This via Talking Drugs.
As of 2025 we’ll be highlighting more articles, updates and information about general international drug policy. This is an interesting place to start
Recent debates on international drug control emphasise how colonial legacies are maintained in today’s global anti-drug agendas, with devastating consequences. Driving the discussion to under-explored regions, this recent article published in the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development calls for increased attention to this dynamic in former Soviet States, particularly Azerbaijan. Russian imperialism is rarely featured in colonial accounts of drug histories, and former Soviet states have remained marginal in historical studies of drug policy, mostly appearing in clustered regional overviews.
Azerbaijan is one such case. It was under Russian rule for almost 150 years – during the Tsar regime in the 19th century until it briefly gained independence from 1918-1920, and then under the Soviet regime until 1991. As a newly independent state, Azerbaijan attempted to navigate many competing developments: political tensions to elect a new government that arose in the early 1990s, rising nationalism (an effect of decolonisation), and aspirational Westernisation in order to gain international visibility and economic recognition. The early 1990s were marked, as Azerbaijani researcher Arif Yunusov described, by the desire to “completely dismantle the Soviet-style political system”: the country’s number one priority was maintaining territorial integrity in the face of Russian-ignited armed conflicts over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. This outlook was followed by a middle-ground foreign policy orientation which maintained visible cooperativeness with Russia while integrating into Western political and economic systems. In this constellation, subscribing to international drug control regimes might have been a tool of foreign policy agenda.
Post-independence: Drug policy as a foreign policy tool
Events forming Azerbaijan’s drug policy since independence can be split into two decades: 1999 to 2010 brought about the rise of civil society, harm reduction, and public awareness of drug use and related infectious diseases. Following this, local drug policy was increasingly adapted to meet international demands and geo-economic conditions from 2011 to 2021. During the 2000s, the country became a signatory to half a dozen UN Conventions and a member state of the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2005. Since then, more anti-drug coalitions were formed to unite efforts between Central and Eastern European and Central Asian countries.
Both decades were also marked by the introduction of foreign aid programmes and short-lived civil society organisations. However, unlike Central Asia – which has been a prominent focus of international donors and has successfully implemented harm reduction measures like opioid substitution treatment (OST) programmes – such initiatives did not gain much momentum in Azerbaijan. This was partly due to historically low prevalence rates of injection drug use and infectious diseases, which contributed to the lack of political will to finance services for people who use drugs.
The other explanation is the fact that internationally funded programmes often included measures that were not aligned with local traditional values. Basic harm reduction measures, like distributing condoms or sterile injection equipment, were not seen as acceptable practices, especially in carceral settings.
A study conducted in Baku in 2021 showed that several local factors interfered with the delivery of OST: it noted a lack of political will to accommodate for harm reduction, and a consistent questioning on whether people who use drugs deserved to be integrated in healthcare services during crises like the one created by COVID-19. The study reported that police blocked access to OST by removing anonymity from those applying for treatment; doctors refused to provide free treatment due to overbooked capacities, disregarding the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recommendations on safety and prevention.
In this example, OST did not work well with local health priorities of who deserves healthcare, despite the availability of resources and the existence of programs in state narcological hospitals. This example reiterates the question on whether Western policy measures such as harm reduction need to be better adapted to local cultural contexts, and whether alternative ways of knowing as well as thinking about who participates in producing interventions, best practices, and the empirical data used to build our knowledge.
Human rights framework: The interconnected local and global frameworks
Against this background, another key framework informing international drug policy agendas is the human rights framework, which rallies many UN member states under a common banner. A human rights approach can be used to justify certain interventions; however, it can simultaneously sanction or enforce specific norms or visions for the alliance. While this framework is mostly used to condemn draconian drug policy measures and violation of basic human rights including the right to life, it simultaneously has the potential to reinforce normative ideologies that more recent drug policy debates have tried to challenge.
Critical drug studies have highlighted the limitations of human rights-based approaches and their potential to reproduce ideas about citizenship and people who use drugs that are rooted in neo-liberal Western ideas about rationality, economical contribution, and masculinity. Human rights frameworks can be used by powerful states to alienate other countries or manipulate them for political gain – as was seen with the historical demonisation of the coca plant by the international drug control community.
Read the full article at
Azerbaijan: Between the Soviet Legacy and International Drug Control
