In the conclusion of the progress review of the action plan on drugs 2005-2008 it is said that “available data do not always provide a proper insight as to whether the outputs of the Action Plan have had an impact on the problem they are trying to address.” In the evaluation of the EU Action Plan 2000 - 2004 by the EMCDDA in October 2004, the same problem had been noticed. Then it was explained as follows: “the indicators are considered too vague to allow evaluation reports to show if there has been any concrete impact on them”.

There is nothing in this progress review that allows the reader to conclude if the efforts to obtain the aim of the Action Plan (“to significantly reduce the prevalence of drug use among the population and to reduce the social and health damage caused by the use and trade in illicit drugs") have been successful or not. We read about the establishment of agencies, policy programmes, organisation of meetings, data collecting mechanisms, etc. But there is no information that allows us to judge the value of all these things for the impact of drug policy.

On July 7 to 9 in Vienna, Austria, ENCOD will participate in the “Beyond 2008” NGO Forum. This forum is meant to collect the points of views of NGOs regarding the outcome and the direction of global drug policies. The NGO Forum is supposed to produce a statement that will be included in the process of reflection that governments and UN agencies are in, and that will conclude at next year’s annual meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna (March 2009)

Today, the deadline expires for applications to the budget line on “Drug Prevention and Information 2007-2013’. This budget line was originally created to facilitate ways in which European citizens who are daily affected by the drug issue could have their say in decision-making processes. Instead, the European Commission has converted it into a tool to ensure their voices will be excluded from these processes.

The yearly session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs is a weird kind of meeting. Almost permanently, four kinds of sessions are going on at the same time: the plenary; a committee with the puzzling name “committee of the whole”; “other meetings”; and “side events”.

For me, coming in there as an individual, it was hard to know what was going on, where and when. Gradually I learned that the member states’ delegations and most of the attending organizations were prepared from the start, so that every member delegate knew where and when she/he had to be, taking turns at specific meetings to be able to keep track or make notes of the rare moments that something of substance was eventually being said.

HAVE YOUR SAY ON ENCODS ROLE ON THE EU CIVIL SOCIETY FORUM ENCOD has been invited to the second session of the Civil Society Forum on EU Drug Policy that will be held on May 20th and 21st 2008 in Brussels. To the forum, 26 representatives of EU civil society organisations will be invited.