 A few months before the United Nations General Assembly special session on drugs, which aims to shape global drug policies, the UN Agency on Drugs and Crime prepared a position paper in support of the decriminalization of drug use. The paper was supposed to be published here at the International Harm Reduction Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but in the last moment the agency withdrew it, stating that the paper does not reflect its position and it was only for dissemination and discussion. For those of you who have been following the news the last couple of days, you perhaps followed the news of a paper that has come out of UNODC that has been distributed through several media outlets and which was now distributed at the door. Since this paper was intended for dissemination and discussion at this conference, I would like to move on behalf of Harm Reduction International that we commend UNODC for this position, and I would like us to urge UNODC to publish this paper. And anyone in favor of the motion, I would ask that you hold up your hand or hold up the paper as a show of support. Please keep your papers up. Keep them up for a second. Recently that was a paper leaked out from the UNODC supporting decriminalization, but then it was suppressed. Do you have any comments on that? Decriminalization is not rocket science. There are multiple examples throughout the world, particularly in Western Europe on how it might happen. We've been talking about Portugal, Portuguese model for many, many years. So it's good that UNODC noticed and that actually tried to articulate its own position. Obviously it's disappointing that it did not get properly rolled out. I think it's a real shame and very devastating that somehow UNODC has succumbed to political pressure and that must be what it is to backtrack and now say that the statement is simply a draft, that it wasn't supposed to be released, that it wasn't agreed that it would be released. We know that it was supposed to be released on Sunday at the opening session of this conference. Do you have any guess, like what's behind, who was the government that suppressed the document? Well, we don't know, but let me say this. Reporters called governments for comment and I don't think that the reporters who got the report early, like the BBC or the New York Times, would know how to call the Russian government. So my money would be on the US government, though we have no independent confirmation of that yet. What does it mean to us? So it means two things. It means that the drug control consensus is cracked and that UNODC has joined the ranks of UN agencies that see that criminalization is at the root cause of many, many bad effects and many problems in the war on drugs. But it also means that this is an unstable and uncertain transition. Well, the truth generally comes out and the truth is that criminalization is an obstacle for public health and for human rights and one day or the other, the UNODC will be brave enough to tell it to the member states of the convention. Would you like to comment on this leaked UNODC paper on the criminalization? You know, as a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, we have been advocating for decriminalization from day one and this is to us one of the key priorities, hoping that UNGAS will not sort of endorse it. I can't see because I can't see a consensus on this, but the language coming out of UNGAS will clearly give the signal of a shift and then that more and more countries will actually move.