A new declaration from drug prevention advocates seeks to restore Article 33 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to its rightful place in global drug policy.
In 2021, more than 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses. They left behind 86,000 children. One in every 840 kids in the United States was orphaned that year alone. Over the past two decades, one in every 175 children has lost a parent or caregiver to illicit drug use.
These figures do not appear in harm reduction advocacy materials. They do not feature in the policy briefs of organisations pushing for drug decriminalisation. They are, by design, invisible.
The Eindhoven Declaration, a document emerging from the Wake Up Drug Free conference in the Netherlands in March 2025, seeks to change that. Authored by a coalition of researchers, advocates, and practitioners from across the globe, the declaration reasserts a principle that has been systematically undermined for nearly two decades: that children have a legal right to a drug-free environment.
That right is enshrined in Article 33 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The article states that governments should use all means possible to protect children from the use of harmful drugs and from being used in the drug trade. It sits alongside protections from slavery, trafficking, and sexual exploitation. The Convention is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. 196 nations have signed it.
And yet, according to Gary Christian, president of Drug Free Australia and one of the founding authors of the Eindhoven Declaration, that article is under sustained attack.
“Since 2008, a number of billionaires have been putting money into the United Nations,” Christian said in a recent interview on the Unnecessary Harm Podcast. “George Soros is on record saying he wants to get rid of any laws against illicit drug use. They’ve been targeting specific agencies within the UN and getting them to come on board with drug legalisation.”
Christian points to a 2018 injection of $19 billion from Soros into his social agendas, alongside coordinated efforts by Richard Branson and others through the World Economic Forum beginning in 2016. The target, he argues, is not just drug policy but the very framework that protects children from the consequences of adult drug use.
The statistics harm reduction ignores
The Eindhoven Declaration draws on a body of evidence that Christian and his colleagues compiled for the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. The findings are stark.
Twenty-seven per cent of American children live in a home with a substance use disorder. Ten per cent live with a drug use disorder specifically. Thirty-nine per cent of child neglect cases involve substance use. Children in drug-affected families experience sexual and physical abuse at 2.7 times the rate of other children.
Perhaps the most disturbing statistic: 75 per cent of all child sexual exploitation cases in the United States involve funding the drug use of a parent or caregiver. Fifty per cent of those sexually exploited children are suicidal.
“The harm reduction lobby says it’s just harms to the user,” Christian said. “They don’t want to talk about the rest. The partner. The children. The grandparents who end up raising the kids. The siblings. The workmates. The road users. All of these people are harmed by drugs.”
In Australia, 76 per cent of people using drugs report some form of food insecurity. Forty-two per cent report high food insecurity, meaning they often go hungry. The children in those households go hungry too.
Seven recommendations
The Eindhoven Declaration sets out seven recommendations that reject the normalisation of drug use and place prevention at the heart of drug policy.
The first recommendation states that prevention is the best form of harm reduction. This is not a rejection of harm reduction as a tool, but a rejection of harm reduction as an ideology that ignores recovery.
“Harm reduction is okay only as it leads to recovery,” Christian said. “It’s part of a continuum of care. When it’s taken out of that, it’s no longer a viable option.”
Other recommendations call on communities to take responsibility for their own protection. There is no saviour coming, the declaration argues. Policymakers will not fix this without pressure from the people most affected.
The final recommendation addresses the medical use of psychotropic substances. The declaration warns against the use of clinical trials as a Trojan horse for drug legalisation, citing ongoing efforts to position psilocybin, MDMA, and cannabis as treatments for conditions like PTSD and chronic pain that cannot be objectively measured.
The road ahead
The Eindhoven Declaration currently has around 650 signatures. Its authors want thousands.
“One of the first steps you can take is go to the ovom.org website and sign the declaration,” Christian said. “Then get other people to sign. That’s really important.”
The declaration is available to read and sign at One Voice One Message. Supporting resources, including a statistical overview of harms to children and a video explainer on Article 33, are available through the same platform.
For Christian, the stakes could not be higher.
“If our society was serious about protecting children from all of these damages, they would not be nearly as liberal as what we are here in Australia or in the US,” he said. “Prevention is the best way forward. Prevention is the key to everything.”
The full interview with Gary Christian is available on the Unnecessary Harm Podcast.
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