 Tonight's event will debate what some say is a crisis spurred by the current drug policy regime and the prospects for change. Why is that? Because almost on a daily basis we hear news reports on drug-related violence around the world and if you will the horrors of mass incarceration. We routinely confront health crisis intensified by repressive drug laws and now we see public opinion in fact turning against our current criminal justice-oriented approaches. For example last week I believe there was a poll taking United States that revealed that for the first time ever the majority of citizens support Mariana regulation which in essence means as I was told over lunch means legalization of Mariana. As many of you know Colorado has recently legalized the recreational use of Mariana which now pits actually state law and US federal law and international conventions against each other even creating stark contradictions in multi-level legal regimes and multi-level issues of governance. We now have been functioning in sort of decades of a relatively someone called prohibitionist regime when it comes to drug control. Even though we have one set of conventions if you look at how countries practice or how do they interpret those conventions it actually is somewhat different. The report that we did which was launched last year and you can get a copy on the table downloaded 75,000 times in the first three weeks I am proud to say. I looked at 21 jurisdictions across the world that had adopted some form of decriminalization. That could be decriminalization of cannabis or decriminalization of old drugs. What we wanted to do was to show that if you dot non-criminal sanctions or take a decision not to enforce the criminal law around possession that the sky does not fall in, that drug use does not skyrocket, the 10 year olds don't start shooting up heroin on the streets of our cities. And what we find overwhelmingly that there was no statistically significant increase in levels of drug use in those jurisdictions that had adopted a decriminalized approach. What is important about decriminalization is that it avoids all of those negative associations that we have when we criminalize someone for possession of drugs. So a criminal record and higher impacts on employment, education, just basic life aspirations. There was never any intention to use the criminal justice system as the line of first resistance to the drug problem. The first principle was public health. It so happened in the practice that the criminal justice system was given ascendancy in it and that was wrong. That should not have happened but it has happened. Accepting historical mistakes means that we have to start moving forward with those. So I would suggest that prohibition in itself is not really the right way to frame this debate but it is something which if it's used in shorthand I find that perfectly acceptable. But I think what we need to look at is how we are going to improve the system which undoubtedly has its limitations. I actually am somewhat depressed by the statement that the drug control treaties have been put in place under the public health banner because if that's true then men I think we fail. Because in a sense if you in fact count the current public health costs like the HIV epidemic, like the overdose and all the other issues that people are struggling with then I think we really have not done a good job. That's sort of what I walk out of here with. And another issue is that my concern is that whatever was put in place potentially is making things not only not better but worse. The biggest weaknesses of the system and we went out in public and wrote them down in our World Drug Report in 2008 was that there were unintended consequences of the way the system was implemented. It created a huge criminal black market. It stigmatized users. It treated users as criminals rather than people suffering from an illness. These are the things in the system that need to be changed. And the biggest weakness was the displacement created in policy in which a system designed to protect public health turned into a system that used punitive law enforcement approaches to reach that end. We can keep the system but change this emphasis is my argument. The unintended consequences and the question to what extent all the problems that we see with drug control and indeed the stigmatization around it, the human rights violations etc. To what extent is that just attributable to wrong implementation of the model or are there fundamentally things wrong in the system itself? I think that it is not only a question of implementation. There are embedded in the treaties. There are a number of issues that have to be repaired because they have directly caused the aberrations. The main issue where in the development of the system it got out of hand was with the obligation to use the criminal system to suppress a number of acts and especially the 88th Convention. The whole language of the 88 treaty is these have to be treated as serious crimes and that is exactly what happened after that, the whole explosion of the incarceration rates. You are talking about the multilateral system and the developments that are coming from South America, particularly Bolivia and if you think about it in the sense of is it possible to think ahead when the UN assemblies on a meeting in 2016 of thinking a framework that is not a multilateral system of consensus of how to deal with this issue but that has a very cultural differentiation of how to agree with these things. The question is, is it possible the coexistence of significantly different regimes next to each other within one continent or within the world? I think that there is too much fear for diversity. If we look at the reality for example that there are still I think 12 or so countries in the world that maintain a strict alcohol prohibition regime. So there is of course a certain and it's not easy for them because everybody around them of course freely trades in alcohol. Now that same issue becomes more complicated in the case of cocaine for example because it is the cannabis market you can still consider to organize, regulate at the national level. But it's like for a country like Guatemala at the moment and they are struggling with it really because of all the violence but they can't regulate the flow of cocaine that comes illegally from the south and goes to an illegal market in the north so what can they regulate about it? And one remark on the tobacco issue because we did do the exercise by looking at the WHO tobacco framework convention and replacing everywhere with said tobacco nicotine with cannabis just to see how that treaty would work for cannabis and remarkably I think it would give a quite good framework for cannabis control. I have a question to Sandeep. What happens if the federal government of the US decides to tolerate the regulatory systems in the states of Colorado and Washington which are clearly not in line with the spirit and letter of the conventions? Is there any further mechanisms the UN system can pressurize the US government to do something? There's very little the UN system can do because first these are decisions to be taken number one by a sovereign member state. Number two it's very clear the US government has frequently said itself that there exists a problem between federal law and what has been decided in these two states. To the extent that the United States needs to maintain its obligations under the single convention this is a matter of domestic jurisdiction which the federal government will have to work out with the state government. Whichever way it's worked out if the United States is domestic drug law has to be changed then that will imply that it comes under some form of being outside the single convention. What the government of the United States will do about that I or nobody else can speculate but the issue is one which will at some point have to be faced either in terms of whether these two states go forward with creating their regulated markets and what the federal government decides about it but it is perfectly clear that it is not consistent with the terms of the single convention to which the United States is a signatory and which by the way the International Narcotics Control Board has already told the United States federal government. And the Narcotics Control Board in the UN system is the one that carries the responsibility for overlooking implementation of the drug treaties. Yeah I would say that I do hope that the momentum that is now happening that it continues to grow it looks likely in the sense that already several other states within the US are working on proposals for the dynamic of this sequence of moments towards the UN guys in 2016. I think a big difference could be whether California already does it in the halfway elections because that would have a huge impact. The moment California would regulate the cannabis market, Mexico the next day will decide to do it as well. And then there is a snowball effect that I think within a decade at least the whole hemisphere would have changed the cannabis policy. But at least if that kind of momentum keeps building up I think then what can come out of the UN guys is not yet the new agreement but is a clear display of the necessity of changing the foundations of the regime. I would be very careful to point out that by the time 2016 happens I will be retired from the United Nations. I hope that I will not follow the trend that I observed over the last five years is that every retired public official becomes a powerful advocate for drug policy reform. Oh please do. We welcome you. I said I hope I won't follow it because I hope I'm speaking honestly as it is and combining my duties as a member of the secretariat which is a servant of member states but you can be a servant with supplication and you can be a servant with integrity and I prefer the latter. So I would argue I would like to see in 2016 and something which we have hoped for for a long time and tried to work towards at least three things. First and foremost the recognition of the point I made earlier is that an exclusively criminal justice approach will not solve the drug problem. And while that may stay in the background the principle public health approach for which the conventions were built has brought back to center stage. The second thing I would like to see is I would like to see an answer to what makes the whole drug control system extremely vulnerable and that is the problem of cannabis. Exactly what Martin said because that shakes up the whole system because the system doesn't know how to deal with cannabis as we've been saying for many, many years. And the third thing that I'd like to see is I'd like to see the stigma removed from drug users so that we can treat them the same way as we treat a diabetic or a person suffering from heart disease who has the right to go into the public health system and get treatment for it and I would like to see a recognition in the system and then in the practice of governments to be able to do this so that we can treat drug users this way. I mean it is about bringing substances all together and having a dangerous substances approach or harmful substances approach that includes alcohol, that includes tobacco, that includes pharmaceutical substances and that we can regulate them more effectively as we've done with tobacco and which is why we have the reduction in it through taxation, regulation and good public health messaging. And prevention, absolutely.