In November 2025, DruGS Program affiliate Professor Kate Seear (Deakin University) presented a TEDx Talk as part of The Science of Us event hosted by Deakin University in Melbourne. Entitled The War on Drugs: A Global Failure, Professor Seear explored not only the inordinate human harms caused by efforts to enforce drug prohibition globally, but the planetary damage done in its name.

Counter to perceptions that drug policies are a niche issue, Professor Seear reminded the audience that half of all Australians have used an illicit drug at least once. In this sense, the War on Drugs shapes many more lives than those usually presented in news and popular media about the production and consumption of various drugs. As a lawyer, Professor Seear examined the legal implications of this policy failure, noting that 34 countries still impose the death penalty for drug offences – despite this practice being prohibited under international law. As she succinctly put it ‘we break the law in order to enforce it’.

Given the racist origins of the War on Drugs and its enormous human toll, it is often referred to as a war on people who use drugs, rather than drugs themselves. However, Professor Seear’s presentation challenged the audience to think of the War on Drugs as a ‘war on the planet itself’. Using the ecological destruction caused by attempts to eradicate the coca plant in Colombia as a case study, the presentation demonstrated the environmental impacts of prohibition efforts – causing harm not only to people (regardless of whether they consume drugs) but riverways, lakes, ponds, forests and soil.

As Professor Seear argued, a key implication of this analysis is that we must rethink our efforts to govern drugs in ways that do not so routinely place humans at the centre. While it is humans who have transformed some things into ‘drugs’ and designated them as evil objects, efforts to destroy them harm not only people and culture, but the ecosystems that sustain life itself.