Drug Policy Reform | Beckley Foundation
Chooper's Guide is Committed to Drug Control Policy Reform
THE GLOBAL WAR ON DRUGS HAS FAILED
IT IS TIME FOR A NEW APPROACH
WE THE UNDERSIGNED call on Governments and Parliaments to recognise that:
Fifty years after the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was launched, the global war on drugs has failed, and has had many unintended and devastating consequences worldwide.
Use of the major controlled drugs has risen, and supply is cheaper, purer and more available than ever before. The UN conservatively estimates that there are now 250 million drug users worldwide.
Illicit drugs are now the third most valuable industix in the world, after food and oil, estimated to be worth over $350 billion a year, all in the control of criminals.
Fighting the war on drugs costs the world's taxpayers incalculable billions each year. Millions of people are in prison worldwide for drug-related offences, mostly personal users and small-time dealers.
Corruption amongst law-entorcers and politicians, especially in producer and transit countries, has spread as never before, endangering democracy and civil society. Stability, security and development are threatened by the fallout from the war on drugs, as are human rights. Tens of thousands of people die in the drug war each year.
The drug-free world so confidently predicted by supporters of the war on drugs is further than ever fromattainment. The policies of prohibition create more harms than they prevent. We must seriously consider shifting resources away from criminalising tens of millions of otherwise law abiding citizens, and move towards an approach based on health,. harm-reduction, cost-effectiveness and respect for human rights. Evidence consistently shows that these health-based approaches deliver better results than criminalisation.
Improving our drug policies is one of the key policy challenges of our time. It is time for world leaders to fundamentally review their strategies in response to the drug phenomenon.
At the root of current policies lies the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. It is time to re-examine this treaty which imposes a lone-size-fits-all' solution, in order to allow individual countries the freedom to explore drug policies that better suit their domestic needs.
As the production, demand and use of drugs cannot be eradicated, new ways must be found to minimise harms, and new policies, based on scientific evidence, must be explored.
Let us break the taboo on debate and reform. The time for action is now.
Yours Faithfully,
President Juan Manuel Santos | Professor Niall Ferguson |
President of the Republic of Colombia | Professor of History at Harvard University |
President Fernando H. Cardoso | Lord Rees, OM |
Former President of Brazil | Astronomer Royal and former President of the Royal Society |
President Lech Wałęsa | Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta |
Former President of Poland, Nobel Prize winner. | Professor of Economics at Cambridge |
Professor Noam Chomsky | Caroline Lucas, MP |
Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT | Leader of the Green Party and MP for Brighton |
Bernardo Bertolucci | Trudie Styler |
Film Director | Actress and producer |
Mario Vargas Llosa | Professor Robin Room |
Writer, Nobel Prize winner | School of Population Health, University of Melbourne |
Thorvald Stoltenberg | Professor A. C. Grayling |
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs (Norway) and UN High Commissioner for Refugees | Master of the New College of the Humanities |
Michel Kazatchkine | Nicholas Green, QC |
United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS | Former Chairman of the Bar Council |
Professor Sir Anthony Leggett | Sir Peregrine Worsthorne |
Physicist, Nobel Prize winner | Former Editor of The Sunday Telegraph |
Javier Solana, KOGF, KCMG | Professor Robert Grayling |
Former EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy | Dean of School of Medicine, KCL |
Wisława Szymborska | Dr. Patrick Aeberhard |
Poet, Nobel Prize winner | Former President of Doctors of the World |
Professor John Polanyi | President Otto Pérez Molina |
Chemist, Nobel Prize winner | President of the Republic of Guatemala |
Professor Thomas C. Schelling | President César Gaviria |
Economist, Nobel Prize winner | Former President of Colombia |
Professor Lord Piot | President Aleksander Kwaśniewski |
Former UN Under Secretary-General | Former President of Poland |
Professor Colin Blakemore | Desmond Tutu |
Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and University of Warwick | Archbishop, Nobel Prize winner |
Professor Sir Ian Gilmore | George P. Schultz |
Former President of the Royal College of Physicians | Former US Secretary of State |
Dr. Julian Huppert, MP | Carlos Fuentes |
Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform | Novelist and essayist |
Professor Jonathan Wolff | Jaswant Singh |
Professor of Philosophy at UCL | Former Minister of Defence, of Finance, and for External Affairs, India |
Professor Peter Singer | Asma Jahangir |
Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University | Former UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary, Extrajudicial and Summary Execution |
Gary Johnson | John Whitehead |
Republican US Presidential Candidate | Former US Deputy Secretary of State |
General Lord Ramsbotham | Dr. Kary Mullis |
Former HM Chief Inspector of Prisons | Chemist, Nobel Prize winner |
Peter Lilley, MP | Professor Kenneth Arrow |
Former Secretary of State for Social Security | Economist, Nobel Prize winner |
Tom Brake, MP | Professor Sir Harold Kroto |
Co-chair of the Lib Dem Home Affairs, Justice and Equalities Parliamentary Policy Committee | Chemist, Nobel Prize winner |
President Jimmy Carter | Pavel Bém |
Former President of the United States, Nobel Prize winner | Former Mayor of Prague |
President Ruth Dreifuss | Professor Sir Peter Mansfield |
Former President of Switzerland | Economist, Nobel Prize winner |
President Vicente Fox | Professor Martin L. Perl |
Former President of Mexico | Physicist, Nobel Prize winner |
Sir Richard Branson | Professor David Nutt |
Entrepreneur and Founder of the Virgin Group | Former Chair of the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs |
Yoko Ono | Professor Trevor Robbins |
Musician and artist | Professor of Neuroscience at Cambridge |
Sean Parker | Dr. Muhammed Abdul Bari, MBE |
Founding President of Facebook, Director of Spotify | Former Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain |
Sting | Carel Edwards |
Musician and actor | Former Head of the EU Commission’s Drug Policy Unit |
Louise Arbour, CC, GOQ | Lord Mancroft |
Former UN High-Commissioner for Human Rights | Chair of the Drug and Alcohol Foundation |
John Perry Barlow | Bob Ainsworth, MP |
Co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation | Former UK Secretary of State for Defence |
Maria Cattaui | Lord MacDonald, QC |
Former Secretary-General of the International Chamber of Commerce | Former Head of the Crown Prosecution Service |
Jeremy Thomas | Tom Lloyd |
Film Producer | Former Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire |
Gilberto Gil | Paul Flynn, MP |
Musician, former Minister of Culture, Brazil | Labour MP for Newport West |
Source: http://reformdrugpolicy.com/partner/public-letter/