Progress amidst fracture: reflections from the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (March 2026)

At the United Nations (UN), global drug policies are shaped by three international drug control conventions – dating back to 1961, 1971 and 1988 (UNODC, 2013). The implementation of these conventions is overseen by the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), which comprises 53 voting member states from across different regions (UNODC, 2026). The CND meets annually in Vienna, Austria, to discuss drug policy issues, decide any changes to the substances under international control and agree on a series of resolutions which aim to emphasise and strengthen collective actions on specific issues.

The latest meeting – the 69th Session of CND – was held from 9 to 13 March 2026 and produced a series of outcomes that will likely have policy implications at the national level. The meeting was attended by government officials from almost every country, as well as by around 900 representatives of civil society – including the International Drug Policy Consortium, a global network of non-governmental organisations that comes together to promote more humane drug policies. Below, we summarise some of the key headlines and reflections from this year’s CND gathering – held against a backdrop of overall global instability and crises facing multilateralism.

This year, the CND adopted five new resolutions. While not legally binding, the resolutions that are proposed, negotiated and adopted at the CND are important policy documents and capture commitments agreed by member states on various issues. Unsurprisingly, these resolutions generally reflect the political dynamics and priorities of the time – and 2026 was no exception.

The first two CND resolutions were tabled by Mexico (CND, 2026a) and the USA (CND, 2026b). Very similar in their focus and content, these resolutions aimed primarily at reinforcing the levels of control over the licit supply chain for equipment and materials to avoid their diversion towards the illicit drug market. This comes in the midst of a dramatic narrative shift towards securitisation by the Trump administration – including with the resurgence of a deeply problematic “narcoterrorism” narrative. As part of this approach, since September 2025, the USA has conducted multiple military strikes against boats suspected of drug trafficking, resulting in over 200 killings as of June 2026 (WOLA, 2026). These actions were described by UN drug policy and human rights experts as an alarming erosion of the rule of law and a blatant violation of international law (OHCHR, 2025). A number of civil society and UN human rights representatives – including the UN Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights – strongly condemned this highly punitive narrative during the CND discussions. However, only one reference to the importance of protecting human rights was added to the Mexican resolution during the negotiation stage, and none to the US text.

A third resolution concerned the implementation of alternative development approaches, which strive to substitute illegal crop cultivation with legal alternatives such as cocoa or coffee beans. Resolutions on this topic have been submitted through a partnership between Germany, Peru and Thailand every year since the 1990s. Over time, these resolutions have addressed broader development, environmental and human rights considerations. In March 2026, the new CND resolution agreed to complement the UN Guiding Principles on Alternative Development (UN, 2013) with additional guidance on key contemporary issues such as environmental protection, the rights of Indigenous Peoples and gender equality (CND, 2026c). This was the subject of much discussion at the CND and across different UN settings, as President Trump has sought to explicitly distance the USA from the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as pushing back against references to gender in any multilateral documents. Inevitably, no agreement could be reached on the resolution, and the proposing member states decided early in the week to send the resolution to a vote instead.

A fourth resolution was negotiated by Kyrgyzstan on the need to strengthen early warning mechanisms to detect and assess new synthetic drugs and their precursor chemicals (CND, 2026d).

It was the fifth CND resolution which was the most hotly contested – submitted by Finland and Norway on the topic of “integrated and coherent… public health responses” (CND, 2026e). One of the trickiest aspects of the resolution was in outlining and agreeing on what comprises a truly integrated and comprehensive public health approach – and especially the inclusion of harm reduction interventions. Harm reduction has long been a source of political tensions at the CND, and the term was only explicitly adopted in a resolution for the first time in 2024 (Fordham and Bridge, 2024). This stands in stark contrast with other UN forums, where harm reduction is more broadly accepted – including in successive Political Declarations on HIV/AIDS at the General Assembly (UN, 2021), and at the Human Rights Council, where the term was included without any caveat in its latest drug-related resolution (Human Rights Council, 2025). In this regard, the CND has lagged far behind other parts of the UN in recognising harm reduction as a key component of the right to health (Human Rights Council, 2024).

The inclusion of harm reduction in the 2026 CND resolution was hard-fought and not purely symbolic but a reflection of an undeniable (albeit slow) shift towards a more rights- and health-based approach to drug policy. However, the adopted text was significantly watered-down during negotiations: the addition of a footnote that “harm reduction is not a universally agreed concept among member states” was conceded by Finland and Norway to secure 46 votes in favour (Figure 1), compared to the 38 votes secured in 2024.

Decision-making at the CND has always been complex and multifaceted – reflecting ever-changing government positions but also wider geopolitical alliances and conflicts that transcend drug policy discussions. For over 40 years, since the early 1980s, the CND took immense pride in an established practice of agreeing on all resolutions and decisions by consensus – frequently referred to as the “Vienna Consensus”. In practice, however, this self-imposed reliance on consensus has allowed a small but vocal group of member states to block progress. This is why, for example, the term harm reduction was not agreed in any CND resolutions until 2024 due to resistance from the likes of China, Pakistan and the Russian Federation.

In reality, however, the “Vienna Consensus” was always masking fragmentation at the national and international levels (Bewley-Taylor, 2012), including the emergence of regulated recreational markets for certain drugs. The veil was finally lifted in March 2024, at the 67th Session of CND, when a resolution on overdose included the first references to harm reduction and was adopted by vote (Nougier and Cots Fernández, 2024). Since then, every CND resolution has been taken to a vote. The CND consensus has been irreversibly broken.

The 2024 resolution on overdose was actually submitted by the USA under the Biden administration, driven by the devastating impact of a domestic drug-related deaths epidemic. But the country has since performed a 180-degree turn in its policy stance under President Trump. Yet, as Figure 1 above shows, at the CND in March 2026, the USA found itself increasingly isolated – backed only by Argentina in its stubborn position against sustainable development, gender diversity and harm reduction – and even references to the World Health Organization. This “new normal” at the CND has implications for how drug policies are made and negotiated going forward, and it can be argued that this opens the door for more progressive language and agreements which will, in turn, bring greater benefits at the local level as well.

For a long time, human rights were not seen as relevant to Vienna debates and language was easily vetoed from CND resolutions because of the consensus-based decision making. This mirrored a lack of attention to drug policy from the human rights field, the two operating as “parallel universes” (Hunt, 2008). Several key issues changed this, driven largely by civil society advocacy. These included the death penalty for drug offences, which nobody could deny was clearly a human rights issue, as well as severe abuses against people who use drugs in compulsory detention centres. Over time, harm reduction also became recognised as a requirement under the human right to health. Greater attention was also given to the global lack of access to opioids for pain relief as not only a global health problem, but as a human rights crisis as well. These issues, however, were only a selection of the many ways in which drug policies can affect human rights (OHCHR, 2015).

One major challenge was the very breadth and complexity of drug policy. There was no authoritative guidance as to how international human rights law applied from production through to use. Following a global consultative process and three years of research, the International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy were launched in 2019 (HR-DP, OHCHR, UNAIDS, WHO and UNDP, 2019). Produced with support from the German and Swiss governments and endorsed by key UN agencies, the Guidelines apply contemporary human rights law to all aspects of drug policy, providing actionable guidance based on member states’ legal obligations. A key feature is that they begin not with supply and demand reduction objectives, but with human rights obligations, thereby changing the normative entry point and focus of attention. Further, they contain sections on specific groups – women, children, people in detention and Indigenous People – and provide reference guides on key themes such as health, criminal justice and development. The Guidelines themselves are backed up by an extensive legal commentary providing the normative support for each specific section (Schleifer et al., 2023).

Since their launch, the Guidelines have been influential at the national and international levels. For example, to date they have influenced policy development in Colombia, criminal justice reforms in Pakistan, judicial training in Albania, and the development of an innovative Charter on the Rights of People Affected by Substance Use in Scotland (National Collaborative, 2024). At the international level, the Guidelines were referenced in the European Union drug strategy for 2021–2025 (European Union, 2021), by numerous UN human rights mechanisms, and in resolutions of the UN Human Rights Council (Human Rights Council, 2025).

At the CND in March 2026, 58 member states signed a common statement on human rights and drug policy, condemning rights abuses in drug control and affirming the importance of the Guidelines in moving towards a human rights-based approach to drug policy (European Union, 2026). Yet opposition remains in Vienna, largely due to the critical questions of drug control and the UN drug conventions that a human rights analysis necessitates. For example, member states that retain the death penalty often voice opposition at the UN (both in Vienna and Geneva), claiming that the death penalty is a matter of domestic concern only and challenging the provenance of the Guidelines. For the past five years, meetings of like-minded member states (the “Friends of the Guidelines”) have been organised during CND sessions to share lessons about implementation. However, the Vienna-based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) still refuses to join its sister UN agencies in endorsing the Guidelines.

Amidst the fracture and tensions at the CND, one other key take-home from the March 2026 session was the creation of a new multistakeholder expert panel. Following the adoption of a resolution led by Colombia in 2025, a group of 19 independent experts from different regions has now been selected (Figure 2), including individuals from academic, diplomatic and policymaking backgrounds. The expert panel has been given a broad mandate to review “the existing machinery for the international control of narcotic drugs” and provide their recommendations for improvements and reform (CND, 2025). The panel’s independent review, therefore, has the potential to shine a light on the ongoing failings and harms of the current global drug control regime and to promote real, meaningful reforms that advance human rights, health and social justice.

The panel has been tasked to develop and present its recommendations and findings to the CND in 2027, and work is now underway towards that aim. Crucially, the resolution mandating the panel also specifically requested that they consult “with relevant stakeholders, including civil society, the scientific community, academia, youth groups, the private sector and other pertinent actors” (CND, 2025). At the time of writing, the exact nature and timeline of these consultations remains to be confirmed. However, they should offer an important opportunity for a wide range of voices to be heard – including from the international, regional, national and local levels and from practitioners, affected populations and policymakers alike (Bridge, 2026).

The last few years at the CND – where member states come together annually to debate and discuss their collective drug control efforts – have seen unprecedented fracture and tension. The collapse of a 40-year tradition of agreeing all resolutions and decisions through consensus can be seen as a direct symptom of broader geopolitical conflicts and crises in 2026. But it has also lifted the veto that some member states were holding in terms of more progressive concepts around drugs, harm reduction and human rights. International agreements and discourse on drugs can influence and shape national policies and responses, so the outcomes of the 69th Session of CND in March 2026 are of global relevance. These include a series of new resolutions, such as on the implementation of a comprehensive public health approach to drugs through prevention, treatment, harm reduction and access to medicines.

The creation of the independent expert panel to review “the existing machinery for the international control of narcotic drugs” is a timely opportunity for honest reflection and progressive reform of an outdated system. It is also a landmark moment to highlight the importance and primacy of human rights in all drug control efforts and to strive for a system that is more closely aligned to the International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy and other normative guidance. Moreover, the panel is tasked with holding consultations with civil society, academia and young people to inform their work, and this opens an important opportunity for new and diverse voices to be heard.