 On World Drug Day in 2011, the members of the European Drug Policy Initiative organized media events in five countries, asking for an accounting for the last 50 years of the costs of the global war on drugs and to explore its alternatives. This year 2011 is the 50 year anniversary of the 1961 UN single convention on drugs. The global war on drugs has been fought for 50 years without preventing a long term trend in increased drug supply and use. It is actually creating many of the problems that it is supposed to be fighting against. It's not just a failure, it's actively counterproductive. And this damage is done is out of all proportion to the damage that drugs themselves do. We need to remember that 90% of drug use is non-problematic. The war on drugs undermines international development and security. The money that is created by the illegal trade provides financing for paramilitary groups and terrorist groups. In Afghanistan the war on drugs is very real. In the jungles of Colombia there are wars and bloodshed. In Mexico since 2006 there have been 30,000 deaths. 30,000 people killed as a direct result of drug related conflict and violence. The drugs haven't stopped going through Mexico, they're still there. Deforestation and pollution occurs. Aerial spraying of pesticides has had little or no effect on long term production levels yet has contaminated the soil and the waterways. So you destroy the coca crops in one area and it's just grown in another area. But to grow it in the other area they have to cut down the forests to grow it and it doesn't reduce production. Production of cocaine has more than kept pace with demand. The drug war creates crimes and enriches criminals. In the UK 50% of property crime is committed by those dependent on heroin and cocaine. Provision has fueled the development for the world's largest illegal commodities market with a turnover in excess of 200 billion euros a year. If they don't want the message they want the money. There is an economic cost in terms of direct expenditure on drug law enforcement. Between 70 and 100 billion euros or equivalent a year is spent globally enforcing the war on drugs. 42% of all drugs are cannabis. Nobody can tell you how much this costs. 6-800 million euros are used to get a certain amount of money. Evaluation of the political impact on drugs and research in Norway, in Sweden and Norway as well. So it's very, very small. To put it simply, I can't tell you how this works out of research. This is done on a specific institution. The effects of the damage to the regime that has been carried out and carried out are very documented. So we know at least that if they don't do especially well, they cause a lot of trouble. UN AIDS, the United Nations AIDS Organization, has estimated that globally we need just 2.2 billion to provide harm reduction services in terms of needle exchange and medication for the entire global population of injecting drug users at the moment we spend around 0.1 billion. We know that harm reduction works, it saves lives, it does protect health. We're spending a hundred billion a year on enforcing the laws that are creating the problems for these injecting drug users in the first place. The war on drugs threatens public health, spreads disease and causes death. A punitive enforcement-based approach increases the risk associated with drug use. Perhaps one of the most devastating effects is with injecting drug users and the HIV and hepatitis epidemic amongst injecting drug users. The war on drug promotes stigma and discrimination. There's some very dramatic statistics from the US that African American black males are imprisoned on drug charges 13 times the rate of white males and this is despite the levels of drug use amongst those populations being comparable. In many countries drug control efforts lead to terrible human rights abuses, torture by police, mass incarceration, executions and extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention and denial of basic health services. Drug users are often sent to drug treatment centres. They're called drug treatment centres but they do not do drug treatment. These are effectively forced labour camps. Around 1,000 people a year are executed for drug offences. No government or international body has properly counted these costs. They've never modelled the alternative. Account the costs campaign which I hope you will support and your country will support and every other voluntary organisation concerned with human growth, peace, survival and development will support as well, demands that that research be done. We need to count those costs. We need to fully understand what the war on drugs is costing us and what we could better do with that money. Former presidents, former general secretaries of the UN, big figures from the world of business and so on are all saying the same thing. This is not a marginal issue anymore. It's very much a mainstream, it's very much part of the mainstream public and political debate.