Ahead of UN Global Drugs Summit, Experts Debate the Past and Future of Drug Policy
WARSAW—Ahead of a UN summit on global drug policy, international experts will gather in Warsaw on March 5 to evaluate the last ten years of drug policy around the world and its consequences, and make recommendations for the future.
The UN High Level Segment of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, to be held in Vienna on March 11, will decide the next 10 years of international drug policy. The last such meeting took place 10 years ago under the slogan "A Drug-Free World—We Can Do It!"
The Warsaw conference is jointly organized by the Open Society Institute Global Drug Policy Program, Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, Se-ma-for, Social AIDS Committee (SKA), Polish Drug Policy Network, JUMP '93, and Liberation.
The event will also serve as the premiere of an animated film on drug policy produced by the Oscar-winning film studio Se-Ma-For, in cooperation with the Global Drug Policy Program. Its creators are two young artists—Anna Blaszczyk and Paulina Majda—who have received multiple awards at international festivals.
"In this film we show the paradoxes of global drug policy. There are scenes concerning the violation of human rights in Vietnam and China, where people accused of drug use end up in labor camps; and there are many more of these absurdities and human rights violations," said Paulina Majda.
Representing a drug-producing country will be Daniel Mejia Londono, a Colombian economist researching the costs of the "war on drugs." His recent report, co-authored with Pascual Restrepo, evaluates the economic effectiveness of Plan Colombia, a joint military alliance set up by the U.S. and Colombia to combat illegal drug production and trafficking.
Mejia Londono and Restrepo conclude that targeting drug trafficking is much more effective than targeting drug production. Despite billions of dollars spent in recent years on combating illegal drug production and trafficking, the production of cocaine decreased by only 6.5% between 2000 and 2006. The amount of cocaine reaching consumer countries has stayed the same, while cocaine use has actually risen in Europe.
Aleksander Tsekhanovich, founder of the Humanitarian Action Fund, will analyze the situation in Russia, a country with over two million HIV-positive people, the majority of them infected through drug use.
As the drug problem exploded in Russia during the nineties, the Humanitarian Action Fund (formerly known as Doctors of the World) set up the first harm reduction program in Russia, including needle exchange.
Results from a public opinion poll on drugs conducted in seven EU countries will be presented by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union representative in Poland, Agnieszka Sienawska, and commented on by leading Polish sociologist, Professor Ireneusz Krzeminski.
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