Paolo Amorosa

This research project examines how the international drug control regime – enshrined in treaties such as the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and the 1988 Convention Against Illicit Traffic – functions as a source of environmental harm. Indeed, the global governance of drug prohibition produces persistent ecological consequences: deforestation, soil degradation, chemical pollution, and biodiversity loss, driven by enforcement practices such as aerial fumigation, forced eradication, and the displacement of illicit cultivation into fragile ecosystems. The project asks how this harm becomes structurally externalized from the regime's own criteria of legality, examining three interlocking legal mechanisms: the authorization of environmentally destructive enforcement practices, the systemic omission of ecological consequences from compliance frameworks, and an interpretive closure that keeps environmental norms from being integrated into drug control. Drawing on case studies from Colombia, Afghanistan, and north-western Europe, the research further asks why the growing presence of environmental language in drug control discourse has left this structure intact, and what that persistence reveals about how specialized legal regimes decide what counts as legally relevant harm.