 Good morning, everybody. Welcome to all of you, and thank you for attending this plenary three on leadership in drug policy reform. I am very honored to share the chair with Kasia, and we'll just introduce very briefly what we have to discuss during this session. I think it will be mainly aimed at the preparation of the United Nations Special Assembly that is convened in April next year in New York. And I think, and I speak in the name of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, that this critical meeting has to be approached in a sense of urgency and in a spirit of change, because the status quo is not longer acceptable. The general policy, the global regime of drug control, has failed not only to achieve its original stated objectives of reducing drug production and consumption. It also generated alarming social and health problems as we know. And this human cost of repressive drug policy around the world can no longer be ignored nor tolerated. So we have to change drug policy on the ground. And we witness that governments are already introducing measures to safeguard health and human rights in embracing reforms. These reforms, I would say, always were fueled by the call of the people working on the ground, of the people directly concerned by drug use, of the people directly victims of the harm of a failed policy. This reform we witness in many countries, inclusive when we think about harm reduction here in Malaysia and in many other places of the world, mitigate the consequences of a punitive approach and make steps toward a more fundamental reform. We cannot accept the idea that just putting at the disposal of the people the measures we know that they are efficient, that they are cost effective will be the end of the movement of reform. In the country, they just show how contradictory the prohibition and the health approach is. This is the reason why we hope that the Ungas should in the final declaration recognize the necessity not only to invest in prevention, treatment, and harm reduction, not only to ensure equitable access to essential medicine that relieve unnecessary pain and suffering, but to end the criminalization and incarceration for drug use, for possession of drug use, but also for the rank and file people who are exploited by the criminal system of the drug traffic. We have absolutely to empower and to make shift into the international bodies in order to bring development, human rights, health at the forefront of the policies that will bring together the countries of the world. And as you know, the Global Commission on Drug Policy thinks that this is not enough, that the step that is absolutely necessary beyond Ungas, and I have to stress that it is not to be expected that the real move is made at Ungas, is the regulation of the drug markets, of all substances all over the world. We have to find a way to regulate and to take control about the substances and not to leave them as we do now in criminal hands. So it is clear, in my view, in the view of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and I think in the view of most of the participants of this conference, that beyond Ungas, the convention will need to be updated and revised. This evidence is clear in my eyes, and it is time to act. Our session will have to discuss about these political aims we have to put on the table. I give now the floor to Kasia, and she will present the participant at this panel. Thank you, Ruth, very much for this excellent framing of our panel. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kasia Malinovska. I work for Open Society Foundations, and it really is a pleasure to be here with all of you on the stage. And at this plenary. Before I introduce the excellent speakers, I wanted to alert you to the fact that the paper that you received walking in is something that we will discuss at the end of the session. Rick will lead us through this discussion. So please make sure that you have a copy and please make sure that you have a very quick look, not distracting from presentations that will be given so you can have an opinion about it by the end of the session. So we have four impressive presenters. One of them was unable to be with us in person, but send a video message. So we're grateful for that. We will start with Carl Hart, who is a professor at Columbia University in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology and a research scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He has published nearly 100 scientific articles in the area of neuropharma, wow, ecology, and probably has given over a thousand presentations. And many of you, I'm sure, have seen his book, High Price, a Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery that challenges everything you know about drugs and society and we'll hear more of that today. Carl, I'm gonna introduce, I see that you're ready to go, but I'm gonna introduce others. So I was really excited to hear that his book received a very prestigious PEN award in 2014. And I want to stress that because I think this is one of the signs that drug policy is reaching mainstream. So congratulations, Carl, for that. And I think congratulations to all of us for being such effective advocates that, in fact, drug policy is now part of mainstream. After Carl speaks, we will have the video message from Juan Mendes, who is a UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel inhumane and degrading treatments. He was formerly the Special Advisor on Prevention to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Justice Court and the President of International Center for Transnational Justice. We will then hear from Professor Adiba Kamla, Adiba, I'm sorry, I know you for so many years and I always have trouble pronouncing your last name. Kamla Rulzaman. Adiba is a fierce advocate for people living with HIV for harm reduction for drug policy right here in Kuala Lumpur. You have seen her on a stage accepting award, co-accepting an award for Malaysian AIDS Council. Adiba is a Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases and the Dean of Medicine at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. She is also a Director of an HIV Research Center at the University and she was the President, as you heard, of the Malaysian AIDS Council between 2006 and 2010. And then we will hear from Annie Maiden, who is the Executive Officer of Australian Injecting and Illicit Drug Users League. A prominent national organization representing people who inject or have injected illicit drugs, including in those people who are in drug treatment in Australia. And she has, as everyone else on this stage, been working on drug policy and AIDS issues for over two decades. She has a degree in Social Sciences, is now undertaking a program in graduate law studies and is a person living with hepatitis C and herself is currently on methadone. So it's a broad and excellent range of perspectives and we very much are looking forward to hearing from you. We will hear the presentations and then leave sometimes for the interaction with all of you and also we'll make room for Rick to come up and lead us through a quick discussion of the document you received at the door. So, Koel. Thank you all for joining us this morning, this early morning. I wanna say that I'm honored to be on this panel with some of my favorite people in the world, actually. Some of you all may have saw my name tag. It says that I'm from Switzerland. I stayed in Switzerland for the past three months and so now I have become a Swiss citizen and I'm glad my president is on stage. So, Ruth has given me honorary citizenship and so thank you. And I also am joined on stage with Kasia who is my boss actually. She told me what to talk about here today and she also gave me my opinion on the report that you all will look at. So, thank you and I'm also honored to be up here with Annie and Adiba as well. So, with that I'd like to begin talking about what Kasia told me I should say. The name of the title of my talk is Selective Enforcement of Drug Laws. She asked me to really speak about race. I tucked the race title out because in the United States and that's the example I'm going to use, this plays out. This is selective enforcement and also the development of drug laws is race plays an important role in driving no source of things. But as we travel around the world in places like Northern Ireland, the Belfast or even the Philippines, in various places it doesn't play out in terms of race because many of the population there are it's a homogenous, racially homogenous population but there still are groups that are being targeted and so I don't want you all to walk away thinking that this is exclusively about race. In the United States it certainly plays out in a racial context and I'm gonna use the United States as my example but I just want us to be thinking more broadly please. And I'm gonna proceed with the United States example and then make some connections where are appropriate. The thing that you should know about the United States and I don't have to tell you this, the United States drug policy has been exported and so our drug policy is largely based on racial discrimination. I mean we have this whole history of a racialized drug policy and enforcement and I just want to take you back to the time we passed our first national drug laws in the United States. It was 1914, it was called the Harrison Act. This act required, it restricted the use of opioids and cocaine. We tried to pass this law in 1909 with only the opiates and we were vilifying the Chinese at the time but that was not powerful enough to get the law passed and so by 1914 they wanted to include cocaine because at the time we could associate cocaine use with black people although black people were not the only people using cocaine. Now this article that I have on the board is an article from February 14th, I'm sorry February 8th 1914 in which the author who at the time was an imminent neurologist he argued that negro cocaine fiends were a new southern menace. If you know anything about the southern states in the United States it's notorious for having a horrible racial history although the country is as well but I just want to point out the south in particular. In this article this person argued that when black people snored at cocaine there were three major points he made. He pointed out that black people on cocaine were unaffected by 32 caliber bullets when they were on cocaine so you can unload your gun and you would not affect them when they're on cocaine and that argument allowed the southern police forces to move away from the 32 caliber weapon to a bigger weapon, the 38 caliber weapon. That's one argument. Another argument is that black people became more murderous when they were on cocaine and the third argument was that they became better shooters. They were better marksmen. So you have this deadly combination that the population was concerned about and this provided the fuel of the juice that got the Harrison Act passed and this is kind of like the start of our official start of our drug war in the United States 1914 but as we move forward into the 1980s this same issue had not gone away although the language had been tempered. This is another newspaper article from the late 1980s and by this time we were concerned about crack cocaine in the United States. In this particular article it talks about the Ku Klux Klan teaming up with the National Association of Colored People in NAACP. Now the National Advancement that's the Association for the Advancement of Colored People or what they're called. The NAACP's mission had been to fight against the Ku Klux Klan who wanted to exterminate black people and other people and crack cocaine united them. They joined together to rid this particular community in Florida of crack cocaine. It was a black community. Now I hope you all understand the irony because by the looks on your face I don't know if you're getting it. The one group that wants to destroy black people teams up with another group that is trying to save black people who are black themselves in order to come together to get rid of this common enemy crack cocaine and when we're talking about crack cocaine we're really talking about the black crack cocaine dealers. Do you all see how ridiculous this is? But this shows how people, good well intended people, the NAACP lost their minds as a result of concern about crack cocaine. So this is a message for us as well as our intentions are good. We must always critically evaluate what is being said and the NAACP in this case didn't. But as a result of this sort of hysteria in the United States, we pass some of the harshest drug laws that we had ever passed. And this is the law that punished violations of crack cocaine a hundred times more harshly than violations of powder cocaine. What that meant was that people went to jail for small amounts of crack cocaine for a mandatory period of five years. And how that played out in the public or how it played out in real life was that 80%, more than 80% of the people who were convicted under these laws were black people in the United States. Now, when you think about who were actually using crack cocaine in the United States, black people did not use crack cocaine higher than white folks, but they were the ones who were punished a lot more severely or more often. Then we have to think about this issue of is crack cocaine different from powder cocaine? There are people in the world today who still believe that the drugs are different. So as a result, I have on the slide a picture, a chemical picture of the two compounds. If you focus your attention on the left, that's powder cocaine. If you focus your attention on the right, that's crack cocaine. And if you go back to the left, where the red circle, that's the only difference. And that circle is what we call a hydrochloride group. That hydrochloride group is essentially just a salt. And it keeps the compound stable. It has no biological activity, no pharmacological activity. It just, if it's there, it just means that you can't smoke the drug. If you wanna smoke the drug, you have to remove the salt as we do on the right with crack cocaine. Now you can smoke it. But when you look at the pharmacological and biological effects of the drugs, they produce identical effects. Now it's true that when you smoke crack cocaine, the effects are more intense and more rapid. But when you inject powder cocaine dissolved in water, it produces the same intensity, the same rapid onset of effects as smoking crack cocaine. They are the same drug. And so this disturbed many people in our community because we had this differential treatment of these two drugs, that's if they were somehow different. It even disturbed presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2007. When he said that judges think that's wrong, Republicans think that's wrong, Democrats think that's wrong. And yet it's been approved by Republican and Democratic presidents because no one has been willing to brave the politics and make it right. That will change when I'm president. So you all got that, huh? Good, you are awake. So the question becomes, did it change? I think you laugh because you know that that wasn't exactly how it happened, right? Well, it changed somewhat. In 2010, Barack Obama signed into law this legislation that decreased the disparity from 100 to one to 18 to one. It still doesn't make any sense, right? Because the drugs are identical. We're still punishing crack cocaine, or violations of crack cocaine, 18 times more harshly than powder cocaine. In terms of what this means or what we think of it, I think Malcolm X had the best sort of view on this when he was speaking about civil rights or something else in the 1960s. When he said that, it's like this, if you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there is no progress. The progress is in healing the wound. So this is the situation that we're currently in. But yet, many people have given the President and Congress a pass on this as if this is progress, real progress, it's still wrong. And then, when you think about the fact that even today, the people who are disproportionately arrested are black people for this same law. This is still happening today. More than 80% of the people in the United States who are arrested under this federal law are black. This still exists today. And we have given the current administration a pass on this, and we have not called them out on this enough. Now, I've been talking a lot about crack cocaine, but I just want to make it clear to you all. In the United States, this is not unique to cocaine prosecutions or arrests. The same is true when we look at marijuana. When we think about marijuana throughout the States, black people are still four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than white folks in the United States. Again, even though they smoked marijuana at about the same rates. Now, this would be bad enough if it was unique to the United States and it stayed in the United States. If we kept our bad policies and our ignorance about drugs to ourselves, that would be bad enough. But that's not what we do. I recently wrote a piece in a Brazilian journal after my several visits to Brazil, it was clear to me that we had exported our drug policy there. In Brazil in 2005, crack cocaine appeared. Now, just like in the United States in the 1980s, one of the things that happened in Brazil was that crack was blamed for the high rates of murder, the unemployment, the poor housing. Any sort of wretched behavior, crack cocaine was blamed. Now, please recall that I said that crack appeared in Brazil in 2005. If any of you all know anything about Brazil or South America, you know violence has been in South America long before 2005. And if you know anything about Brazil, poor people have been in Brazil long before 2005, unemployment, poor education. All of these things were there long before 2005. In fact, what's going on in Brazil is essentially is apartheid, but nobody has been informed. 50% of the population in Brazil is African, but you would not know that when you look at public officials, people in the middle class. If you look at people who are university professors or people who travel abroad as Brazilians, and so now one of the things that's happening in Brazil is that they are using their drug policy to further marginalize that group. The same thing is happening in South Africa. So as it relates to race in those places, race becomes important, but it's not the only thing. And so I think that, I hope that this gives you an idea of the concern that we have in terms of the role of selective enforcement, the role of race, and the role of other conspicuous characteristics by which we can separate groups and we can go after those marginalized groups. Given that that's the case, I like to wrap up and simply offer some suggestions. I think that one of the things that we can do is that we can call out the discrimination when we see it and call out those who support discrimination. And it might mean that you, me, we all take a look at ourselves, at our organizations, who are in our organizations. Another thing that we can do is that as we will talk about after this session, we can work to change the status of these drug laws. I know we're going to talk about decriminalization as the UNODC has suggested. And that's a great step, that's a great advancement. But ultimately, we have to really think about legalization. We have to really talk about legalization in terms of when we think about adults, adults should be able to engage in behavior, and responsible adults should be able to engage in these behaviors. Now, before concluding, I just want to say that when we think about drug users, if we're going to push for these sort of changes, we have to broaden the scope or broaden the view of who we think drug users are. Drug users, by the way, I know this will be news to some of you all. Drug users are not solely the people who are pathological. Drug users are responsible people. I'm a drug user. But simply because I'm not an injection drug user does not mean that I'm not a drug user. And so we have to make sure that we are, the tent is big enough so we can have, we change the face of the narrative. So people can see drug users vary as widely as the people who have sex. People who have sex don't all look one way. Do they? Of course not. Well, maybe they do, maybe they are beautiful, right? You all, you all are those people. But remember that if we make these changes, if we make these changes, we have to also be prepared to evaluate the consequences of those changes constantly. Because when we change laws, particularly when we have these repressive laws, we have done a poor job of evaluating the consequences and making changes. So we have to constantly evaluate the risk-benefit ratio, the cost-benefit ratio. And on that note, I just wanna thank you all for your attention. Thank you.