 We are reporting from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where more than 800 people from 17 countries attend the International Harm Reduction Conference. I have no hesitation in saying that for societies in Asia, drug prohibition is a historic wrong which needs to be corrected. We have countless examples in all regions of the world where harm reduction has saved lives, saved money and helped promote the human rights and dignity of people who use drugs. An estimated 100 billion US dollars is spent every year on punitive responses to drug control, yet harm reduction investment amounts to only 160 million dollars a year. This is just 7% of what is required to scale it up fully. The world has failed people who use drugs. Harm reduction international estimates that just 10 cents of every dollar spent on drug enforcement could fund the global HIV and hepatitis C response amongst people who inject drugs twice over every year. A 10% reinvestment of current drug enforcement spending by 2020 or 10 by 2020 is the collective demand of the harm reduction movement. Rick, why did you choose Malaysia? Malaysia this year to organize the International Harm Reduction Conference. In terms of Malaysia, we very much wanted to recognize the great work that's gone on here over the last 10 years to build the harm reduction response here. And we wanted to showcase it as a model of what could be achieved in the region when you had good partnership between government and civil society. The other aspect of course is the opportunity to sort of continue to highlight some of the human rights violations. Despite the good progress on harm reduction here, we still know Malaysia has very punitive drug laws. Harm reduction programs coexist with a policy environment that is very punitive. So you'll have operational harm reduction programs that hand out clean needles, but you'll have police at the same time waiting outside the methadone clinic or the needle exchange program arresting people and using needles as evidence. We have to come as a united to show our oppositions to the death penalty for drug offenses because it's one of the most serious negative consequences of the war on drugs. I'm based in Mexico City. I work in Latin America and producing in transit countries. Sometimes we forget that maybe they don't have high consumption rates, but what they do have is policies that militarize, that criminalize poor people, that criminalize people who produce, who cultivate these substances and these plants. And so it's important to think about how do we really bring them into a harm reduction conversation and how do we reduce that harm of the punitive and repressive drug policies that we have around the world. What's this global day action is about? What we've built, we've built a wall that represents and symbolizes the wall to funding for harm reduction. We just want to gather many, many people with many statesmen asking them, how do they value harm reduction? So as you can see people brought many different things because it saves lives, it makes a difference, it keeps my baby alive. I come from a drug-using background, so I really don't like the classification of being a clean person and a non-clean person or a suffering person and a clean person. And being a person who has recovered, we have stopped using certain drugs and using certain stuff that you like and going through that is kind of like you are nowhere. You are not in the harm reduction community, you are not in the 12 step or the NA community. I think as always what is most important is that the people who are directly concerned by drug use, by other activities that marginalize them has here really the possibility to express, to give their testimonies, to show their fights. It's wonderful to see Asian civil society coming together, being stronger, being more diverse, growing all the time, being more sophisticated in their advocacy as well. They are highlighting the important issues that remain in this region, compulsory drug detention and I think also importantly more attention being paid to the issue of stimulants and harm reduction for stimulant use, which is a big problem in this region. Claudia, why do you think it's important to address gender issues in relation to harm reduction services? Women continue to be excluded from many harm reduction services, even in places where these services are widely available and services continue to be very male dominated and very much a kind of one size fits all approach. Fortunately now with the advent of new and better drugs, hepatitis C is completely curable across genotypes within a short period of time. Drugs are prohibitively expensive. Significantly they don't allow exporter of those drugs to high burden hepatitis C countries like those in Latin America, the MENA region, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. We have a lot of problems in Russia and it's mainly connected with the lack of political will and insufficient funds for harm reduction services. Community itself can't do everything alone. I mean there should be some kind of help, that is technical help and also lobbying of our interests on a high level. The Global Fund keeps repeating that it has a limited budget and it has to allocate it on the low income countries and it can only take into consideration the disease burden and the level of income of a country. What would be your response to this? Well the Global Fund isn't withdrawing from middle income countries but it is withdrawing from many countries in Eastern Europe and Asia which is precisely where the people who inject drugs are and my response to the Global Fund and to all people who care about the fight against AIDS would be if you want to fight AIDS you have to go where the AIDS is and where the risk of AIDS is. You know we interviewed the head of the Global Fund and we asked like why do you move out from this country? He said because they are high income so the government should pay for harm reduction so what do you think about this issue? Income of the country usually not distributed for vulnerable population and in different countries vulnerable groups have the similar incomes, very low incomes. The Global Fund projects will soon end in Thailand. Does it endanger harm reduction services in Thailand? Once the transition is finished on 1st of January 2017 the Global Fund is pulling out of Thailand and to date there is no money in the bank to continue service delivery for people who inject drugs in Thailand. So we interviewed the head of the Global Fund and he said you know we have a very limited budget and we need to allocate it on Africa and poor countries not to higher income countries. What would you respond to that? There is historical evidence that the Thai government will not invest there. So yes perhaps the Global Fund is targeting their resources more efficiently but I think there is another dimension that they need to be conscious about and it's the willingness, it's not only capacity to pay but the willingness to have the policy and environment to enable the funding to lead to effective service delivery. This conference is really our last opportunity to prepare for Angas as a harm reduction movement. I think what really matters around Angas is that we sort of stick to the spirit with which this Angas was articulated and that spirit is a request for evaluation for thinking through what has not worked, of thinking about what needs to change. I think to all of us harm reduction as Alex Vodak said is also reducing the harms from bad drug policies. I hope the spirit of this conference will now inspire the people to go back to countries, to capitals, interact with their delegations and you know push for a successful Angas. UNODC, the agency responsible for leading the world fight against drugs in the UN called for decriminalization of drug possession for personal use as well as drug use. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, this important news has been complicated by the fact that the UN has caved and withdrawn its own report when in fact they were supposed to be releasing it here at the conference. Is there an important issue you would like to highlight at this international harm reduction conference? Well right now it's the election in Canada. We did it! Harper is out and I hope it's going to be helpful for us to have supervised injection site in Montreal to have better service for people who use drugs and for sex workers.