Statement from ENCOD to the VNGOC meeting on 4 june 2012

Re agenda item 10:

Preparations for UN General Assembly Thematic Debate on Drugs, Crime and Development, June 26, 2012 New York City

We call on all non-governmental organisations to urge the UN and UN member states to start studying alternative methods of drug control, not based on prohibition.

The theme of the UN General Assembly of June 26 is “Drugs, Crime and Development”. Within this theme, the study of legal regulation of presently criminalised drugs should be high on the agenda. However, the planning of the GA seems to aim at further intensifying the so-called fight against drugs.

This will have all the well-known harmful consequences of prohibition, including large-scale violence and funding of criminal and terrorist groups. It must be noted that these effects of drug prohibition can no longer be called “unintended”.

The time has come to start, in earnest, to implement polices of harm reduction that are proven to work, and to explore options like ‘Tax and Regulate’ that will offer some measure of control of drugs that are increasingly out of control, even as the prohibition policies undermine democracy, encourage abuse of human rights and give astronomical profits to criminal organizations, while failing to diminish the harms to individuals and societies connected to drugs and to “drug control”.
We urge everyone reading this to cooperate with us to get the issue of alternative drug policies on the agenda of relevant organisations and meetings. The first opportunity to end the official taboo on this subject is the upcoming Thematic Debate of the UN General Assembly.

Frederik Polak, M.D.
president of ENCOD, European Coalition for Just and Effective Drug Policies

3 June 2012

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