 Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, first of all, thank you for the organizers. Thank you for the organizer here in Malaysia and for the support they gave to this gathering of the world community of harm reduction leaders. We are all at all level where we work facing a large spectrum of challenges. This conference showed once more how long it takes to convince the authorities and the public about the necessity to change radically not only the means but even the aims of drug policy. As long as a drug-free world or drug-free societies will remain the proclaimed objective, harm reduction will remain a second-order policy with services offered reluctantly and with insufficient and revocable funding. Politically, when allowed and implemented, it will still be realized in the shade of more prestigious achievements, more less hidden as something more less shameful, directed towards people who don't really deserve it, not really be recognized as full citizen and accepted as full members of society. Harm reduction will remain a concession to an unaccepted reality. Think about this. The last Ongels has taken place in 1998. Its final declaration put a deadline to the achievement of a drug-free world, a deadline of 15 years. How to count the many dead people having passed over during the deadline? Because they were deprived of the means to protect themselves and their environment from the consequences of drug use under the conditions of prohibition. The mantra of the drug-free world is still repeated in several regional declarations and in most national narcotic laws. We have still not reached the international consensus, and neither did we in most countries, that humanity and psychoactive substances have a common history since the very beginning. That it is silly to think that the conception of some of them, more or less arbitrary chosen, will be suppressed if they are just banned and their use prohibited. Others being accepted, available under more or less severe conditions, their quality controlled by the state, substances even promoted by the same states greedy for the incomes they may generate. Yes, we are still far from the recognition that we live in a world with drugs, and the best we can do is to take responsibility of their use. So the first objective for the UNGAS taking place in April 2016 is to force the member states to face the reality and to abandon unrealistic views and lying hopes which prove to bring far more harms than the substances they pretend to eradicate. The second objective is to use the platform of UNGAS to present the evidence that arm reduction measures are urgently needed to fight against the transmission of HIV and the virus of EPC, that they have to be accessible and available for all, which implies an additional and sustainable financing. This conference is right in counting that the shift of 10% of the funding now wasted in repression would enable a public health policy which is still lacking in a majority of countries. The three complementary responses, prevention, harm reduction and treatment. This conference is right in calling the governments and the international organizations to adopt this modest objective within 20. UNGAS should become also the platform, the marketplace for good practice in health intervention and scientific evidence about what works and what does not, as constrained treatments and such that destroy the free will instead of strengthening it, they do not work. The spectrum of treatment must be large enough to respond to the wish, to the possibilities and to the individual situation of those who are looking for professional help. The third objective is even more important in my view. It is about lifting the main obstacles to access to health services, social integration and the responsible consumption of psychosocial active substances, the prohibition of drugs itself. This is the obstacle. The debate on the criminalization of drug use can no longer be postponed and it is crucial. Because a criminal record is a stigma in the search of a living, because it might be the reason why parents lose the rights to live with their children and educate them, because the prisons often lack the health protection measures and become herds of contamination and violence, because the fear of arrest makes it difficult to attend medical and social services, because treatments are delivered in some countries only under the condition of abstinence because, because, because there are so many obstacles that prohibition and criminalization is putting on a safe society. Not to speak about the discrimination of the poor, the migrants, the women, the cultural minorities, not to speak about the racial profiling, but to mention because we are here in Malaysia that physical pain inflicted to prisoners violates the right of physical integrity. To lift the punishment is what we have to call for at Ungas and the taboo has finally been broken. This conference is right in accepting and adopting this declaration from Kuala Lumpur, which is the call I am bringing my voice to. Beyond that, we have to, we have to challenge the fact that even if incarceration are stops and alternatives are developed, use and its preparation will remain unlawful in the terms of the Convention of 1988. My country ratified this Convention very late and only with a reservation on the relevant article on the necessity to declare illicit the consumption. And I wonder why there are not many other countries to do the same or consider to do so in a near future. The most severe form of criminalization is the death penalty. For drug offenses it is even more shocking because retentionist countries along international rule should only consider death penalty for the most serious crimes and the expert agree on excluding drug offenses from this definition. But the most shocking is certainly the mandatory death penalty depriving the court of the discretion it needs to exercise justice. All these ideas will be on the agenda of the Ungas. It will be important that if a new consensus on all of them will not be reached next year in New York, and that is to be expected, the absence of a general agreement will stay in the room and not be hidden behind a minimal formulation. Most of us think that it is not yet the time for renegotiate the conventions because it would not be successful. At least let us explore new solutions on national levels and let us make clear that Ungas is the beginning of a process leading to smarter policies. Harm reduction was and still is a movement able to save lives and empower the first person concerned, the drug users and the people working on their side. I have the impression that it has become more than that. That it has grown into a movement that will play a crucial role in changing the attitude toward the drug issue in general. I and my fellows from the Global Commission in Drug Policy are deeply grateful to all of you for this commitment. Let me finish with a thought nourished by my own national experience. In a situation of acute health emergency, we could develop some innovative tools in the fields of arm reduction and treatment. And we were able to convince our citizens first that it is worth it trying new ways and second that on the base of the evidence collected they should become permanent measures. We could do so because the different stakeholders understood that it was crucial to collaborate and to avoid actions that might jeopardize others' intervention. And we can be proud about what was achieved, thank this mutual understanding and collaboration. But we still don't have offer to all of need the help that we could. We still have not been able to be as creative as we were in the fight against HIV in relation with other types of addiction and other harms. And we missed to lift the fundamental contradiction between the illicit character of drug consumption and all the means to care, to cure, to support, to protect the users and more important to fully respect them. Without the regulation of the whole chain from the production to the consumption of psychoactive substances and medicines, now called drugs and diabolized, this contradiction remains. Not a reason for not doing all we know is useful. Not a reason to not accepting to take upon ourselves to assume and to explain this contradiction. But our aim must be to lift it as soon as possible.