The issue of drugs doesn't usually get showcased at the UN General Assembly. This year is different

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Every year, tons of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs flow around the world, an underground river that crisscrosses borders and continents and spills over into violence, addiction and suffering. Yet when nations' leaders give the U.N. their annual take on big issues, drugs don't usually get much of the spotlight.

But this was no usual year.

First, U.S. President Donald Trump touted his aggressive approach to drug enforcement, including decisions to designate some Latin American cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and to carry out deadly military strikes on speedboats that he says said were carrying drugs in the southern Caribbean.

“To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America: Please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” he boasted at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday.

Hours later, his Colombian counterpart fired back that Trump should face criminal charges for allowing an attack on unarmed "young people who were simply trying to escape poverty.”

The U.S. “anti-drug policy is not aimed at the public health of a society, but rather to prop up a policy of domination,” Colombia's Gustavo Petro bristled, accusing Washington of ignoring domestic drug dealing and production while demonizing his own country. The U.S. recently listed Colombia, for the first time in decades, as a nation falling short of its international drug control obligations.

The barbs laid bare, on global diplomacy's biggest stage, the world's wide and pointed differences over how to deal with drugs.

“The international system is extremely divided on drug policy,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, who has followed the topic as a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution think tank. “This is not new, but it’s really just very intense at this UNGA.”

While the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, climate change and other crises got much of the focus in the U.N.'s marathon week of speeches and meetings, the topic of drugs turned up from Trump's and Petro's tough talk to side events on such themes as gender-inclusive drug policy and international cooperation to fight organized crime.

Some 316 million people worldwide used marijuana, opioids and/or other drugs in 2023, a 28% rise in a decade, according to the most recent statistics available from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. The figures don’t count alcohol or tobacco use.

The specifics vary by region, with cocaine use growing in Europe, methamphetamine on the rise in Southeast Asia, and synthetic opioids making new inroads in West and Central Africa and continuing to trouble North America, though opioid-related deaths have been falling.

The U.N. drug office says trafficking is increasingly dominated by organized crime groups with tentacles and partnerships around the world, and nations need to think just as broadly about trying to tackle the syndicates.

“Governments are increasingly seeing organized crime and drug trafficking as threats to national and regional security and stability, and some are coming around to the fact that they need to join up diplomatic, intelligence, law enforcement and central-bank efforts to push back,” agency chief of staff Jeremy Douglas said by email.

Although organized crime hasn't featured very prominently in top-level discussions at the General Assembly to date, he said, “we’re at a point where this needs to, and hopefully will, change.”

Nations pair up in various joint counternarcotics operations and working groups and sometimes form regional coalitions, but some experts and leaders see a need to go global.

Countries need to “pool resources in a fight that must be a common cause among all nations,” Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino told the assembly. He said his nation had seized a “historic and alarming” total of 150 tons of cocaine and other drugs this year alone.

To be sure, there is already some global-scale collaboration on drug control. The U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs decides what substances are supposed to be internationally regulated under decades-old treaties, and it can make policy recommendations to the U.N.'s member countries. The International Narcotics Control Board monitors treaty compliance.

But the U.N. is big-tent politics at its biggest, so even as some components of the world body deal with drug enforcement, others emphasize public health programs — substance abuse treatment, overdose prevention and other services — over prohibition and punishments.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has advocated for decriminalizing at least some drug use while clamping down on illegal markets. Given that policing hasn't reduced substance use or crime, “the so-called war on drugs has failed, completely and utterly,” he said last year.

Separately, a U.N. Development Programme report last week said punitive drug control had led to deaths and disease among users who shied from seeking help, racial disparities in enforcement, and other societal downsides.

At a gathering marking the report's release, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo deplored that “the global drug control regime has become a substantial part of the problem.”

“The question is: Do governments have the wisdom and courage to act?” asked Zedillo, now a Yale professor and a commissioner of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a Geneva-based anti-drug-war advocacy group.

The other question is whether they could ever agree on what action to take.

Even if countries agree — or say they do — with ending the drug trade and resulting ills, “the objectives might be different, and certain means, tools, resources they're willing to devote to them, are different,” Felbab-Brown said.

Nations' own drug laws vary widely. Some impose the death penalty for certain drug crimes. Others have legalized or decriminalized marijuana. At least one — Thailand — legalized it only to have second thoughts and tighten the rules. Countries' openness to needle exchange programs, safe injection sites and other “harm reduction” strategies is similarly all over the map.

As leaders took their turns at the assembly rostrum this week, observers got occasional glimpses of the world's different views of its drug problem.

Tajikistan's president, Emomali Rahmon, called drug trafficking “a serious threat to global security.” Guyanese President Irfaan Ali endorsed international efforts to address drug trafficking, which he counted among the ”crimes that are destroying the lives of our people, especially young people.”

Syria's new president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, noted that his administration closed factories that produced the amphetamine-like stimulant Captagon, also known as fenethylline, during his now-ousted predecessor's time. Costa Rican Foreign Minister Arnoldo André Tinoco said drug smuggling networks are exploiting routes traveled by migrants and “taking advantage of the vulnerability of those seeking international protection.”

“Isolated responses are insufficient,” as the traffickers just go elsewhere and create new hotspots of crime, Tinoco said.

Reviewing the challenges facing Peru, President Dina Boluarte listed transnational organized crime and drug trafficking alongside political polarization and climate change.

“None of these problems is merely national, but rather global,” she said. “This is why we need the United Nations to once again be a forum for dialogue and cooperation.”

Peru President Dina Boluarte addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

President of Guyana Mohamed Irfaan Ali addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith)

President of Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith)

President Donald Trump gestures with his hands as he addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis)

President of Colombia Gustavo Petro Urrego addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith)

SYDNEY (AP) — A father and son are suspected by officials to have killed 15 people on a popular Australian beach, shocking a country where gun violence is rare. The government on Monday, a day after the shootings, proposed tougher new gun laws amid criticism that officials didn't take seriously enough a string of antisemitic attacks.

Here's a look at what to know from the attack at Bondi Beach:

Little is known about the suspects in the attack on Sydney's famous Bondi Beach, but there was widespread shock when officials said that the two men pictured firing weapons in social media videos were related.

The 50-year-old father, who was killed, arrived in Australia in 1998 on a student visa, authorities said, and was an Australian resident when he died. Officials wouldn’t confirm what country he had migrated from.

His 24-year-old Australian-born son, who was shot and wounded, is being treated at a hospital

The target was a Hanukkah celebration where hundreds had gathered to celebrate the first day of the eight-day Jewish holiday. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it an act of antisemitic terrorism.

Albanese said that Australia’s main domestic spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Agency, had investigated the son for six months in 2019. The Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported that the agency had examined the son’s ties to a Sydney-based Islamic State group cell. Albanese did not describe the associates, but said the spy agency was interested in them rather than the son.

The dead included a 10-year-old girl, a rabbi and a Holocaust survivor. Dozens of others were injured, some seriously.

Police said the father held a firearms license and that he was a member of a gun club, which suggests he was a target shooter.

One dramatic clip broadcast on Australian television showed a man appearing to tackle and disarm one of the gunmen, before pointing the man’s weapon at him, then setting the gun on the ground.

The man was identified by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke as Ahmed al Ahmed. The 42-year-old fruit shop owner and father of two was shot in the shoulder by the other gunman and survived.

A wave of antisemitic attacks have shocked and angered many in Australia over the last year.

Australia has 28 million people and about 117,000 Jews.

Antisemitic incidents, including assaults, vandalism, threats and intimidation, surged more than threefold in the country during the year after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel launched a war on Hamas in Gaza in response, the government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal reported in July.

Last year, there were antisemitic attacks in Sydney and Melbourne. Synagogues and cars have been torched, businesses and homes vandalized with graffiti, and Jews attacked in cities where 85% of the nation’s Jewish population lives.

Albanese in August blamed Iran for two of the attacks and cut diplomatic ties to Tehran.

Israel urged Australia’s government to address crimes targeting Jews. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he warned Australia’s leaders months ago about the dangers of failing to take action against antisemitism. He claimed Australia’s decision — in line with scores of other countries — to recognize a Palestinian state “pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.”

Australia has strict gun control laws.

Mass shootings are extremely rare. A 1996 massacre in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur, where a lone gunman killed 35 people, prompted the government to drastically tighten gun laws, making it much more difficult to acquire firearms.

Significant mass shootings this century included two murder-suicides with death tolls of five people in 2014 and seven in 2018, in which gunmen killed their own families and themselves.

In 2022, six people were killed in a shootout between police and Christian extremists at a rural property in Queensland state.

The prime minister said he was pushing for tougher gun laws.

People leave notes at a flower tribute for shooting victims outside the Bondi Pavilion at Sydney's Bondi Beach, Monday, Dec. 15, 2025, a day after a shooting. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

New South Wales Premier Chris Minns, right, and Kellie Sloane, leader of the opposition, the New South Wales Liberal Party, lay wreaths at a tribute for shooting victims outside the Bondi Pavilion at Sydney's Bondi Beach, Monday, Dec. 15, 2025, a day after a shooting. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)