Once addicted to psychotropic substances and a serial abuser of alcohol, former Mozambique President Joachim Chissano says stringent laws and punitive jail sentences deployed currently to fight narcotics in eastern and southern Africa are a vanity, unless abusers are willing to kick the habit and given a reason to live an uncontaminated life.

Instead of deterrence laws and attendant punishment for breaking them is akin to “criminalising poverty” as majority of the convicts languishing in detention institutions are “women, young people and children” – whose role in regional economies is peripheral because of marginalisation.

The former president is now al leading voice in the push to decriminalise illicit drugs by ‘commuting’ it to a health and economic concern, and addressing it by creating employment opportunities. Fellow commissioners view illicit drugs crimes as more of a human rights issues that results from economic and social marginalisation.

Chissano, now a member of Eastern and South Africa Commission on Drugs (ESACD) is vouching for decriminalisation of drugs as a way of reducing the severity of the impact of the substances.

Speaking during the launch of a Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) in Nairobi on June 16, 2025, in Nairobi, the former president narrated how he wrestled with addiction to cigarettes and cannabis sativa despite his high office and international stature.

Chissano, former South African President Kgalema Motlante and former Mauritian President Cassam Uteem are part of a group of eminent persons driving the ESACD agenda as Africa ceases to be passive player in narcotics economy to a market, with attendant challenges are decimating populations of youth in the United States, Latin America, Eastern Europe and East Asia.

“Drugs kill early. The urge to stop smoking should be encouraged rather than criminalised. Young people should be encouraged in the fight against drug abuse. We have to find ways of engaging the government too,” says Chissano, explaining how he took the initiative to dump the habit.

The temptation to relapse into drug abuse was ever-present but he was determined to kick out the habit, he admits.

In his address at the launch of ESACD’s research finding in eastern, central and southern Africa, Final Report and Action Plan, the former president used himself as an example of how the drug menace in Africa can be tackled without accompanying stigmatisation.

The report is a product of a collaboration between Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime – an international civil society, the European Union and ESACD, which was launched in Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on June 16, 2025.

“Drugs are an external factor that abusers use to solve an internal problem,” Chissano said, while outlining the internal struggles as validation, rejection and acceptability. The retired president revealed that he kicked the habit once he realised the negative health, economic and social impact of the substances he had become addicted since his days in the struggle for Mozambique’s independence.

Instead, Chissano, a member of a group of African eminent persons that include former South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, former Mauritian President Uteem Cassam, former President Supreme Court of Kenya Willy Mutunga and African Union Special Envy for the African Medicines Agency Michel Sidibe, laws and policies intended to disrupt drugs manufacture, distribution and consumption have typically tended to criminalise poverty.

According the report, “African drug markets, and particularly ESA markets, continue to be under-researched, and the absence of evidence-based market information is often replaced by political prognostication, misguided analysis and inaccurate proxy metrics. In most countries of the region, there is no reliable determination of some of the basic marketplace denominators needed to assess a drug market, the harms it is creating or the relative effectiveness of the measures put in place to address these.”

Dr Mutunga says the punitive sentences and penalties meted out to drug offenders have had little or no impact in reversing a trend that is in tandem with ejection of the youth, women and children from the mainstream economy.

Chissano and Mutunga attribute the meteoric rise in illicit drug trafficking and consumption in Africa to politics that increasingly marginalises economically vulnerable segments of the economy – children, women and young people. Despair, they point out, creates reason to resort to drug abuse.

The report captures the sentiments and calls for a radical relook into the judicial system – a universal concern – that punitively punishes the poor but spares that the “big fish”, who finance the lucrative underworld industry.

“The arrest of smallholder farmers for illicit crop cultivations and the destruction of their meagre livelihood has impoverished innumerable rural households. National prison populations have expanded in some lacs to over-capacity levels of 250 per cent and more as state security and judicial structures have responded to the political push against the drug threat by arresting vast number of poor people for drug related crimes,” ESACD report says.

“In considering the responsibilities of state with regard to these rights we must ensure that there are policies that address the fundamental needs of the population, in particular health needs of the people who use drugs. We needs to consider how law enforcement interfaces with the needs of the people who use drugs,” Mutunga explains.

Sucked into international drug circuits as a launching-pad for narcotics destined for European and Asian markets from Latin America, Kenya has become a major dispersal point in East Africa given its status as a regional economic hub and gateway to the wider hinterland.

“Longstanding maritime trafficking channels of opiates from Afghanistan to the eastern and southern Africa seaboard are recognised as significant challenge for the region, with onward driving shipment destined for European and US consumer markets. Illicit synthetic substances such as methamphetamines accompany consignments of heroin along this supply route. Since the 1990s South Africa and Mozambique shipping ports have become key hubs in the global supply network of cocaine in South America,” EASCD reports.

GI-TOC Director Mark Shaw expressed concern that security agencies and investigators are not adjusting to rapidly changing trends in the illicit drugs industry.

“The global market of drugs is changing rapidly and the commission is aware of that. There has been debate, not only here, but generally about how the global community should respond. The changes are fast – much faster in many ways that we are capable of measuring and the impact of this change is significant and in some cases terrifying,” Dr Shaw says.

There has been rapid development in synthetic drugs, he says.

According to Shaw, “Unlike the agriculture-based cousins that are attached to soils and growing seasons, synthetic drugs can be made anywhere. They can be synthesised from a wide range industrial chemicals that are increasingly easy to acquire. We are seeing an entirely new class of entrepreneurial drug producers emerging each and every day. The rapid evolution has consequences in this sector. One of these is what w thing we know about drugs n than what we don’t know.”

The experts say drug market has a diversity new chemicals that makes it difficult to analyse the substances being used. The diversity ignores public health concerns, harm reduction and overdose concerns and drug treatment.  

Equally, it has far reaching implications for our governments and security institutions to respond the challenge of managing illicit and responding to its harm, they say.

• A Tell Media report / By Juma Kwayera