This side event was organised by Penal Reform International, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Czechia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Switzerland, European Union, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Corporación Centro de Estudios de Derecho Justicia y Sociedad (Dejusticia), Drug Policy Alliance, Harm Reduction International, International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), International Network of People who use Drugs (INPUD), Justice Project Pakistan, Mujeres Libres Colombia, NoBox Transitions Foundation, Skoun, Release Legal Emergency Drugs Service Limited, Students for Sensible Drug Policy International and Youth RISE.

Below is a copy of the speech delivered by EuroNPUD: For more information, click here.

Thank you, Chair. I speak on behalf of EuroNPUD – European Network of People who Use Drugs .

Dostoyevsky titled his novel Crime and Punishment – not Crime and Treatment, not Crime and Housing, not Crime and Peer Support. Perhaps if he had, we would not still be having this conversation 160 years later.

I want to thank the peers from the Global Group of Experts by Experience at Penal Reform International for sharing what they would want said here.

One of them put it simply: drug use is a symptom, not the root cause. When a court diverts someone to a treatment programme, it is responding to the visible behaviour – the use, the possession charge, the petty offence. It is rarely responding to what was there first: the trauma, the poverty, the eviction, the abuse, the lack of anything to return to. If our alternatives to incarceration are only designed to stop the visible behaviour, we are building on sand.

This is where so many “alternatives” fail in practice. When a court tells you to choose between prison and a locked therapeutic community, between a criminal record and abstinence, that is not a real choice. People lose housing, children, and jobs not because they committed a new offence, but because their continuum of drug use did not match what the system demanded. Some so-called treatment centres operate like detention facilities. Alternatives should provide genuine support – not simply shift people from one form of confinement to another.

A colleague spoke about the Drug Treatment Court – a positive step, because it focuses on rehabilitation rather than imprisonment. But the principle must hold everywhere: treatment works better when people choose to engage rather than feeling coerced. Recovery is not linear. Systems that measure success only through abstinence are designed, consciously or not, to produce failure.

The human rights framework is clear. The OHCHR, the International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy, a guidance note on Drug use in the context of HIV from UNAIDS – all point the same way: decriminalise possession for personal use, adopt proportionate sentencing, and ensure that where treatment is offered as an alternative, it is based on informed consent and free of coercive conditions. When treatment is a condition to avoid prison, consent is not free. People who are in withdrawal or afraid of losing OAT access will agree to almost anything to stay out of a cell – and we have ample evidence of police deploying exactly this tactic to make people compliant.

The consequences fall hardest on those already most exposed: people who are poorer, racialised, undocumented, women with children, people with complex mental health histories. They are more likely to be labelled non-compliant, expelled from programmes, and returned to the justice system.

So what would genuine alternatives look like?

First, ensure equitable access to housing, employment, mental health care, counselling, community. Without these, diversion may reduce recidivism on paper while failing the person completely.

Second, protect rights throughout. Surveillance, urine testing, home visits, mandatory reporting – these can become control by another name. Dignity and autonomy must be protected, not relocated from the prison wing into the community.

Third, measure success honestly. Harm reduction, stability, housing maintained, children kept safe – these are meaningful outcomes. Treating any relapse as a breach of contract punishes people for the nature of dependence itself.

Fourth, co-design with us – Penal Reform International , International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD) , EuroNPUD – European Network of People who Use Drugs , AfricaNPUD, International Drug Policy Consortium , Harm Reduction International , and hundreds of other networks. We ask the questions that otherwise get skipped.

And the elephant in the room: regulation and safe supply, and the recognition that people have used drugs for millennia and will continue to do so until our Sun explodes, could prevent many of these problems in the first place.

The question, as always, is political will – and whether those of us who have lived these systems will be trusted not just as evidence, but as architects of something better.

Thank you.

P.S. Many thanks to European Liver Patients’ Association – ELPA for providing funding to attend the 69th CND.