Well, let's talk about how drug policies around the world are organized around drug prohibition, and that principle has been carried out for almost a 100 years, not quite. It's based on three international drug treaties, 1961, 1971 and 1988. Not every country in the world has signed these treaties, about 200 countries in the world, but almost every country has signed these three treaties, there are few countries that haven't. The second point about these treaties is that the system they set up after the Second World War within the United Nations, there were a number of organizations established to develop policy, to implement policy, to monitor policy. The organization that was established to monitor drug policy, the International Narcotics Control Board, INCB, also took upon itself the interpretation of the three international drug treaties. There's some contention about whether the way they interpret those treaties is the way they should have interpreted the treaties, but in any case, most of the interpretation we have for the last 40 or more years has been by the INCB, it's not really a UN organizations or quasi UN organisation. I think it's fair to say that their interpretation has been quite rigid and very prohibitionist, it's very much emphasizing always supply control and the parts of the international treaties and emphasize the commitment that signatory countries should have, for example to providing drug treatment or respecting human rights. All of that is overlooked but the parts that had to do with reducing the supply of drugs or trying to reduce the supply of drugs are always heavily emphasized. There was saying during the Watergate affair in Washington D.C. in the United States in the 1970's Follow the Money Trail. If you really want to know what's going on in an organisation or even within the UN system, it's a good idea to follow the money trail. If you follow the money trail within countries, you find that most countries spend most of their money in response to illicit drugs in trying to reduce the supply of drugs, trying to reduce their availability, trying to push up the price, that's where the emphasis goes. Now, about half a dozen countries have allowed people to pore over their records and make estimates of what proportion of government expenditure in response to those drugs as is allocated to supply control that is trying to reduce the supply of drugs, as opposed to demand reduction trying to reduce the demand for drugs or harm reduction, triying to reduce the adverse consequences of drug use or drug policy. About half a dozen countries have done those estimates, my country Australia has allowed those to be done twice. Results through are very similar and the results around the world are broadly very similar. My country, 66% of government expenditure in response to illicit drugs is allocated to supply control, that is things like courts, customs, police, courts and prisons, that gets 66% of expenditure, 21% in my country goes to drug treatment, 9% to preventing drug use and only 1% to harm reduction. Even harm reduction has been explicitly part of my country's national drug policy since 1985, only 1% of government expenditure goes to things like needle syringe programs. So, the bulk of it really does go to customs, police, courts and prisons, so it really does help to follow the money trail. Third point is that it helps to also pay attention to the words that people use when they could use other words, and you'll notice for example, even within the UN system, UN system refers to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, it doesn't refer to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Health or Drugs and Social Well-being. No, it's United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. So, our question is pretty well framed as a criminal justice question. If you look around the world in most countries, you'll see that the politicians are also quite selective about words that they like to apply when referring to drug users. They're often very harsh, very negative, very pejorative terms, drug addicts, scumbags, they use terrible language to refer to people who have a drug problem. We don't use terminology like that for people who can't stop smoking cigarrettes or can't stop drinking alcohol. We have some sympathy for those people, are at least the politicians do, but in most countries around the world politicians, have no time for drug addicts and they make that very clear. So again, that's framing this very much as a supply problem, as a criminal justice problem. Now, many supporters of drug law reform argue that the threshold step that we need to make in trying to get better results has to be redefining the whole issue of drugs as a criminal justice problem, and they argue and indeed I argue as well, that we should be prime saying that this should be primarily a health and social problem. Not just a health problem, it's also a social problem. No, that doesn't mean that law enforcement should have no role in this. Of course, law enforcement should have a role in this, but it should be a supportive role rather than the primary role, it shouldn't have the burden of having the whole weight of drug policy resting on its shoulders. Because this is seen very much as a criminal justice problem, it's criminal justice that gets the bulk of the government money. What should happen in the future I think is that government spending on health and social interventions has to rise at least to the level that criminal justice still enjoys. If we start talking about shifting money from one to the other, that gets us into all sorts of problems, so I don't think that's a good idea but let's talk about where we want to end up. Where we want to end up is that health and social interventions need a lot more funding, and need a lot more emphasis, need a lot more support. The reason for that isn't just ideology, it's because the evidence when people have done studies shows that it's very difficult. It's a real challenge to find instances where criminal justice approaches have really very clearly brought benefits to drug users, their families and their communities. On the other hand, it's quite easy to show a lot of benefit from health and social interventions, it's quite easy to show, unfortunately, a lot of unintended negative gross consequences from law enforcement initiatives. On the other hand, it's much harder to find instances of adverse consequences, unintended consequences from health and social interventions. So, for all of those reasons, I think and many people say this these days, we should really be talking about this issue much more as health and social issue and not trying to keep on pretending that it's a criminal justice problem which in my view clearly isn't. So, these are really the major implications that come from trying to look even at a fairly simple level, at what has been a very difficult problem for the world and for many countries around the world for the last few decades, and that difficulty has been very apparent in recent years. I hope you'll join efforts around the world to try and get better outcomes from drug policy in the future. Thank you.
