By Khalid Tinasti, Advisor, Joint Action on Drug Elimination (JADE), and member of the UN Expert Panel for the strengthening of the international drug system
Vienna International Center’s, home to the United Nations entities based in the Austrian capital, white corridors are not designed to convey urgency. And yet, sitting in Plenary Hall as the 69th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND69) opened on March 9, the stakes were difficult to ignore. More than 180 member states. Five days of negotiations. And a synthetic drug crisis that continues to claim tens of thousands of lives each year while the multilateral system works, sometimes painfully slowly, to keep pace.
I attended CND69 both as an adviser to the Joint Action on Drug Elimination (JADE) at PAX sapiens, and as a newly appointed member of the UN Expert Panel tasked with contributing to the 2029 international drug policy commitments. What follows are reflections on what this session suggested about where the international drug control architecture stands, and where the most consequential work remains to be done.
First came the national statements. These inevitably reflect domestic political conditions as much as diplomatic strategy. This year was no exception. Several delegations framed the synthetic drug crisis in explicitly bilateral terms, emphasizing the responsibility of source countries for precursor chemical flows and calling for stronger enforcement action upstream.
These concerns are legitimate and well-documented. The CND’s decisions to schedule additional precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of synthetic drugs, conducted over the last decade, represents a meaningful step forward, building on recommendations from the International Narcotic Control Board’s ongoing precursor monitoring work. Yet the scheduling system faces a structural limitation that no single decision can resolve. Illicit chemists adapt, molecules are modified, and the regulatory framework must perpetually catch up. We are reactive and not proactive. The challenge is not the absence of political will; it is the architecture of a system designed for a more stable chemical landscape than the one the synthetic drug crisis has created.
Furthermore, attributing responsibility is not the same as building the conditions for cooperation. The multilateral system requires both. This instantly reminds me of JADE’s founding premise that durable progress on synthetic drug precursors requires a trusted and neutral forum, one that can advance pragmatic, operational cooperation in spaces where political sensitivities might otherwise foreclose dialogue. That premise felt more relevant this week, not less.
Second came the most consequential development of CND69. On March 12, the Commission finalized the establishment of the new UN Expert Panel to contribute to the 2029 international drug policy review and new commitments (the successor to the 2019 Ministerial Declaration and the landmark 2016 UNGASS outcome document). I am honored to serve on it, and I want to be direct about what I believe is at stake regarding synthetic drugs.
The 2029 political agreement will set the normative architecture for drug control for the decade that follows. If it embeds synthetic drug precursor accountability (including supply chain transparency, Know Your Customer standards for the chemical industry, and measurable enforcement benchmarks), those priorities will shape national legislation, UN technical support programming, and bilateral cooperation frameworks for years.
I count highly on JADE’s research and stakeholder engagement over the years, which has been oriented precisely toward this moment, to feed my thinking and contributions to the Expert Panel.
The period between now and 2029 is the window. The work of shaping the next political declaration’s framing questions, before drafts appear and positions harden, begins now.
Third came the normative work. And the CND69 has seen three major resolutions directly related to the work of JADE negotiated and adopted. First came a resolution championed by Mexico to prevent the diversion of equipment and related materials used for illicit production and manufacture of drugs; then a resolution tabled by the United States on enhancing supply chain integrity to prevent the criminal exploitation of licit supply chains; and finally a resolution put forward by Kyrgyzstan to strengthen early warning mechanisms to enable effective responses to the emergence of synthetic drugs. Put together, these resolutions provide the international community with new tools and incentives to work closely with the private sector in securing licit manufacture, trade and shipping of chemical precursors, to use existing INCB tools to prevent equipment diversion, and to strengthen the infrastructure for early warning systems and systematic information exchange.
Finally, it would be unfair to assess a CND session solely by the resolutions it produces. The Commission’s formal outputs represent one layer of the international drug control system. Equally important, and less visible, is the work of building the relationships, shared frameworks, and mutual understanding that make operational cooperation possible between sessions. This is the space in which initiatives like JADE’s Track II are designed to operate. Governments negotiate in plenary; the conditions that make those negotiations productive are often shaped elsewhere, in bilateral technical exchanges, in industry dialogues, in the patient work of identifying where interests genuinely converge beneath the surface of political positioning. CND69 offered a useful reminder of both how far that work has come, and how much remains to be done.
I leave Vienna with three sharpened priorities where JADE is playing a central role:
- The first is to advance concrete mechanisms for industry-level voluntary self-regulation on precursor chemical exports, a key complement to the scheduling system.
- The second is to engage the UN Expert Panel process substantively and early, contributing analytical grounding on synthetic drug supply chains to a review that requires as much information as possible on this issue.
- The third is to continue providing the neutral space for dialogue that the current geopolitical climate makes more necessary, not less
