“We are blind in this area,” says Carla Álvarez, a researcher and professor at IAEN, about the lack of recent studies on drug use in Ecuador. The cause, he explains, is the absence of a public institution or drug monitoring agency in the country that collects statistics on what and who uses drugs in the country. He says the guidelines that exist on the subject are based on assumptions rather than scientific evidence. “No technical decisions are made, but populist decisions.” One of the main shortcomings of this announcement is the form. Minister Vela alluded to a reform of the law in the National Assembly. However, the consumption table as such is not part of a law. In fact, ignorance of consumption in the public space, in turn, is filled with a content of punishment and punishment. In the absence of regulations or administrative penalties, drug possession in public spaces becomes a criminal problem overshadowed by police definitions of illicit drug trafficking. Therefore, the project only exploits the darkness and weak boundaries between consumption, possessions and human trafficking. After justifying this offer, the table destroyed the company.
In 2019, the Ministry of Health reported nationwide that more than 94,000 people were in emergency situations due to drug use and that more than 59,000 people had relapsed. With the takeover of the new government, the then interior minister quickly became a deputy and carried as his flag a controversial law that precisely included restricting the prohibition of drug use or consumption in the city. This time, it is the draft “Organic Law against the Use and Microtracking of Drugs” that interweaves and perfects the character of the prohibition of a “subtle” use of the administrative powers of decentralized autonomous governments; that is, within the 221 municipalities counted in Ecuador. Since this is essentially a penitentiary project, the central axis of which revolves around the deprivation of liberty of persons – which must be dealt with accordingly by the corresponding Commission for Criminal Affairs of the National Assembly or the Commission for Justice and State Structure – the initiative of the current DEPUTY Serrano was dealt with by the Committee on Autonomous Governments. Decentralization, competences and territorial organization. Thus, the transplantation of the war on drugs is a municipal matter. This law symbolized one of the strictest laws in the region. With its adoption, the integrated approach of Ecuador`s previous national laws and plans for the control and prevention of the use of illicit substances has disappeared. Bill 108 shifted the country`s focus in these areas from a focus on drugs as a public health issue to a focus on law enforcement. This was not the result of major changes in drug market trends in Ecuador, but rather as a result of the dictates of international drug control agreements and political pressure, in addition to the new funding streams offered by the U.S. government for drug control programs.
One of the most flagrant contradictions of Law 108 with the Ecuadorian Constitution is the presumption of guilt inherent in that law. In addition to the fact that drug-related offences are treated differently from other apparently similar offences and are defined as prison offences, persons charged with drug-related offences are convicted even before the hearing. “We are depriving our health of the money we spend to persecute the bad guys,” says Rodrigo Vélez, former executive secretary of Consep and also a researcher at Parametría. It is fitting that drug policy was on a heading: prohibition and greater attention to supply rather than demand. Ecuador has conducted and published eight studies on drug demand, according to the 2019 Ecuadorian Drug Policy Evaluation Report. The analysis was conducted by the OAS Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD). The country, for example, has not interviewed patients in treatment centers, patients in emergency rooms, or populations in conflict with the law. Their list is consistent with the last national drug use survey published in 2014 and the 2016 high school student survey. CiCAD used both of these studies for its 2019 report on drug use in America. In this way, it was learned that Ecuador ranks third in South America for the prevalence of cocaine use among high school students and sixth for inhalation agents (solvents, aerosols, gases and nitrites). When it comes into force, the anti-drug use project will be a rasula rasa of legal and legal reforms and guidelines regarding possession for marketing purposes or simply possession for the purpose of human trafficking. The prohibition of drug use deprives drug users of the right to the city; As a result, they are exposed to clandestineness, madness, stigmatization, violence, prosecution, criminalization and punishment.
In the name of the fight against drugs and the municipal regulation of public spaces, the law becomes a real Trojan horse because it wrongly threatens to undermine the principle of innocence within the rule of law, as well as the principle of not being criminalized for possession of illicit drugs intended for use in cities. In itself, as a theoretical framework, it reproduces a political error, as it denies the existence and rights of individuals and groups who use drugs and, at the normative level, ignores drug use as a fact and social reality. Despite the fact that the ban was challenged more than half a century ago – due to the failure of its axiom and the murderous social, economic and political effects that are still reported – it reappears in Ecuador without renewed discourse, but using the same lobbying rhetoric as the 1912 International Opium Convention. A setback that takes us back in time a little over a hundred years ago. The legal aspects of Bill 108 became the main instrument that enabled ecuadorian security forces to carry out activities funded by the United States Drug Control Assistance. However, Bill 108 also laid the foundation for the establishment of an administrative unit focused exclusively on drug issues. In particular, it demanded the establishment of the National Council for the Control of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, CONSEP. The establishment of a separate organizational unit for drug control issues was a significant change from the previous management of drug problems by the Government of Ecuador. In addition, lawyer Gustavo Chiriboga points out that the limits indicated in the table serve as a reference for the application of a criminal sanction in the event of drug trafficking, depending on the quantity marketed. Between 2015 and 2019, the country reportedly allocated $200 million a year to the fight against drugs.
In 2010, unASUR established the South American Council on the World Drug Problem, headquartered in Quito. The company has an action plan focused on demand reduction and alternative, comprehensive and sustainable development. The construction of a South American identity on this issue, one of its central objectives, has been hampered by different visions and policies between Member States. In February 2015, the launch of initiatives on the world drug problem in the region was announced. 1. What is the trend in drug laws in Ecuador? Loor wonders that there are no prevention and communication campaigns that guide the family on how to prevent and where to go. Without the participation of families in this policy, there will be little impact. In Santa Elena, he says, Parametria researched the consumption of H. There, the municipality arrested consumers and took them to another area as a “cleaner.” In the focus groups they organized, teachers asked parents to take them with them. “They have been discriminated against in schools, in the health system.”