Introduction: 

1. The submitting organisations welcome the opportunity to provide comments on the first draft of General Recommendation N. 37 on racial discrimination in the enjoyment of the right to health.
2. Drug policy is a central element of public health. In the words of the UN special rapporteur on the right to health, access to harm reduction and other evidence-based health responses to drug use is ‘essential for the protection of the right to health of people who use drugs.’ Drug policies have been justified for decades as a means to protect ´the health and welfare’ of humankind. However, there is now undeniable evidence that the enforcement of punitive drug laws and policies has been a tool of racial discrimination in the criminal legal system, and that this has had a discriminatory impact on the enjoyment of physical and mental health of people of African descent, Indigenous peoples, and other ethnic minorities.
3. This submission provides evidence of the role of drug laws and policies as a driver of discriminatory policing and incarceration, and of how this leads to the violation of the right to be free from racial discrimination in the enjoyment of the right to health. We urge the Committee to recognise explicitly in the General Recommendation that contact with the criminal legal system is a social determinant of health, and that States have the obligation to reform criminal laws, policies, and practices with racially discriminatory outcomes - including drug-related laws, policies, and practices.