Alex Wodak says conference in New York is ‘the last big international forum before global drug prohibition collapses’

The president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, Dr Alex Wodak, has questioned Australia’s attendance at a meeting of UN member countries to debate global drugs policy later this month, describing the conference as “the last big international forum before global drug prohibition collapses”.

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The special session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGASS) on the world drug problem is being held at UN headquarters in New York from 19 to 21 April. It follows the failure of member countries to achieve a UNGASS goal set in 1998 for a drug-free world by 2008 by following a war-on-drugs approach.

While some member states have now acknowledged the war on drugs has failed, others, led by Russia, are still pushing a hardline punitive approach to drug crimes.

With the meeting less than a fortnight away, the Australian government was unable to confirm to Guardian Australia by Friday morning which politicians, stakeholders and drug experts would comprise the Australian delegation, or what their policy platform was. But Wodak described attending the conference as “a complete waste of government money”.

“I don’t think Australia will be listened to at UNGASS,” said Wodak, who has been invited to attend the conference by the Thailand government but is not part of their official delegation.

“We’re not going to see anything of what Australia would want to see. What should happen, in an ideal world, is a clear and explicit statement that the path the international community has taken for the past seven decades in response to illicit drugs hasn’t achieved its objectives. In fact, the drug control strategy has been counterproductive and there have been very serious, unintended consequences of that approach.”

Wodak said it was likely the member states would approve the resolutions from last month’s UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, a document largely influenced by Russia that, as a result, led to recommendations for drug reform being watered down so much that they were almost rendered ineffective.

Countries like Australia should move away from trying to reach a global consensus on drugs and instead pursue their own, evidence-based drugs policies, Wodak said.

“If a majority of voters in California support taxing and regulating cannabis on 8 November 2016, as seems very likely, then this will be much bigger than UNGASS,” Wodak said. “About half a dozen other US states will also vote to tax and regulate cannabis on the same day. The US is saying ‘well, you can do what you like but we’re going to go our own way’ and Australia will increasingly do the same.

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“Up until now member states, including Australia, have been trying to maintain an international consensus about how to approach drugs but it’s clear now that international consensus is irretrievably broken and the fractures are multiple, deep, severe and irreparable. We can’t go back to pretending there is some kind of international agreement.”

While Australian state, federal and territory governments have refused to unanimously endorse evidence-based, harm-reduction approaches such as drugs testing at music festivals and medically supervised injecting rooms (only one injecting room exists in Australia, in NSW), leaders are increasingly acknowledging that the war on drugs has failed.

In 2014 the then prime minister, Tony Abbott, said that the war on drugs was “not a war we will ever finally win”. However, he also said that “you may not ever win it but you’ve always got to fight it”.

The assistant health minister, Fiona Nash, has previously said Australia can not “arrest our way out” of the ice problem, while a report on ice led by the former Victoria police chief commissioner Ken Lay recommended rehabilitation programs, rather than law enforcement, as a focus. The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has said while a strong response from law enforcement was critical to addressing drugs issue, it was impossible to “arrest our way to success”.

But the Harm Reduction Australia president, Gino Vumbaca, said there was a risk that while countries like the US and Portugal continued to move forward with drugs reform, Australia would remain stagnant because of its failure to back up its rhetoric on the failure of the war on drugs by introducing reforms.

“The countries opposed to harm reduction and prevention tend to be Russia, Iran and China, who believe law enforcement should be the dominant feature of drugs policy, while Australia doesn’t really say anything at all,” Vumbaca said.

“What we keep hearing is we can’t arrest our way out of this problem but we’re not seeing any policy movement on that to reduce the number of people being arrested and charged for offences like possession.”

He said there had been no transparency around Australia’s delegation to UNGASS or what Australia would be advocating for once there.

“It will cost hundreds of thousands for the delegation to go there for a week in New York, so why can’t we get answers for how many bureaucrats are going and what they expect will be the outcome?” Vumbaca said.

Dr David Caldicott, a Canberra-based emergency medicine specialist with an interest in illicit drugs, described the UNGASS meeting as “the most important global drug summit of the decade”.

He disagreed with Wodak that it was a waste of time and money.

“I think it is our duty to advocate for significant change in global drugs policy,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter how overwhelming the opposition appears to be. I think it is very important that we speak truth to power wherever we can. We haven’t seen a great deal of pressure from Australia publicly towards countries like China and Indonesia about the death penalty when it affects non-Australians but we must look beyond out own citizens and push a broader, civilised position towards drugs policy.”

UNGASS was an opportunity to do that, Caldicott said.

However, he added that “we’re not seeing a great deal of science-based drugs policy being done in Australia” and that it was up to drugs researchers and experts who formed part of the Australian delegation to UNGASS to advocate for evidence-based drugs policy on a global stage.

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“We still have huge amount being spent on sniffer dogs, facile arguments being made against drug testing at music festivals so that people can actually know what it is they’re taking, and there is a huge dissonance between the rhetoric from experts and truly trying to implement evidence-based policy,” Caldicott said.

“The sort of policy Australia should be embracing are in the Canberra declaration on illicit drugs from the Australian drugs summit, signed off by Australian researchers but which politicians in a position to implement policy have not taken on board.”

Among many measures, the declaration calls for personal illicit drug use to be viewed as primarily a health issue, not a criminal issue, and for the removal of criminal sanctions for personal drug use to be evaluated.