removing them without replacing those functions can leave communities exposed to new armed actors, deeper insecurity, and renewed dependence on the same illicit arrangements under another name.

A credible review should therefore distinguish among cultivators, brokers, financiers, armed protectors, money launderers, political patrons, and downstream beneficiaries. Collapsing them into a single “drug economy” punishes the weakest while leaving the most powerful actors better protected.

Treating chronic crisis as temporary disruption

A sixth misunderstanding is critical: Drug policy often imagines crisis as a short disruption from normal life. For many communities living on prohibited crops, crisis is the norm. Debt, displacement, insecure land, crop failure, food shortages, militarization, low prices, weak protection, and market volatility shape everyday life year after year.

This is why the language of “survival strategies” can be too thin. Households are not only reacting to a temporary shock. They build coping economies that provide durable ways of organizing labor, credit, risk, exchange, protection, and social obligation under chronic uncertainty. Coping economies are evolving fields of interdependence through which people organize access to vital resources, distribute risks and obligations, and produce practical authority. These arrangements can keep people alive, but they can also trap them in dependence on illegal markets and coercive brokers.

Colombia’s 2016 Peace Agreement shows how quickly illicit markets reorganize when rural transformation does not keep pace with armed demobilization. When the rebel organization Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia withdrew from territories where it had regulated coca economies, the market entered a brief period of uncertainty in 2017. By 2018, however, the market was already reorganizing, with new armed and criminal actors entering and competing to control the territories, routes, rents, and populations left behind.[10] The lesson for the review is that removing or demobilizing one armed actor does not dismantle a prohibited crop economy when demand, poverty, market exclusion, and weak civilian institutions remain in place.

The review should take coping economies seriously because they reveal the social infrastructure any transition must replace. A substitution program that offers seeds without buyers, training without roads, or short-term payments without land security cannot compete with an illicit market that already provides cash, credit, coordination, and demand.

Overlooking the transition risk to legal alternatives

Alternative development rarely pays sufficient attention to transition risk—that is, the danger that poor households face when they are asked to abandon crops that provide cash, credit, buyers, employment, and protection and move instead to legal livelihoods that may take years to mature, require capital they do not have, depend on roads and markets that do not exist, or expose them to new forms of debt, hunger, and violence. For wealthier farmers, transition may be an investment decision; for land-poor households, sharecroppers, laborers, women workers, and displaced families, it can mean losing the only livelihood system that currently works.

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Alternative Development and the 2026 appendix move international drug policy in a more development-oriented direction.[11] But it remains organized around an “eradicate first, support later” sequence, approaching transition as a technical process without fully accounting for the risks it creates for poor households. A household living close to hunger cannot simply wait two or three seasons for a legal crop to mature. Furthermore, opium gum, coca paste, and cannabis are not merely harvest commodities—they function as cash alternatives, savings, collateral, and emergency insurance where formal finance is absent. Stored quietly at home, they can be sold when illness strikes, food runs out, debts must be paid, or families need to move quickly.

The task for the 2029 review is therefore to improve alternative development while also asking whether the international drug control system can support rural people without making support conditional on the prior disappearance of the crops that currently keep them alive. Support must come first, with measures to protect subsistence and enable a gradual transition to viable legal livelihoods. The 2029 review should also consider how to decriminalize small-scale cultivators through differentiated treatment, distinguish them from powerful criminal beneficiaries, and create channels for community participation in policy design and monitoring. A people-centered review must therefore ask not only whether crops were reduced but who lost income, who gained rights, who carried the risk, and who had the power to shape the transition.

Reproducing exclusion in legal markets

In recent years, there has been increased consideration of legal cannabis and coca markets as fairer alternatives to crop substitution. But their record carries a warning. In cannabis, legalization has too often opened doors for corporate capture, allowing companies with capital, lawyers, laboratories, export permits, and brands take over while traditional growers remain trapped as informal suppliers, low-paid workers, or symbolic beneficiaries. Coca faces a different but related blockage in which the leaf remains internationally controlled, burdened by the stigma of cocaine, confined to narrow domestic or traditional uses, and largely shut out of global trade. In both cases, legality has not automatically created justice. Without rules that reserve value for small farmers and traditional communities, legal markets can move crops out of illegality while leaving rural producers at the margins.

The review panel should therefore ask a practical and political question: Can the international drug control system create legal space for coca, cannabis, and opium markets that actually benefit the people who have carried the risks of prohibition? That means looking beyond permission to cultivate and asking who owns licenses, who controls processing, who captures brands and patents, who has access to credit and buyers, who sets prices, and who is protected against corporate capture, biopiracy, and criminal retaliation. A just transition would require cooperative licensing; public investment; community-based traceability; fair pricing; protections for Indigenous, peasant, and women’s rights; anti-monopoly rules; and legal-market access designed around rural producers rather than investors.[12]

Conclusion: What the 2029 review could recommend

The review should use these eight misunderstandings as a diagnostic framework. It should ask whether the international drug control system can support rural people whose dependence on prohibited crops is produced by exclusion, weak markets, insecurity, and abandonment.[13] The measure of success should be whether rural households have viable alternatives to illicit crops, supported by stronger rights, safer communities, more secure land, better market access, and greater political participation.

The review should also insist on people-centered indicators. Hectares and seizures may remain part of monitoring, but they should never stand alone as proof of progress. They must be assessed alongside food security, income stability, land rights, market access, protection from violence, access to health and education, gender impacts, ecological effects, and affected communities’ participation in decisions that shape their lives.

Finally, the review should treat peasants, women, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, and other rural producers as political subjects rather than policy targets. Their organizations should help define what support means. They should be involved in designing transition pathways, setting indicators, monitoring harms, and deciding how development, rights, and drug policy should be aligned in their territories.

The international drug control system has spent decades trying to control plants, to police territory, and to interrupt supply. The review should ask a more demanding question: Can the system help make legality livable for the rural people it has too often treated as a problem to be managed?

Prohibited crop economies will not disappear through suppression alone. They will recede only when the legal world offers secure land, dependable buyers, fair prices, credit, roads, protection, political voice, and dignity. A drug control system grounded in human rights would begin there. It would support people rather than destroy livelihoods. It would measure lives before counting hectares. It would recognize that the path out of illicit crop dependence runs through rights, citizenship, and viable rural futures.

Eric D. U. Gutierrez, PhD, is a scholar-practitioner with over 25 years of experience working with nongovernmental organizations and is currently an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Pedro Arenas is a co-founder of Corporación Viso Mutop, an organization in Colombia that promotes respect for human rights and advocates for drug policy reform.

Please address correspondence to Eric D. U. Gutierrez Email: eric.gutierrez@unimelb.edu.au.

Competing interests: None declared.

Copyright © 2026 Gutierrez and Arenas. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

References

[1]  United Nations Development Programme, World Health Organization, Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, et al., International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy (2019).

[2] United Nations Development Programme, Development Dimensions of Drug Policy: Assessing New Challenges, Uncovering Opportunities, and Addressing Emerging Issues (2025).

[3] E. Dávalos and L. M. Dávalos, “Social Investment and Smallholder Coca Cultivation in Colombia,” Journal of Development Studies 56/6 (2020).

[4] A. Zuluaga Duque, K. Seear, and R. Fomiatti, “Gender, Coca, and the Colombian Peace Agreement: The Overlooked Gendered Dynamics in Policy Implementation,” International Journal of Drug Policy 145 (2025).

[5] M. J. Cascant-Sempere, C. Dávila, and S. Vesga, “In Search of a Substitution Model for Coca in Colombia: Buffalo, Cocoa, and Coffee in Peasant Reserve Zones,” Latin American Policy 14/3 (2023).

[6] A. Caicedo-Salcedo and D. Ojeda, “Plantations and Colombia’s Agri-Military Regime,” Antipode Online (2023), https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/5_Caicedo-Salcedo-and-Ojeda.pdf.

[7] Washington Office on Latin America, “U.S.-Colombia Anti-Drug Plan Pushes Failed Policy of Aerial Fumigation” (March 6, 2020), https://www.wola.org/2020/03/usa-colombia-anti-drug-plan-failed-aerial-fumigation__trashed/.

[8] United Nations Development Programme (see note 2).

[9] E. D. Gutierrez, “Criminal Entrepreneurs as Pioneers, Intermediaries, and Arbitrageurs in Borderland Economies,” International Journal of Drug Policy 89 (2021). See also E. D. Gutierrez, “The Paradox of Illicit Economies: Survival, Resilience, and the Limits of Drugs and Development Policy Orthodoxy,” Globalizations 17/5 (2020).

[10] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Government of Colombia, Colombia Coca Cultivation Survey 2017: Summary and Factsheet (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2018).

[11] See United Nations General Assembly, United Nations Guiding Principles on Alternative Development, UN Doc. A/RES/68/196 (2013); United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Appendix to Complement the United Nations Guiding Principles on Alternative Development, UN Doc. E/CN.7/2026/L.4/Rev.1 (2026).

[12] M. Jelsma, T. Blickman, S. Kay, et al., A Sustainable Future for Cannabis Farmers: “Alternative Development” Opportunities in the Legal Cannabis Market (Transnational Institute, 2021); Transnational Institute, Legal Protection for Coca: Genetics, Human Rights, Indigenous Knowledge, Cultural Heritage and the Coca Leaf: Exploring Legal Options for Safeguards (2026).

[13] D. Mansfield, “Alternative Development: The Modern Thrust of Supply-Side Policy,” Bulletin on Narcotics 51/1–2 (1999).