 Well, ladies and gentlemen, dear friend, it's a real big impression to be here and to look at you. So numerous and so dedicated. It's an honor for me to address such an audience. And it's an honor for me to be a part of this opening session of the important Congress on the value of harm reduction. And it is a welcome opportunity to express my deep gratitude to the organizers of the event who have created this huge hub for experience sharing. To those among you who often in difficult and even hostile surroundings are providing day after day to people in need, generally to despise people, the means to protect their neighbor as themselves. And for those among you who, through scientific trials and monitoring, are giving the base of evidence to harm reduction policies, the conjunction of the front line work and the scientific scrutiny, the vocal recall that human rights are not invalidated for drug consumption, brought and bring step by step more governments to change their drug policy to integrate, if not to give priority to public health overimposing rule of prohibition. Among these states, and this is my fourth acknowledgement, Lithuania, our beautiful host country, it plays a pioneer role in Eastern Europe. Harm reduction services were introduced at the early stage of the HIV epidemic. They contributed to maintain a relatively low prevalence in the country. I read that five years ago, this prevalence was 10 times lower than in some neighboring countries. Needle and syringe program and opioid substitution showed here and elsewhere efficacy. Nevertheless, the hidden hepatitis C epidemic progressed among the people who inject drugs. 90% of them may live with this very contagious virus. Lithuania is aware about the threat of the ticking viral bomb. Despite the high cost of testing and treating, Lithuania is making a great effort of delivering. But the coverage of harm reduction services and health care remains insufficient. Hepatitis C shows the absolute need and necessity to scale up. To make harm reduction services diagnostic and medicine available, accessible, and affordable for all in need is a big challenge we are confronting with today's. On one side, it is a fight between moralistic ideology and evidence-based public health policy. On the other side, it is a time trial, a race against time for reducing the cost for the poor. Given the high cost of the existing treatment, given the risk that those in the last stages of clinical trials will also be prohibitive, if nothing is undertaken to avoid it, international solidarity is needed. Financing through states and charity must be combined with a price policy of the pharmaceutical industry with their readiness also to share their pattern and technologies in order to provide treatment in middle income and poor countries. My friends, HIV AIDS was a brutal teacher. First of all, he obliged us to consider drug users with other eyes, not criminals, but if addict ill people. We learned to listen to their needs and revendication, to recognize their capacity to act in a responsibility way if they were no longer hunted like game, not only by the drug cartels, but even by the police. We learned that mass incarceration, far from deterring the drug use, was the place where HIV, hepatitis C, drug consumption were spreading and new soldiers for the gangs were recruited. We learned that harm reduction and human rights are thus more necessary in detention than outside detention places. The hepatitis C virus, more contagious than the HIV, is not only a repetition of the lesson learned earlier. It is a more demanding lesson. We will have to do more. Our approach has to be more comprehensive. Time has come to a broader understanding of the harms produced by the moralistic condemnation of activity which do not harm others. The dream, or better said, the illusion of a drug-free society, the militarization of the war on drug. Even if this conference is dedicated in first line to the public health response to the misery of drug users and the sanitary stress for the whole society, even if the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and I am very proud to work in it with President Alexander Krasniewski and Michel Kazachkin, both attending this conference, even, as I said, if the Commission published reports on HIV and Hep C virus advocating for harm reduction, access to treatment, and decriminalization of drug possession and use, it is necessary to consider harms beyond the public health approach. The harms of the dominant drug policy regime are broader. They are interlinked, and they show a different mixture in different regions of the world. Let me just enumerate the most important harms who are not directly in the field of public health. The increased power of the criminal organization controlling the chain of illicit substances from production to retail challenges not only weaker states. Their huge profit allowed them to corrupt police, justice, and governments, threatening democracy and the rule of law in many parts of the world. Think to the Caribbean region, Central America and Mexico, Central Asia, West Africa, and others. Second, the fights against the cartel and against the military for the domination of production, arraias, traffic roads, and markets fuels violence at a level touching step by step the whole population. In some quieter places of the planet, the street deal occupying poor neighborhoods creates at least a feeling of insecurity and a loss of quality of life if not a real threat for the inhabitants. Mass incarceration is a huge waste of public resources, and human rights violations are justified by the so-called war on drugs. Most execution in the world are the cruel answer of drug offenses. In too many countries, people in strong need of pain relief medicine, for instance, people suffering cancer in the terminal phase are deprived of them. Restrictions to medical and scientific use of substances listed in the UN convention are not in line with the letter and the spirit of this convention, yet they exist, and it is a hard job to make them accepted. It is a hard job to show that the convention cannot be an excuse for that. The Global Commission on Drug Policy, therefore, is advocated for cautiously designing and experimenting models of regulation by the state of all drugs. The UN Special Assembly in 2016 will be an important opportunity to share such experiences and to open new ones. Nevertheless, it is still urgent. It is still necessary all over the world to fight for harm reduction measures, to make them understood by the public opinion, to make them accepted by the authorities, to make them promoted, scaled up, financed with sufficient resources, and to develop new fields in new fields of addiction, new measures of harm reduction. We are all committed to achieve these aims. You are all committed to achieve these aims. You are saving lives, and you are protecting the dignity and the right of the over-deprived community. Once more, thank you, from the deepest of my heart, but also from my brain, for your engagement.