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.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you here today. My name is Job Joris Arnold and I represent the European Coalition for Just and Effective Drug Policies. ENCOD -for short- is a European network of currently 156 organizations and individual citizens, all affected and concerned by current drug policies. We believe future drug policies need to be just and effective, i.e. based on respect for human rights and on scientific evidence.

Now, I have been asked to talk to you about what’s going on at the UN-level. And I see some signs of hope, so I might just have some good news for you today.

1998 In 1998 the UNGASS, which is the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Illicit Drugs, convened in that building right there around the corner and had some 180 countries sign up to this fantasy of stamping out drugs worldwide within a ten years.

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)

This year the International Conference on the Reduction of Drug Related Harms is taking place in Barcelona, May 11-15, supported by the Department of Health of Catalonia.

On the first day there were satellite events on various issues, including harm reduction in prisons, gender sensitive services, suboxone, alcohol and harm reduction, HIV prevention in Asia and drug users’ activism (our report from the INPUD congress is coming soon).

Paul Hunt, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health made an excellent keynote speech addressing the multiple violations of the human rights of people who use drugs. For example ambulances refuse to treat overdosed people, investigators force suspects into unmedicated withdrawal to extract confessions, drug users are imprisoned and forced into treatment, governments ban publications on harm reduction, police breaks up peaceful demonstrations against drug laws and so on.

“This widespread, systemic abuse of human rights is especially shocking, because drug users include people who are the most vulnerable, most marginal in society,” said Hunt. “Despite the scale of the abuse, despite the vulnerability, there is no public outrage, no public outcry, no public inquiries, on the contrary: the long litany of abuse scarcely attracts disapproval. Sometimes it even receives some public support.”

According to Mr. Hunt, the promotion and protection of human rights should precede drug control objectives. He encouraged NGOs to use the procedures and possibilites provided by the independent rapporteur system. He alluded to his visit to Sweden, where he found inadequate access to harm reduction services and urged the government to scale up needle exchange and substition treatment (read the report of IHRA and the Swedish Drug User Union).

He called it an “inexcusable situation” that the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) focuses on the three international drug conventions “with scant regard for the international code of human rights that emerges from one of the Article 1 objectives of the United Nation’s charter.” He said the international drug control organizations operate in “paralel universes”, but there are some signs that human rights are slowly infiltrating the drug control system.

Persons whose lives are affected by drugs policies suffer the deterioration of their health, the effects of exclusion and stigmatisation, and the violation of their most elementary rights due to a policy that is imposed by international organizations, -International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and by our own country. Participation of affected persons’ organisations in the design and evaluation of drugs policies is anecdotal and, when it happens, it has no influence in the decision making process.

The anti-drugs strategy has turned throughout the years into an open warfare against users. Having signed and implemented the directives of international organizations, governments deny the evidence of harm reduction policies being more just and effective. They prefer to respect political agreements without any scientific base, and some cases signed more than 40 years ago, instead of developing real policies centred on the public health, based on human rights and sensitive with the gender differences.