 When I first came to work for the Drug Policy Alliance, it was actually in 2000 and that was so long ago that DPA was still called the Linda Smith Center and it was a project of the Open Society Foundations housed in a tiny basement on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And I was brought on as a consultant to pull together programs for these massive media events convened by Ariana Huffington that were meant to put opposition to the drug war into the national spotlight. At the time I thought I knew very little about drug policy. My background was in international human rights, but I was charged with pulling together the program for these events that were meant to inspire the uninitiated and get them to care about this issue. And in the process I found myself becoming very passionate about this cause. I met Gus Smith, the father of Kemba Smith, the remarkable woman you met yesterday at the Morning Plenary when he came to speak at one of the events to advocate on her behalf because Kemba was still incarcerated. I met medical marijuana patients fighting so hard for the medicine they needed to survive. I met people from Latin America whose lives were devastated by the violence caused by the drug war and prohibition throughout the region and I met drug users who were pushed to the margins of society and denied basic humanity and dignity. I came to realize that this was all connected to my own life, my own community, my family and the impact and the harms the drug war had had upon us. And not only was the drug war a human rights issue, but one of the principal instruments of violating human rights around the globe that affects each and every one of us. So it's my honor to be here today to present a series of incredible speakers who are really fortunate to have with us today who will talk to you about the impact of the drug war across the globe and its impact on human rights. So please join me in welcoming the first of these speakers. It's Damon Barrett who's joining us. He's a co-founder and director of the International Center on Human Rights and Drug Policy based at the Human Rights Center at the University of Essex where he's visiting fellow. From 2007 to 2014 he worked at Harm Reduction International leading the organization's Human Rights Strategy and is deputy director from 2012 to 2014. He's now a PhD researcher at the University of Stockholm and he lives in and he helped me in pronouncing this Gothenburg Stockholm Sweden. It's not easy to say, it looks like a different way than it's pronounced. Thank you Sweden for being hard for us. But Gothenburg Sweden is where he lives. So join me in welcoming Damon Barrett. That is a big room. Okay, for a little man. Gov Mahogott Sharda and G.E. Irvamajanakarja. Thank you Sharda and good morning friends. I begin in Irish to have a little detour if you don't mind in the light of events yesterday in Congress. I saw Congress people with names like Connolly and Fitzpatrick and Murphy passing an act that will stop refugees coming into this country and 170, 170 years ago Irish people fled famine and repression in their hundreds of thousands and came here and I as babies are being washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean I ask if they've got no sense of history and no shame. So listen, speaking of Ireland, okay, Catholic Ireland, we legalized same sex marriage through a constitutional referendum, recognized the legal status of transgender people and are probably having safe injection facilities next year. So things change, right? These are not things the Vatican likes, but as I speak there are more than 10 million people in penal institutions around the world and we don't know how many but it's likely millions for drug offenses. Right now we're going to miss global HIV targets by decades, decades because we flush our money down the ineffective and abusive sinkhole of enforcement rather than investing in harm reduction. Right now billions, billions, four-fifths of the planet, mostly in the developing world have little or no access to basic medicines for pain. This is people with cancer, people who have been in accidents or undergone surgery. Right now hundreds of thousands of people are displaced because of drug related violence, perhaps millions, and crop eradication campaigns. And on average today, tomorrow, the next day and for the rest of the year, two or three people will be executed for drug offenses in the world. So we could read the human rights indictment of the drug war all day. In fact, many of you have experienced its worst abuses and you could read your own indictment. And here's the kicker, if this were a trial, if this were that all of these facts would be stipulated by the other side, nobody denies it's happening. The only disagreement is what's driving it, who's to blame, and what drug policy reform can do about it. So that's what I'd like to speak to and a whole conference could go on this. But I'm going to focus on the international regime. But through that I hope there's some resonance with national systems. So I know talking about treaties can be tedious and boring. But I want to just make two important points. The first is that international law and treaties matter. They do important things. The refugee convention is more important than ever. But like any other legal system, there's good laws and there's bad laws. And in this case, we have three drugs treaties which enshrine a certain strategy for how to deal with drugs. And what they require states to do is hugely risky from a human rights perspective. So let's look at why. States have to ban private behaviors. They have to ban indigenous people from doing what they've been doing for millennia. They have to stop religious minorities from pursuing their beliefs. They have to conduct surveillance, arrest people, prosecute them, extradite them. They have to eradicate crops. They have to ban certain forms of expression because of an ill-defined idea of incitement to use drugs. This is what was signed up to. And it's done and it's all carried out under a so-called principle of shared responsibility. This has been the wording for many, many decades in the UN. And usually used to resist reform. We have shared responsibility to control drugs. Well, who takes shared responsibility for everything I just listed? Who takes shared responsibility? Who shares it for the human rights consequences of what's happening? Ethan said yesterday, everyone went along, right? Well, no matter what they say now and no matter how friendly some of our governments are, they went along too. And they went along for decades, so every state has to answer for it. Because it's too easy to say, look at China, look what they do. Look at Indonesia and who they execute. Look at Mexico and its violence. But if you prop up the system that creates the infrastructure in which that takes place, it's your fault too. So I think that recognizing past errors is cathartic and it's important. And that includes governments who maybe now see some flaws in this system and want to change it. They have to recognize their own responsibility in creating it. The in-memoriam, we saw Nils Christie. Well, Nils Christie didn't just refer to drugs as a good enemy. He said it was a perfect enemy. It was a perfect enemy, sets up an extraordinary threat that requires extraordinary responses. It doesn't ever die. It never goes away. And it's a moving target. So we had opium, we had marijuana, we had cocaine, crack, novel psychoactive substances and so on. And the thing is, this is a huge human rights problem because if you identify an extraordinary threat, point the finger at who's to blame for it, human rights abuses are coming and they're exceptionally easy to justify. And a final point about a perfect enemy. The extraordinary responses should not be those that threaten the powerful. So it helps to justify the abuses if the victims are minorities. It helps if they're in the global south and connecting the dots. It really helps if they're poor. And that's what we have. Today in fact, I'm going to a film screening. There's a fantastic man called Albi Sax, who's speaking. He was a judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa and before that an anti-apartheid freedom fighter. Now in 2002, he wrote a wonderful dissent in a case about cannabis use among the Rastafari. The majority of the court said that a religious exemption for this already maligned religious minority would threaten the broad prohibition that was in place and it would undermine South Africa's ability to live up to its treaty obligations. Sax said, no, no, no, no, hang on. This goes against the tolerance of diversity that is central to the entire constitutional project and, and this is important, it represented a thumb on the scales for ease of law enforcement. Now that for me is an important lesson because that's exactly what the UN Drug Control Treaties are. And importantly, that's what they were intended to be, especially the Drug Trafficking Convention. It was intended to make enforcement easier. And this for me is an enormous human rights problem because part of the human rights movement is to resist the arbitrary capricious overreach of state power into our lives and the treaties in many ways legitimize that, make it stronger in international law. And that's a major problem for these treaties and I think a taboo, if we're going to break them, that likely wouldn't come up at the UN gas next year. So if, if the, the treaties and if drug control is a thumb on the scales for ease of law enforcement, and then our job in solidarity is to put all of our weight on the other side of the scales, surely. And doing that requires considerably more than arguments about personal freedom. It requires considerably more because a person, in fact, because I mentioned it in apartheid South Africa, they used to say no freedom without bread and no bread without freedom. Starving person is not free. A person working three minimum wage jobs is not fully free. When people's life chances, their opportunities are so curtailed by poverty, they are not truly free. And I'm talking, of course, about economic and social rights, not just civil rights for what we do and how important it is. You know, even if we look at drug dependence, there was a time when people thought addiction, if we want to call it, that was all about the dependence producing properties of substances. We know now that's not the case. We know there's a role, but there's so much environmental and social factors going into that. And economic and social rights legislate better for that, better for that than any drug law can. So personal freedom is really important, but not enough. And marijuana reform is important, but not nearly enough. And you know what? Drug policy reform I don't think is enough because the damage the drug war has done is so far-reaching. And the causes of so much of the things we care about that lead us into this movement have something to do with something else. So Ethan, I think yesterday asked, you know, how do we know when we've won or what does victory look like? I don't know, but I do know this. I won't back off on human rights. I won't do that, so I'll stick to my principles. I also know this, that once the drug war gets out of the way, we're going to have so much more left to do in solidarity with others. But our job will be a lot easier than it currently is. Now, I began 170 years ago, I'm going to go back further. According to the Spanish artist Goya, the sleep of reason produces monsters. Or as he clarified, the imagination without reason will bring about impossible monsters. Now, people stood at this podium yesterday and described things that happen to them that should be impossible in a free society, that should be impossible, life without parole for nonviolent defense. This should be impossible. But the imagination of a drug-free world has brought about its impossible monsters. But I think that HIV made a big noise and started to wake up reason in drug control and harm reduction has become like that little buzzing alarm clock on snooze mode, reminding reason every three minutes or so to wake the hell up. And I think that human rights, the human rights consequences of the drug war now, it's more like a fire alarm. And there's no sleep any more possible. And reason has to not only wake up, but stand up. And, you know, Goya's image was actually, imagination and reason combined will bring about wonders. So I think that if we can campaign for life of dignity for everybody and solidarity with them, and if we reject state repression in the name of social policy and if we reject the legitimization of that level of state power through international law, then I think we combine our reason, everything we know from all of these decades with our imagination for the world we want. And in that way, I think we'll have impact beyond our drug strategies and for the human rights movement way beyond this room. So that's what I have to say and just I should say that England or English is in the house. So thank you very much. Ireland is in the house. So Gora of Mila Mahgweb, Galaire, and Sweden is in the house. So tack så jättemycket.