 Distinguished ladies and gentlemen from Government and Civil Society and the Diplomatic Corps, it is a great honor for me to be part of this very distinguished panel and a great honor for me to be here. It is a bit my misfortune to be the first non-Portuguese speaker on the program. I'm sorry about all that. I want to thank the governments of Cape Verde and the people of Cape Verde for the very warm welcome that we've had here for your engagement in this process. I want to thank our good colleagues at Aptes for all the very hard work that they put into making this meeting happen. I want to thank especially Dr. Goulin and his team for being willing to take the time to share their unique and pioneering experience in drug policy not only here but all around the world. They have made an important contribution to the global debate on drug policy and we are certainly in their debt. I am honored always also to be in the presence of some African pioneers. There is now as we speak a new history of drug policy change being written and being lived here in Africa and some of the key players in that history are here with us also. In addition to His Excellency President Pires and the members of the West African Commission who are making an important contribution in that new history, we have the privilege of being with such persons as Dr. Idrisa Bah from Senegal, your neighbor, who you will get to hear from about how that country has struggled to bring humane health services for people who use drugs into the center of the drug policy debate. You will hear later from Dr. Frank Massau about the experience of Tanzania, a truly African experience that has had great success in dealing with a long-standing problem of heroin addiction in that country. And we have also among us Mr. Adeolu Ogunrombi from Nigeria here in the region who has helped through his work in the West Africa Commission to bring the reality of young drug users to a wider audience and it is truly an honor for me to be with those pioneers in this new movement in Africa. We were asked in this panel to think about transnational or globalization related factors that have influenced drug policy and whether it is possible to move toward policy based on human rights and good scientific evidence. We know now that whatever the factors have been that have influenced drug policy around the world, it still is more the rule than the exception that policies are heavily based on policing and heavily invested in law enforcement and criminal justice compared to the other sectors that have been mentioned here and that are an important part of drug policy. So we might say that human rights centered drug policy I would say anyway is still fairly exceptional of the kind that you will hear more about in the Portuguese experience where the human rights of people who use drugs really are part of how policy has been made. The idea is very well entrenched whether it is because of globalization or for other reasons that war like approaches to drugs are the way to go. The idea that the correct response to drugs is policing and the correct response to more drugs is more policing. For me this is a discouraging situation but it is changing. His Excellency President Sampaio talked about fissures in the debate. For me and I will make reference to repressive drug law, what I mean is also I think what President Sampaio was referring to drug laws that allow for very long penalties, very harsh penalties, long custodial sentences, long prison sentences for minor infractions including things like possession of an amount of drugs that is clearly only for personal use and like drug use itself. Drug consumption itself is still around the world treated as a crime. As President Cardoso also said this is a misconception that we have to keep working about. When we ask, and I have had this conversation in many parts of the world, when we ask government officials why they have repressive drug laws on the books, sometimes they will cite the international responsibilities that they have under the UN drug conventions which have also been referred to this morning. The UN drug conventions I guess we could say technically kind of predate what we might think about globalization and the information revolution and all of the things that go into what we might conceive of as globalization because the first convention is from 1961 and indeed was a bringing together of ideas from various drug treaties that had been around since the 1910s and 1920s. So these ideas are old, they predate what I anyway think of as global factors. Is this a real reason to retain repressive drug policies adherence to the international conventions? At the risk very much of reverting to my old job as a university professor and overwhelming you with text. I think it is nonetheless useful for us to look at what the drug conventions actually say. And I have a Portuguese translation here that comes from the 1988 convention, the third of the UN drug conventions that indeed is often cited by government officials as a reason for retaining very harsh penalties for very minor infractions. It talks about encouraging countries to use their own sovereign legal frameworks to respond to drug related crimes with criminal penalties including as you see here, including individual level or personal level what I would consider to be minor infractions. But that's not the end of what's in the drug conventions. In the very same article of that 1988 convention, we have a statement that says, well in spite of what we just said about criminal law for a wide range of infractions, states have the option to look at alternatives to incarceration for certain offenses again within the framework of their own legal systems. And this language about the sovereignty of legal systems at the national level is repeated in the conventions several times. I would say that the most neglected part of the UN drug conventions is again the repeated reference to treatment for addiction, to diagnosis of addiction, to education, to what's called aftercare, to rehabilitation and what the conventions call social reintegration. And if we had the level of investment in those areas also mandated in these UN drug conventions that we have in criminal law enforcement and application of criminal laws to a wide range of drug offenses, I bet that we would have a very different situation from what we have today in the global world of drugs. Again the emphasis on countries being able within a framework of adherence to conventions, to the drug conventions, to be able to have some flexibility in the framework of their own laws is something that we come back to over and over again. And this is why indeed we might say that Portugal, that many other countries in Western Europe that have essentially decriminalized a range of certain offenses in some cases with respect to certain drugs, can be well adhering members of the international community with respect to the UN drug conventions and still have policies that seem to bring more balance than just more drugs means more policing. But of course it's not just the UN drug conventions that have influenced the formulation of drug policy, it's many, many other factors. I've just noted here domestic political pressures which I think we can talk about and will talk about in these days. But also many countries have been motivated to look at their drug policies to revisit their drug policies because of HIV, which has already been mentioned. Certainly this is an important part of the discussions in the West African Commission and in the African Union in this most HIV affected continent where we are. And in addition, regional agreements that may be made and other kinds of pressures. I actually think to be fair that the picture would look more like this if we made the boxes correspond to the level of influence. Domestic political pressures are what we are always running into as we look at changing national debates on drug policy. In my country, in the United States, in many other countries, politicians are afraid of looking as though they are soft on crime. And the drug issue is one that they know people feel strongly about and that they take into account in their own political positions. But where has this adherence to strong criminal laws on drugs left us? I think that we have already, we've already heard reference to many of these consequences and I won't go through them in any detail. We know that, and it may seem paradoxical, but we know that in spite of billions of dollars, billions of dollars, many, many hours of police time, many investments indeed in military hardware and surveillance and all kinds of things, we are in a situation today where drugs are more abundant than ever, they're purer than ever and they have lower prices than ever. So something seems not to be working. We also know that, and again, my country is the one that kind of wrote the book on this, that our drug, that our prisons are overcrowded with people who should be treated through health and social sectors and not as criminals as has already been so eloquently said. We know that corruption and organized crime are rampant, linked to drugs as has already also been said. I think perhaps we may not think enough about the fact that on the, on the health side it's not just the direct health consequences of drug consumption that we have to worry about, but it's the fact that repressive drug control systems have spilled over to the availability of medicines like pain medications, many of which are opiates and other kinds of controlled substances that many, many people simply do not have access to because they are caught up in the net of drug control policies. I think that, again, we've discussed this a lot in the African Union, the African continent is particularly vulnerable to this problem with the repressive laws that it has. We'll talk more about some of these, these other effects, but I did want to take just a minute to talk about some of the laws that are on the books that I think really undermine our trajectory toward human rights, human rights based policy. Again if you'll indulge me a slightly wordy slide. We have policies in a number of countries or practices I suppose more than laws where police are compensated or they are rewarded or they are promoted based on the number of arrests that they have. Now when that kind of policy is in practice with respect to drugs, whom do you think is likely to be arrested? Who are the people who are going to make those arrest totals go up most easily? Of course it is the small scale drug user and probably not the large traffickers who will make those totals happen. And so this policy of meeting arrest quotas has been very, very, has very much undermined the discussion of more balanced drug policies in some places. In the United States, in some states of the United States, in many, many countries around the world, the drug law is interpreted such that the possession of a syringe, even a clean syringe, can be a crime. The possession of a syringe with a small amount of drug, what I would consider to be a trace amount of drugs, can violate drug possession laws in many countries. Now if we think about HIV, if we think about public health, if we think about ensuring that people have clean injection equipment, we can see how counterproductive that policy is from a public health point of view. We have many, many examples of places where health workers are either required or encouraged to register with the police, somebody who shows up in their services and seems to have a drug problem. Again, very much a barrier to getting people to seek services and to enjoy the benefit of services that might be there. And of course, any kind of policies that allow for frequent incarceration of people who use drugs, we have worked in countries where almost everyone who uses drugs at some point is in the criminal justice system. It becomes very hard to extend the kinds of services that Dr. Goulin and his team will be telling us about later in this conference. I just did want to make a small point about incarceration. What you see here is stated by, regularized or standardized by population, the incarceration rates of a number of European countries. And we add to that the incarceration rate in the United States. And I can assure you that a very large part of that blue bar is represented by very small scale drug, people who have committed small scale drug offenses, minor offenses. This is the burden that the United States is working with and that will take many, many years to combat the consequences of. But in addition, this burden is not borne equally across the population. What we have in this diagram is, again, the incarceration rate for the entire population and the incarceration rate for the white population. And we add to that, however, the incarceration rate for people of African descent in my country. We see that this is not a war that is without its discriminatory aspects. This is a war, in fact, that many people would characterize as a race war as much as it is a drug war. The United States, again, has led the world in investing in eradication of plant-based drug crops, including massive eradication programs in the Andes region of coca plants in the Andes region of South America. I think it merits a lot of thought to suppose what the effect of this kind of eradication program is on poor people who may have very limited opportunities for livelihoods in the mainstream economy. Should they have better options than raising coca? Perhaps they should. But we also know that the programs that have been tried to bring true alternative livelihoods, livelihoods that really can help people support their families as part of eradication of drug crops, have generally been failures, have been poorly invested in. We don't have many success stories like that. That's a challenge for our development agencies and for our development efforts domestically. And what is the result of all of these programs of eradication? By the United States' own figures, what we see here is that sometimes temporarily in Peru, for instance, cultivation of coca has declined, but then it increases in Colombia, or then it goes down in Colombia, it increases in Bolivia. Overall, what we see is that, in fact, there has been no real reduction in production of coca, even in spite of the billions of dollars of investment in these efforts. And lest we think that this problem is very far away, this picture comes from Operation Burn the Weed in Nigeria. The Nigerian government has invested a great deal in the eradication of cannabis cultivation in some parts of the country. Cannabis of all things that is sure to be able to crop up in some other place, as we know from experiences all around the world. Is this a good investment? Is it an investment that is fair to people who, again, may have limited livelihood opportunities other than this cultivation? I actually think, as somebody trained in public health, that one of the truly awful and from a human rights perspective, horrible consequences of drug policies in many parts of the world, have been that we have services that are in the name of treatment of drug addiction really nothing better than torture. The picture that you see here comes from India, and on the left we have, again, a treatment program where one of the elements of treatment is to shave half of people's hair, so they will be marked as addicts. And we have a picture there, I don't know if you can see in the upper right corner it says, changed when chained. And in this particular program, people were allowed another link in the chain for every day that they could be drug free. Again, is this treatment? In many parts of the world, drug treatment includes a time in what is essentially a forced labor camp. In some parts of the world, these labor camps, these camps that provide very cheap labor, as in prison labor camps as well, have a great economic importance and that has made it very difficult to shut them down. Again, this is forced labor in the name of treatment, chaining people to trees, chaining people to beds. We were able to get a little bit of traction on this issue when a number of years ago in Moscow, there was a fire in a drug treatment facility and it turned out that the staff of the facility, the nurses in the facility, escaped the fire, but the patients did not because they were chained to their beds as part of their treatment. And so I challenge you just to think, is there any other public health problem that we might be able to identify in the world where it would be thought to be an appropriate response to chain somebody to a tree or to chain them to their bed or to humiliate them as part of treatment? And so we get to a point where, ladies and gentlemen, I think that we need to look at the facts as objectively as possible and think about how it is that we might come to new approaches. This figure comes from a recent article in the British Medical Journal and it shows this what seemingly paradoxical result that apparently the more that we invest in seizures and interdictions of drug supply, somehow we still have drugs that are more plentiful and therefore cheaper than ever. How is this happening? And how is this making people in the public also think again about the way that their tax dollars are used to make drug policy? We all owe a debt to His Excellency President Sampaio and his colleagues who have been part of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. I encourage you very much to look at their reports on their website, which are available in Portuguese, because they have helped in places where politicians, sitting politicians, have not been able to have the political capacity or courage to open these debates themselves. The Global Commission has helped to raise new questions about drug policy and in a very balanced, I think an even-handed way to help people to suggest questions that we need to be looking at. In this picture you see former President Cardoso, whom we heard from this morning, and to the left of him, former Swiss President Ruth Dreyfus. To the left of her, some of you may recognize Richard Branson, the head of Virgin Atlantic Companies, and all the way on the right, the former Colombian President, Gaviria. One of the things that the Global Commission on Drugs has done, and I apologize that this will be difficult to read, but I would refer you, I'd be happy to refer you to the table on the Internet if you'd like to see it. One of the things that they've done has helped us to challenge one of the pillars of drug prohibition, prohibitionist approaches, which is this idea that all drug use is harmful, and all drug use is harmful to the same degree. So what the Global Commission featured was a report that was published in the distinguished academic journal, The Lancet, where experts were asked, medical experts, were asked to evaluate the harms, medical and social, of various, if you like, addictive or potentially addictive substances. And what we see here is that cannabis, for instance, is in the middle of this list, below tobacco, below alcohol, and below a lot of other things. So the Global Commission is simply raising the question, does it help us to understand all drugs as equally harmful all the time? The real pioneers in that kind of thinking, as many of you will know, are our colleagues in the Netherlands. And before there was really HIV as a public health problem, before there was the information revolution, before there was globalization as we think of it. In the 1970s, the Dutch made a conscious decision to make, to create legal outlets for the sale of very limited quantities of cannabis. And they did that for one reason, and it has to do with that table, the graph that we just saw. They did it for the particular reason of separating, of allowing people to purchase cannabis without having to purchase it from somebody who also sells heroin and cocaine. There are others in the room who know this experience better than I do. But for our purposes in the discussions that we'll be having in this conference, I think that question of protecting people from the more harmful drugs in drug policy as an element of drug policy is a very interesting experience that raises some interesting questions. I think we can also be very grateful again to the West African Commission. We also appreciate the involvement of Kofi Annan and his foundation in the convening of this commission. I hope that you will all be on the lookout for the commission's report. Again, President Pires has been a very important part of this commission. And we hope that it will help generate new debates. I don't know if all of you can pick out a familiar face in this photograph toward the right of the photograph. The President of the United States actually has not changed all that much in his appearance since he was 18 years old. This is a picture of Barack Obama and his friends from Hawaii where he went to secondary school. And if you can see the cake there that is helping them to celebrate their graduation, the end of their secondary studies, it uses a term called chum gang, which basically means the group of friends who get together to smoke cannabis, marijuana in this case. There are many things, this photograph was helpfully unearthed during the presidential election campaign by one of Barack Obama's good friends there and was released to the press. Barack Obama, however, really dealt very frankly with questions of his drug use as a young person and it didn't quite become the issue in the campaign that his opponents had hoped. But what this picture really raises for me that I wanted to raise with you is that people like myself of the generation of Barack Obama who grew up in the United States and had to listen in public school classrooms to federally funded education programs that told us that all drug use, again, was harmful, all drug use would ruin our lives, all drug use would especially ruin our brains and would make us very stupid. By the time obviously that he finished secondary school, Barack Obama, the future Professor of Constitutional Law, the future United States Senator, the future United States President seems to have worked out that what they were telling us in the classroom was not completely true. And I make light of it, but in fact, we have failure after failure of very expensive prevention programs that do not respect people's intelligence, that do not respect the fact that young people will see people use drugs and see that their lives are not destroyed. And we can only get away with that for so long. And so this country, the United States, that really wrote the book on drug prohibition that was really in many ways the main author of the UN Drug Conventions and has been their main promoter. In the United States, we have a change in mentality that's really represented by these survey results about decriminalization of cannabis. I never really thought that we would see this change in my lifetime, but we are seeing it for many reasons. Really, there are many factors that go into that. One is a fiscal crisis at the level of states where it is very difficult now to increase tax revenues, and so we have a budgetary challenge because of over-incarceration of people with minor cannabis offenses. There is in that a new generation of leaders, certainly, and a generation of people who realize that the same things we've been telling our children about just saying no to drugs are not true. There's a whole lot of things in there. But this represents a true fissure, as President Sampaio said, in the debate in our country because we now have states that are beginning experiments in completely legal regulated markets of cannabis. And while for some of us we haven't seen the changes in drug policy that we might have hoped in the Obama administration, last September the President's Ministry of Justice reacted to those state-level initiatives by saying we will not shut them down even though they are technically against the letter of federal law. And so we have these experiences that will go forward and that we hope will, again, inform our debates about alternatives to repressive policies. Our colleagues in Latin America, we talked about the Global Commission, which includes many former heads of state. We now have a very dynamic debate, partly because several sitting presidents in South America in particular, in Latin America in particular, have brought their concerns to the UN. And it is, in fact, because of them that the General Assembly Special Session is scheduled for 2016. It was originally scheduled for 2018. You see here the presidents of Colombia, Guatemala and Uruguay, who are among the sitting presidents who have taken the political risk of saying, no, we have to revisit these policies. We have to look again at the status quo. We can't have the same debate over and over again. And closer to home, the African Union has really turned a page in its new drug policy for these five years. I was very honored to be one of two non-African, at the time I was a professor, professors who were invited to be part of the committee that drafted the five-year policy on drugs for the African Union. We had a very, very rich and at times difficult debate. We were working with replacing a policy that was almost all about drug law enforcement and trying to make one that was somewhat more balanced. And I put in here a Portuguese translation of one of the key provisions that was at the center of our debates. Again, echoing this possibility that is in the UN drug conventions of finding alternatives to incarceration, alternatives to harsh application of criminal law for minor offenses. Now the question is, will governments that are member states of the African Union begin to act on this? Will donors that support their work help them in these efforts? It's something that I think is very much related to the challenge that we face in this conference. So to conclude, I would say that if we are going to change the debate, as President Sampaio said, if we are going to have frank discussions that are based on evidence, we need to be asking questions more than just how many arrests have there been, how many tons have been seized. We need to be asking questions like this. We need to be asking is the health sector, is the social sector around the table with the same power as the criminal law people? Is there a response to use itself, drug consumption itself that is not a matter of harsh criminal law, minor offenses, not a matter of harsh criminal law? Are people who use drugs being treated like human beings? They do not lose their human rights because they use drugs. Do our policies reflect that? Are there ways to look at excesses in drug policing and to do something about those? Does the state ensure access for all people who need them to good humane services that are based on scientific and public health best practice? Are the rights of people who produce drug crops being taken into account in our policies? At the beginning, I talked about the writing of a history of drug law change in Africa. And it is certainly my hope that people in this room, perhaps as a result of this meeting and the follow-up to it, will be part of that history. I hope that the Portuguese speaking countries will pick up the call from President Sampaio and be leaders in this new debate that has to happen. One of the really discouraging things about attending UN meetings on drugs in the past has been that the African bloc has voted unanimously, consistently, for more repressive policies. That can't keep happening. It will not serve your own effectiveness of your national policies and it won't serve the global debate. So I hope that that call that has been so well made here today can be picked up. And I hope that with our discussions this week, we can all be part of this journey toward human rights-based approaches to drugs. Thank you very much.