 Good morning, I'm a bit nervous, so please be gentle with me. Before I begin, I'd like to thank Harm Reduction International and the Organising Committee for providing me with this significant opportunity to present at this important conference today. By way of background and as has been said, I work for an organisation called Aval which is the National Drug Users Organisation in Australia. Aval holds a special place in the global drug users movement in that it is one of the oldest genuinely peer-based drug user led national networks in the world having continuously existed for over 25 years. This is no small feat in a world dominated by drug prohibition and the criminalisation of people who use drugs. Despite this highly challenging context I have had the great privilege of having been part of Aval and the Australian drug users movement across that 25 years and during that time I have seen a thing or two and it is in that context and from that perspective I will attempt to make a few comments on the issue of leadership and drug policy reform today. It is in my view a massive topic and one that you could come at so to speak in a number of ways. I've attempted to identify a few key thoughts and issues from the drug user and drug user activist perspective. I think some of them are important and I hope you agree. So what is leadership? What does it mean to lead? In my view at worst leadership becomes about power, control, domination, singular approaches that not only frequently disappoint, disenfranchise but also cause untold harm at the individual, global and community level. At its best leadership is about courage, clarity of purpose, determination, recognition of diversity, being willing to admit that your approach is wrong or at least may be wrong, that you don't have all the answers, you have things to learn, you are able to listen, truly listen and hear others, be flexible and willing to change and perhaps most importantly of all leadership should be about having a clear and shared vision and bringing people with you through consultation, participation and meaningful involvement. And I figure you can guess which of these two kinds of leadership I think we currently have in relation to drug policy control. Let me give you a clue. It is not what I would call leadership at its best. So if leadership is in large part about having a clear and shared vision and bringing people with you to achieve that vision or goal, what should the goals be when it comes to showing leadership on drug policy reform? As we know much has been made of the fact that a number of countries or even parts of countries have been attempting to make progress at both a policy and legislative level in relation to illicit drugs policy. But as important as these developments are, there are clear limitations to the reforms we have seen. For example, for people who use drugs, the options remain extremely limited. We are either criminalised or pathologised. There are very few options in between or outside. We need to be clear that decriminalisation of small amounts of drugs for personal use does not remove the black market. It remains our biggest problem and our biggest challenge in relation to drug policy reform because it is the black market that drives the majority of harms and problems. Despite support in 1999 for a level of drug policy reform in Portugal, it was very clear that this could not and would not involve any challenge to the core aspects of the three major international conventions on drug policy control. Any reform had to conform with the terms and restrictions under the existing conventions. In my view, it is only when we have a fundamental review of both the language and substance of the international drug policy control conventions that we will really have anything even resembling real leadership in drug policy reform. In short, we need nothing less than a whole of systems approach. Anything less is at best piecemeal and at worst creates more harm due to the false sense of security it can create. The disproportionate level of excitement about the very limited level of reform we have seen to date leads me to ask that when it comes to leadership on drug policy reform, are we being as the saying goes being led down a garden path? For decades now, people who use drugs have been asked to be patient. We are told that when it comes to drug policy reform, it is no matter of no longer a matter of if, just when. But I kid you not, I have been hearing these very same words for over 20 years now. More recently, the constant refrain is the so-called war on drugs is coming to an end and that prohibition is dead or at least in its dying days. As drug users, we are told we must keep the faith that all the signs are there and that some of the changes to laws and policies in parts of the US, in Uruguay, New Zealand and Portugal, etc. are our evidence that fundamental reform is now inevitable. But while we have these examples of incremental change, they are still few and far between. We are still caught in many of the same dichotomous constructs that have fueled the war on drugs rhetoric for decades, such as the concepts of the so-called hard drugs versus soft drugs, recreational versus dependent drug use, or were still drug abuse versus drug use. Because in reality, these reforms exist or are occurring alongside a far greater number of examples of countries where the ongoing criminalisation of drug use and dehumanisation of and brutality against people who use drugs is as bad as it has ever been. And I am not just referring to countries that continue to enforce punitive and coercive or compulsory treatment centres, but in countries like Australia, a self-proclaimed and wildly heralded harm reduction paradise that is in short order currently considering and or implementing mandatory life sentences for methamphetamine offences, actively prosecuting people for minor drug offences of sniffer dogs on public transport, implementing random roadside drug testing, has incarceration rates for drug-related offences that rival the worst in the world, has implemented new harsh penalties associated with novel psychoactives, and the list can go on. And that's before I even talk about the at least 33 countries and territories that still retain the death penalty for drug offences, the 10 countries with a mandatory death penalty for drugs, or the countries that are apparently opposed to the death penalty on paper, but who willingly assist their international partners in intelligence gathering, in capturing and prosecuting those executed in the name of the war on drugs. At its inception in 1946, the World Health Organization proclaimed that the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being. Yet that noble goal remains disturbingly out of reach for far too many people and for people who use drugs in particular. Glaring inequities continue to riddle any health landscape you care to observe. In the white hot landscape of drug law reform, it is so disturbingly out of reach as to be utterly overwhelming and heartbreakingly absent in equal measure. Volumes of research have probed the roots of the disparities inequities, documenting both their enormity and their persistence. Drug policy, as an inequity, can be viewed through various lenses, disease, risk factors, populations, and geography to name but a few. Furthermore, like other major health conundrums, they stem from the distant past. They play out in the public eye, impact a vast array of stakeholders and require solutions that lie well beyond the control of any single authority. Ultimately, the current global approach to drug policy control relegates people who use drugs to the scrap heap of humanity, building on and compounding deaths, misery and suffering of so many and for what end. Moralistic judgmentalism masquerading as legal obligation, economic backroom deals, propaganda and misinformation, used in equal measure to score cheap political points, keep the general public compliant and ultimately complicit, and perhaps most of all, to create opportunities to build capital and capital investment in unexplored markets and to further promote global capitalism and the growth and spread of neoliberal political agendas. No where is this more clearly exposed or articulated than in Canadian journalist Dawn Paley's excellent analysis and debunking of the war on drugs south of the border in the US. Looking at Mexico's armed conflict through the lens of drug war capitalism, Paley exposes it as a pretext for extending US militarization to and control of nations to enhance transnational business opportunities and prevent populist uprisings. Paley claims it isn't a war to improve civil society or to even prevent drug trafficking, but rather a violent centred policy to broaden the reach of global capitalism. It is really, sorry, it is really all so absolutely ludicrous that when taken together, it really would be laughingly comedic if it wasn't so very, very, very sad. Tackling the widespread disparities and achieving drug law reform will only come through leadership. Societal, organisational, individual, and most of all political, that embraces the powerful integration of science, community, practice and policy to create lasting change. Leadership that accepts that everyone has a role. Everyone must play their part to demand of politicians to no longer hide behind empty rhetoric and hollow promises of reform. It also requires a genuine understanding and acceptance that drug use is not aberrant or unnatural or evil, but rather is a fundamental part of the human condition. Indeed, contrary to what we have been indoctrinated to believe, drug use is normal, is natural, is human. But no matter how much we might agree on the urgent need for drug law reform, there are significant challenges and areas of tension as we move towards the youngest. For example, how does one initiate and undertake wide-scale drug policy reform in such a constrained environment as the current drug policy regime? It is by any measure a massive beast with many arms and legs. It will be phenomenally difficult to unpick decades and decades of prohibition and its impacts. There are untold numbers of vested interests in continuing the current approach, including at the political, economic, legal and social levels, many of whom do not see themselves as having either a deeply vested interest in perpetuating the current system and or much to gain from fundamental reform of drug policy, but they are wrong. Part of our role as drug policy reform activists is not only to expose such vested interests, but importantly to also highlight the untold benefits that can flow from comprehensive reform. Added to this is the fact that different countries have different political, economic, social and legal agendas and contexts. Not all situations and circumstances are directly comparable, indeed many are not. Meaningful drug policy reform in one context can mean little or nothing or even make things worse in another. Having said this, however, there are some fundamental commonalities and one of them is that all drug users are just human beings after all. Despite the fact that we are characterised in every other way other than human in the vast majority of time. And that means that a rights-based approach to drug policy reform will be the best way to address the complexities and constraints associated with the different countries, contexts and environments while still ensuring that drug policy reform occurs. When it comes to being constrained, there is little that constrains more than not being at the table at all. That is the reality for people who use drugs in the vast majority of the time in the vast majority of cases when it comes to the issue of drug policy reform. While I want to stress that I believe there are many stakeholders in drug policy reform and that there is a massive amount of work to be done and there is a role for all who are genuinely interested, when it comes to leaders in drug policy reform, there are a few things I would like to say about people who use drugs. The first is that unlike many others in this struggle, this is about our lives, our health, our suffering from the violence, verbal and physical, from the relentless discrimination, the shame and stigma and the constant process of trying to diminish us as people. But guess what? We have a voice, we have self-agency. We are capable of speaking for and representing ourselves no matter how depleted and vulnerable we are made out to be. Too often we are characterized as incapable of knowing our own minds as victims, sick, criminals and immoral, these are the options that are open to us. Under the current system of drug policy control, there is too much focus on the failings of individuals rather than on the real culprits. That is the structural and systemic barriers to the origins of harm, stigma, discrimination, disease and death. But we are the experts in our lives and our experiences. We know first hand the impact of the current system. We know what needs to change, how and why. We know what will work and what will amount to real and meaningful change. Too often however, people who use drugs are at best sidelined when it comes to drug policy reform. We are seen as too radical, too dangerous. We might give but drug law reform a bad name. We might scare the horses as they say. We are seen as too self-interested. All I can say is really? Well of course we are self-interested. It is about our lives. What other interests would we have when we are so indiscriminately and remorselessly pursued under the current system? My final comment on constraints would be that leadership is made very, very difficult when people are relentlessly criminalised, abused and violated. But difficult does not mean impossible. To shift from the impossible to the possible, however, we need to shift from the current punitive criminalising approach that does not distinguish between countries, cultures and contexts to one based on fundamental rights. As it happens at this conference input, the International Network of People Who Use Drugs has launched a consensus statement on drug use under prohibition that sets out 10 basic rights of people who use drugs to support fundamental change, which is this document. These rights are the right to rights. People who use drugs are entitled to their human rights which must be protected by the rule of law. People who use drugs have the right to non-discrimination. People who use drugs have the right to security of person. People who use drugs have the right not to be subjected to torture or to cruel inhumane or degrading treatment. People who use drugs have the right to the highest attainable standard of health. People who use drugs have the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. People who use drugs have the right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. People who use drugs have the right to bodily integrity. People who use drugs have the right to found a family entitled to protect and be protected by the law, entitled to privacy and entitled to be free from arbitrary interference. And finally, people who use drugs have the right to assemble, associate and form organisations. Applying these principles along with the key principles of good leadership in relation to courage, vision, consistency over time, inclusiveness, et cetera. And I believe we will provide the strategic framework for action reform and outcomes that is currently so absent in global drug policy. It is only with this level of profound change that the current harms experienced by people who use drugs will end. But I have a question for you all. Are you willing to put your shoulder to the wheel to create the kind of change and genuine leadership that is required or are you content to be part of propping up a moribund outdated ethically bankrupt and harmful regime? I know there is a lot of misery and hardship in the world, but this particular problem is entirely fixable. It doesn't need to be so intractable. And we collectively have an obligation to those who don't have a voice, who don't get to come to these conferences to stand here and express their views. Those people who have needlessly died what we have been meeting over the last few days to the many, many friends and loved ones I have lost in this needless, cruel and senseless war, I say, let us through our actions that we give our politicians, our national governments and our representatives to the UN nowhere to run, nowhere to hide when it comes to showing leadership on drug policy reform. Indeed, when it comes to this issue and as we lead into the Angus, we must all become leaders because quite simply, nothing else will suffice. Thank you. Thank you so much for this testimony and the strengths of your speech. Thank you also to Carl and to Adiba. It was worse to give them more time than for a normal panel where we want to have time also for an exchange with the audience. It will be difficult because we have just 10 minutes left or less than 10 minutes left in our program so that I immediately want to give the floor to Ricklein who asked yesterday and he's the first in this sense to take the floor. I don't know if we will have time for others but you know that this place is also a place for exchange not only in the room but all over the conference. So Rick, you have the word.